Ecos globales: los mundos de la poesía hispánica de la Modernidad temprana / Global Echoes: The Worlds of Early Modern Spanish Poetry

Abstract

This paper traces the related, though not uniform images of poetic birth and textual health. From generalized depictions of poems as children (born of the poet directly or of the poet’s soul or wit) to metaphors of hurried or badly written poems as premature births, abortions or miscarriages, ideas of poetic creation often turn to the bodily. The comparisons to childbirth, I suggest, highlight the efforts of writing and claims to literary lineage, while laments of “abortos” (found in Sor Juana, Juan de Jáuregui, and Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa) evoke the challenges of polishing a poem to perfection and dangers of sending it into the world too soon. Moreover, assessments of good and bad poetry often draw on the language of health and proper bodily proportions. A weak poem might be simply “desmayado,” as Cervantes criticizes twice in the Viaje del Parnaso , but it could also, more graphically, have bodily defects. These deformities could be congenital or acquired due to detrimental edits. For instance, Gabriel Lobo Lasso de la Vega complains that others printed versions of his romances so changed that “unos vienen patituertos.” Even if the idea of the poem as body was commonplace, the specifics of its anatomy and health offered handy tools for criticism and for rendering theory more concrete. Bodily metaphors were hardly limited to poetics, but I find their use in these contexts especially interesting precisely because poems often differed from whole “cuerpos de libros” in terms of circulation and physical heft. of limeño literary scene. the of the on the dynamics of classical culture of the transatlantic book trade stage an intriguing gender(ed) performance designed to on both sides of the Atlantic thematise the transatlantic dynamic itself. reinscribing the possibility of a non-female Discurso us about the literary dynamics of the global Iberian world. This paper examines the poetic language of Soledades and explores how it incorporates the practices of silversmithing and jewelry production. By relating the materiality of Góngora’s language to the material environment of luxury at the court since the sixteenth century, this paper demonstrates how craftsmanship is embedded in the creation of Soledades . At the same time, by turning to Góngora’s commentators such as Martín Vázquez Siruela, author of “Discurso sobre el estilo de don Luis de Góngora” and an enthusiastic antiquarian, I will show how the poet’s seventeenth-century critics interpreted his works as an exquisite craft. Moreover, this paper echoes the discussion on whether the genre of Soledades is bucolic or epic. While Mercedes Blanco has convincingly explained the cultural obsession with epic and the poet’s intention to emulate Tasso, I choose to reconsider the pastoral poetics in Soledades . I argue that the bucolic since Virgil is a mixed genre characterized by exploring language's materiality. Thus defined, the bucolic itself represents an expression of the intimate relationship between nature and labor as well as a fluidity of poiesis among different forms of labor. Setting Soledades against this bucolic tradition, its materiality not only refers to precious materials but also the craft of working with them. This paper explores how Manuel de Faria e Sousa works creatively with the verse of other writers in his early (and neglected) collection of poetry, Divinas y Humanas Flores (1624). It suggests how Faria e Sousa cites and alludes to verse across various languages (Spanish, Latin, Italian, Portuguese) in ways that are at once deferential and more challenging. Underpinning much of Faria e Sousa’s poetic borrowings is a desire to assert the greatness of the Portuguese language and to offer a positive vision of Portuguese history. This paper examines Ana Caro’s use of epic discourse in her 1635 poetic chronicle on the festivities held in the San Miguel parish in Seville, organized by the Count of Salvatierra, in reaction to the sacrileges performed by French protestants in June 1635 in the Flemish city of Tienen (Tillemont). Rarely singled out for its literary qualities, Ana Caro’s Relación , is an innovative response to and engagement with the epic tradition. Many tropes, such as the epic catalogue and various examples of ‘Überbietung’ (Curtius), create a sense of epic grandeur in the poem’s lyric form ( silva ). It is a song that is both ‘ dulce ’ and ‘ grave ’, as observed in the preliminaries. This paper sets to situate Sor Juana’s Neptuno alegórico within an early modern mythographic tradition that spans both sides of the Atlantic. By mythographic tradition I mean the proto-encyclopedic treatises on pagan gods by Pérez de Moya, Baltasar de Vitoria, and their European homologues (specifically those of Natale Conti and Francis Bacon) as well as the various uses of mythological figures and themes as allegories in early modern vernacular poetry and art. Situating Sor Juana within a transatlantic mythographic tradition permits a more thorough assessment of the poet’s nuanced representation of Neptune and Amphitrite as political and natural allegories equally at home in the Americas as in Europe. By furthermore comparing Sor Juana’s Neptuno to the use of pagan sea gods by the poets Bento Teixeira in Brazil and Silvestre de Balboa in Cuba what comes to the fore is a distinctly colonial American iteration of the Greco-Roman gods as allegories at odds with the baroque tradition of the mythological epyllion in Spain as defined by Sophie Kluge. A focus on the transatlantic dimension of the early modern mythographic tradition is thus revealed to be central to defining in greater nuance the baroque conception of mythological figures and themes as allegories. This paper explores the early modern obsession of the Black female body in the context of Petrarchan poetic activity and love. The link between the description of the Black female body in early modern poetry and poetry within the Americas shows how integral Black female presence has been. Through examples from the poetry of Luís Vaz de Camões and Luiz Gonzaga Pinto da Gama, I discuss how Black female presence has played a major role in poetry and that this gives a sense of subjectivity and an agentive element to the Black female woman. In this paper, I show how the poetic voice in Camões and Gama’s poems differ on its perspective of the Black female body while yet connecting through abjection and love. Matter Many were the domains of knowledge to which early modern Europeans resorted when describing the peoples from the Americas, Africa, and Asia: climate, biblical exegesis, antiquarianism, zoology, and philology. This paper addresses the specific way in which two authors mobilized Quechua poems as sources of knowledge of the Incan past through philological analysis. More specifically, I compare how Inca Garcilaso and Guaman Poma de Ayala discuss the materiality of Quechua poetic language as a means to draw conclusions about the process of knowledge production among the Incas. By contrasting Garcilaso’s and Guaman Poma’s interpretations of the Incan past through poetry, I aim to show how Quechua poetic language—with its focus on matter and the natural world—works as a privileged site for both authors to work their hypotheses regarding the Pre-Columbian period.