The agudeza of Góngora in Stanza XI of the Polifemo

Abstract

The interpretation of Stanza XI of the Polifemo has perplexed commentators since the seventeenth century. Góngora's contemporaries urged him to revise it, and modern critics have deplored its obscurity. For Dámaso Alonso it was ‘un fracaso’. The present article considers the nature of the problem, and the solutions to it that have been proposed, including the hypothesis of Zdislas Milner. It then advances tentatively a reading of the text that complements, rather than replaces, Milner's approach, and examines, in its light, the kind of agudeza involved in Góngora's lines. It concludes that the stanza, read in this way, is a fine and compelling instance of baroque wit.

Notes

¹Luis de Góngora, Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, ed. Jesús Ponce Cárdenas (Madrid: Cátedra, 2010), 158. References to the poem are to this edition. I am grateful to Elena Rossi and Stephen Boyd for their comments on an earlier version of the argument presented here, and to Catherine Ware for answering my questions about the classical tradition of the Golden Age.

²Cited in Antonio Vilanova, Las fuentes y los temas del ‘Polifemo’ de Góngora, 2 vols (Madrid: CSIC, 1957), I, 548.

³Vilanova, Las fuentes y los temas, I, 546.

⁴Vilanova, Las fuentes y los temas, I, 569.

⁵Dámaso Alonso, Poesía española. Ensayo de métodos y límites estilísticos, 8^th ed. (Madrid: Gredos, 1981), 362.

⁸Vilanova, Las fuentes y los temas, I, 547.

⁶Dámaso Alonso, Góngora y el ‘Polifemo’, 7th ed. (Madrid: Gredos, 1985), 470; Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, ‘La XI octava del Polifemo’, in Actas del Sexto Congreso Internacional de Hispanistