Sonoro cristal: Pedro Soto de Rojas and the Eloquent Galatea

Abstract

This article considers the early reception of Góngora's Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea by analysing the Baroque mythological fable ‘Fábula de la Naya’ from Pedro Soto de Rojas’ Desengaño de amor en rimas (1623). I argue that Soto restores the prominence of Galatea, as depicted in the classical versions of the myth, by placing the Gongorist Polyphemic lament in the mouth of a female protagonist. The self-authored notes which accompany Soto's fable gesture towards an ambitious metapoetic agenda, which places the Naiad at the heart of his directed reading. The fragile eloquence with which this female speaker is invested works against this collection's overall movement towards closure and containment. Soto's Fábula may be read as a sylvan intersection in terms of seventeenth-century literary controversy; Naya, and her union with the conventional Fenixardo, becomes the poetic embodiment of a tense dialogue between poetic tradition and innovation.

Notes

¹‘Palabras de cristal y brisa oscura’ (see Federico García Lorca, ‘Soledad insegura’, in Federico García Lorca, Obras VI, Prosa 2, Epistolario, ed. Miguel García-Posada [Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 1994], 944.

²On the recurrence of a rhetoric of silence in both the Polifemo, the Soledades, and Lorca's poem, see Javier Pérez Bazo, ‘Las “Soledades” gongorinas de Rafael Alberti y Federico García Lorca, o la imitación ejemplar’, Criticón, 74 (1998), 125–54 (p. 146). See also Aurora Egido, ‘La poética del silencio en el Siglo de Oro. Su pervivencia’, Bulletin Hispanique, 88:1–2 (1986), 93–120.

³In the Ovidian model Polyphemus is dependent on the narrative of Galatea to reach his listeners, his attempts at wooing relayed to the listener through her retelling of the ill-fated love triangle. ‘I was lying far away / under the shelter of a rock in the arms of my Acis, / but I heard what he sang and still remember it’ (see Ovid, Metamorphoses, XII, 724–897). As Alexander A. Parker pointed out, ‘Góngora departs from Ovid in not putting the story into Galatea's mouth; he cannot therefore repeat the tears with which Ovid makes her tell it’ (see Polyphemus and Galatea, A Study in the Interpretation of a Baroque Poem, verse translation by Gilbert F. Cunningham [Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1977], 55). Paul Julian Smith commented upon the ‘emptiness’ of Galatea, and classified the lovers as ‘all surface, all text’, in The Body Hispanic: Gender and Sexuality in Spanish and Spanish American Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 52 and 67 respectively.

⁴Many of the major studies of Soto's collection in recent years have considered the text's adherence to a Petrarchan itinerary. See Antonio Prieto, ‘El Desengaño de amor en rimas de Soto de Rojas como cancionero petrarquista’, in Emilio Alarcos, et al., Serta philologica F. Lázaro Carreter: natalem diem sexagesimum celebranti dicata, 2 vols (Madrid: Cátedra, 1983), II, Estudios de literatura y crítica textual, 403–12. María del Pilar Palomo, while she acknowledges Soto's preservation of the Petrarchan structure, also notes ‘un elemento plenamente barroco: la superposición a esta estructura de una recusación desengañada’ (La poesía de la edad de oro [barroco] [Madrid: Taurus, 1987], 23–26 [p. 23]). Most recently, see the book-length study by Gregorio Cabello Porras, Barroco y cancionero: ‘El Desengaño de amor en rimas’ de Pedro Soto de Rojas (Málaga: Univ. de Málaga, 2004).

⁵These eclogues also reveal the impact of Góngora, as Gregorio Cabello Porras has indicated in his analysis: ‘Ya aquí la presencia de Góngora, y en concreto la del Polifemo, queda perfilada con nitidez’ (Cabello Porras, Barroco y cancionero, 282).

⁶‘Elogio de Lope de Vega Carpio al Licenciado Pedro Soto de Rojas', in Obras de Don Pedro Soto de Rojas, ed. Antonio Gallego Morell (Madrid: Instituto de Filología Hispánica, 1950), 13–16 (p. 14). The poet himself also refers to the gap between composition and publication: ‘Doze años ha señor Excelentíssimo, que la mía cantó estos rudos sonezillos, y nueve que tengo privilegio para estamparlos. Conociéndolos culpados siempre los oculté’ (7). All subsequent references to the Desengaño de amor en rimas are to this edition of Soto's works. Verse references are not provided in this edition and therefore page numbers will be given in the body of the text.

⁷Antonio Gallego Morell, Poesía española del primer siglo de oro (Madrid: Ínsula, 1970), 157.

⁸Gallego Morell, Poesía española, 182.

⁹Ángel del Arco, ‘Pedro Soto de Rojas', Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, XX (1909), 241–46 (p. 242).

¹⁰Luis García Montero, ‘Soto de Rojas, el gongorismo y la generación de 1927’, in Al ave el vuelo: estudios sobre la obra de Soto de Rojas, ed. Nicolás Marín (Granada: Univ. de Granada, 1984), 97–118 (p. 111).

¹¹Aurora Egido, introduction to the facsímile edition of Pedro Soto de Rojas, Desengaño de amor en rimas (Málaga: Real Academia Española/Caja de Ahorros de Ronda, 1991), 7–83 (p. 15).

¹²This Homenaje focused primarily on Soto's Paraíso cerrado para muchos, jardines abiertos para pocos, with Lorca attempting to locate Soto's esencia granadina, and alluding to el preciosismo granadino. Federico García Lorca, ‘Homenaje a Soto de Rojas', in Obras completas, ed. Arturo del Hoyo, 2 vols (Madrid: Aguilar, 1977), I, 1056–63. A summary of the conference was also reproduced by Marie Laffranque, in ‘Federico García Lorca: textes en prose tirés de l'oubli’, Bulletin Hispanique, 55 (1953), 326–32. See also García Montero, ‘Soto de Rojas', 97–118.

¹³García Lorca, Obras completas, 1033. Luis García Montero has suggested that some factors point toward Eclogue III, since Lorca quoted from this poem at a later banquet. He also suggests that Lorca may have used Adolfo de Castro's anthology Poetas líricos de los siglos XVI y XVII which contains the third Eclogue as well as four madrigals.

¹⁴For a summary of the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the manuscript by Gerardo Diego, and its donation to the Biblioteca Menéndez Pelayo, see Rosa Navarro Durán, ‘Una joya única en engaste de oro’, in Cuaderno adrede. Para Elena Diego, ed. Francisco Javier Díez de Revenga (Santander: Fundación Gerardo Diego, 2012), 57–62. This study anticipates some of the compelling evidence for Soto's authorship of the poem, which Navarro Durán will outline in full in her forthcoming edition (Fundación Gerardo Diego, 2013). I am grateful to Professor Navarro Durán for her generosity in sharing these findings with me. Unfortunately her critical edition will not appear in time for me to include any details from the ‘Fábula de Alfeo y Aretusa’ in this analysis.

¹⁵Cossío's study lists another lengthy Baroque treatment of the myth of Alpheus and Arethusa, by Colodrero de Villalobos. As Cossío notes, this poet rates his Fábula highly enough to include it in the title of his publication, El Alfeo y otras obras en verso (1639) (José María de Cossío, Fábulas mitológicas en España [Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1952]). Pedro Espinosa's Fábula de Genil is also said to draw upon the Ovidian tale.

¹⁶Navarro Durán, ‘Una joya única en engaste de oro’, 57.

¹⁷Isabel Torres, The Polyphemus Complex. Rereading the Baroque Mythological Fable, Special Monograph Issue, BHS, LXXXIII:2 (2006).

¹⁸Carlos Peinado Elliot, ‘Entre el Barroco y la Vanguardia’, Philologia Hispalensis, 20 (2006), 175–204 (pp. 188–89).

¹⁹Sofie Kluge, ‘Un epilio barroco: El Polifemo y su género’, in Los géneros poéticos del Siglo de Oro: centros y periferias, ed. Rodrigo Cacho and Anne Holloway (Woodbridge: Tamesis, forthcoming).

²⁰See Wolfgang Iser, ‘Renaissance Pastoralism as a Paradigm of Literary Fictionality’, in his The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: John Hopkins U. P., 1993), 22–86 (pp. 26–27).

²¹Margaret Worsham Musgrove, ‘Cyclopean Latin: Intertextual Readings in Dante's Eclogues and Góngora's Polifemo and Galatea’, Classical and Modern Literature: A Quarterly, 18:2 (1998), 125–36 (p. 132). See also Trevor Dadson, ‘Rewriting the Pastoral: Góngora's Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea’, in Rewriting Classical Mythology in the Hispanic Baroque, ed. Isabel Torres (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2006), 38–54, and Pedro Ruiz Pérez, ‘Égloga, silva, soledad’, in La égloga, ed. Begoña López Bueno (Sevilla: Univ. de Sevilla, 2002), 387–429.

²²Torres, The Polyphemus Complex, 19–20.

²⁵Kluge, ‘Un epilio barroco’.

²³Steven Wagschal, ‘ “Mas no cabrás alla”: Góngora's Early Modern Representation of the Modern Sublime’, Hispanic Review, 70:2 (2002), 169–89 (p. 186). Wagschal develops these ideas further in his subsequent publication The Literature of Jealousy in the Age of Cervantes (Columbia/London: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2007), 136–87.

²⁴Edward H. Friedman, ‘Realities and Poets: Góngora, Cervantes, and the Nature of Art’, Calíope, 8:1 (2002), 55–68 (p. 64).

²⁶Dámaso Alonso, Góngora y el ‘Polifemo’, 3 vols (Madrid: Gredos, 1985), III, 592.

²⁷Rafael Bonilla Cerezo, ‘Amante en durezas tierno: la Fábula de Polifemo de Antonio López de Vega’, in Los géneros poéticos del Siglo de Oro, ed. Cacho and Holloway (forthcoming). By the same author, see also ‘Cíclopes en un burdel peruano: la Fábula de Polifemo de Juan del Valle y Caviedes, Lectura y Signo, 5 (2010), 241–70.

²⁸ Los ‘Discursos apologéticos’ de Pedro Díaz de Rivas/‘El Antídoto’ de Juan de Jáuregui, ed. Eunice Joiner Gates (México D.F.: El Colegio de México, 1960), p. 34

³⁰See Billy Marshall Bufkin, ‘A Preliminary Study of Andrés Cuesta's Commentary on Góngora's Polifemo’, Unpublished Thesis (Texas Technological College, 1951), 60. This thesis transcribes Cuesta's Notas al Polifemo which are included in BN MS 3906, fols 282^r–403^v. For an account of Cuesta's other works, in particular his Censura a las Lecciones solemnes de Pellicer, also based on MS BN 3906, see José Maria Micó, ‘Góngora en las guerras de sus comentaristas. Andrés Cuesta contra Pellicer’, El Crotalón. Anuario de Filología Española, 2 (1985), 401–72. Micó includes a selection of the most revealing passages of the ‘Notas al Polifemo’, pp.451-468.

²⁹Two studies which do place Galatea at the heart of the discussion are Joseph V. Ricapito, ‘Galatea's Fall and the Inner Dynamics of Góngora's Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea’, in Women in the Discourse of Early Modern Spain, ed. Joan F. Cammarata (Gainesville: Florida U. P., 2003), 160–80, and R. V. Young, ‘Versions of Galatea: Renaissance and Baroque Imitation’, in Renaissance Papers (1984), 57–67.

³¹See Lucian, Dialogue of the Sea Gods, ed. and trans. M. D. Macleod, 8 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1961), VII, 179, 181.

³³Gerardo Diego, Versos escogidos (Madrid: Gredos, 1970), 67. The challenge was taken up by Gaspar Garrote Bernal, who explored the intertextual relationship between his Fábula de Equis y Zeda and Gabriel Bocángel's La lira de las musas. See ‘Para la salcedocoronelización de la Fábula de Equis y Zeda’, Dicenda. Cuadernos de Filología Hispánica, 25 (2007), 83–103 (pp. 87–88).

³²Jorge Guillén, Notas para una edición comentada de Góngora, ed. Antonio Piedra and Juan Bravo (Valladolid: Univ. de Castilla la Mancha, 2002), 11; Alfonso Reyes, ‘Necesidad de volver a los comentaristas’, first published in Revue Hispanique, LXV (1925), 134–39. This essay is included in Cuestiones gongorinas (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1927), 233–41: ‘el estudio de los comentarios publicados durante el siglo XVII nos parece de todo punto indispensable, en vista, no sólo de la dificultad sintáctica de Góngora, sino de su rara erudición’ (239).

³⁴Gregorio Cabello Porras has also noted the metapoetic implications of Soto's poem. The delirious love which the Naiad expresses for Fenixardo endows Soto's pastoral lyric persona with mythical status. See ‘Apolo y Dafne en el Desengaño de Pedro Soto de Rojas: de la eternidad del amor a la “defensa contra el rayo ardiente” ’, Edad de Oro, 6 (1987), 19–34.

³⁵As Friedman has pointed out, ‘exceeding nature is actually exceeding poetic depiction of nature. Because the poetic predecessors have seized upon nature as the epitome of inspiration, nature becomes the metonym for their particular mode of expression and, consequently, Góngora's point of departure in the battle for supremacy […] Surpassing nature through art thus becomes replacing one artistic idiom with another’ (‘Realities and Poets’, 65).

³⁶‘¿Qué mucho, si de nubes se corona / Por igualarme la montaña en vano, / y en los cielos, desde esta roca, puedo /escribir mis desdichas con el dedo?’ (vv. 413–16).

³⁷See Eclogue III by Garcilaso de la Vega, wherein the posture of the dead nymph is compared to a dead swan on the river bank: ‘Cual queda el blanco cisne cuando pierde / la dulce vida entre la yerba verde’ (vv. 231–32). In fact, Soto de Rojas' own third Eclogue also contains a clear adaptation of the canto polifémico. Osuna has read the cornucopia of the latter part of the poem as an adaptation of the cyclopean song: ‘Esta égloga, muy bella y algo oscura, es sin duda una adaptación del canto polifémico, cosa manifiesta a pesar de haber pasado inadvertida entre eruditos’. See Rafael Osuna, Polifemo y el tema de la abundancia natural en Lope de Vega y su tiempo (Kassel: Reichenberger, 1996), 177. The similarity had, in fact, been observed by Rafael Alberti in the prologue to his Eglogas y fábulas castellanas (Buenos Aires: Pleamar, 1944), 11.

³⁸Claudian, De raptu Proserpinae, ed., with an introduction, translation and commentary, by Clare Gruzelier (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), III, 332–59, p. 73.

³⁹The Apuntamientos refer the reader to Homer, Iliad, I and Virgil, Aeneid, VI. Soto does not provide line references; the exact references to Briareus are found in Homer Iliad, I, 402–03 and Virgil Aeneid, VI, 287: ‘et centumgeminus Briareus’.

⁴⁰Kathleen Hunt Dolan, Cyclopean Song: Melancholy and Aestheticsim in Góngora's ‘Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea’, North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures 236 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina, 1990), 55.

⁴¹Isabel Torres suggests that the stanzas indicate ‘a disturbing Baroque restatement of Renaissance universal harmonies. Gone are the new shepherds, resigned to the inherent sadness of life, singing new songs of love and loss and, in their place, the sheep that have survived the slaughter, continuing to feed on the now bloodied grass, and providing a provocative sign of the immanence of death in life’ (see The Polyphemus Complex, 50).

⁴²Naya's appeal also echoes a plea from the Petrarchan canzone, ‘Nel dolce tempo de la prime etade’, in which the narrator is identified with Actaeon: ‘Dunque vien, morte il tuo venir, m'è caro’ (XXIII, 358.8). Petrarch's poem draws upon the Ovidian source, Metamorphoses, III. 137–252.

⁴⁶The line from the second tapestry of Garcilaso's third eclogue reads: ‘llora el amante y busca el ser primero / besando y abrazando aquel madero’ (vv. 167–68). The ineffectual embrace is also present in the Ovidian source: ‘complexusque suis ramos ut membra lacertis / oscula dat ligno; refugit tamen oscula lignum’ (vv. 555–56).

⁴³Cabello Porras, Barroco y cancionero, 325. Garcilaso's description of the transformation reads: ‘A Dafne ya los brazos le crecían / Y en luengos ramos vueltos se mostraban; / En verdes hojas vi que se tornaban / Los cabellos qu'el oro escurecían: / De áspera corteza se cubrían / Los tiernos miembros que aun bullendo ‘staban;/Los blancos pies en tierra se hincaban/Y en torcidas raíces se volvían’ (vv. 1–8).

⁴⁴In the Ovidian description Myrrha, eager for death, plunges her head down to greet the encroaching bark (Metamorphoses X. 497–98).

⁴⁵Elena Theodorakopolulos, ‘Closure and Transformation in Ovid's Metamorphoses’, in Ovidian Transformations: Essays on Ovid's Metamorphoses and Its Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1999), 142–62 (p. 149).

⁴⁷Edward Peter Nolan, Now Through a Glass Darkly: Specular Images of Being and Knowing from Virgil to Chaucer (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1990), 48.

⁴⁸Commenting upon this detail in the Polifemo, Torres cites Dámaso Alonso's 1970 edition of the poem, in which he summarizes chapter XXIV of Don Francisco Fernández de Córdoba's Didascalia Multiplex wherein the ‘coturno’ is described as referring to two different types of footwear: ‘uno alto, propio de la tragedia, y otro bajo, usado por los cazadores y atribuido a las divinidades’. See Luis de Góngora y Argote, Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, ed. Dámaso Alonso, in Estudios y ensayos gongorinos, 3^rd ed. (Madrid: Gredos, 1970), 193, cited by Torres, The Polyphemus Complex, 61.

⁵¹Dolan, Cyclopean Song, 68. Other critics have noted an apparent waning of poetic commitment in the final verses of Góngora's fable. Pointing to a perceived loss of musicality in the description of Acis transformed, Wagschal observes: ‘Such is the sublime jealousy of Polyphemus! It not only destroys a Renaissance-inspired harmonious beauty but is self-annihilating’ (‘ “Mas no cabrás alla” ’, 186–87). In Soto's fable, we are in the presence of a self-annihilating poetic subject and voice.

⁴⁹On the significance of myrtle or ivy in the Fragmentos de Adonis, Aurora Egido observes: ‘El árbol de Venus, según el libro X de las Metamorfosis, es el mirto o arrayán, presente en el Polifemo’. Soto appears to have been aware of Góngora's allusion to the tree and its relation to the golden apples of Atalanta (Los fragmentos de Adonis, 205).

⁵⁰Myrtle is worn as a garland by those who have died because of love in the Elysian fields in Tibullus I. III. 65–66.

⁵²Guillén, Notas para una edición comentada de Góngora, 245.

⁵³Pedro Ruiz Pérez, Entre Narciso y Proteo: lírica y escritura de Garcilaso a Góngora (Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 2007), 57.

⁵⁴ Los ‘Discursos apologéticos’ de Pedro Díaz de Rivas, ed. Gates, 35.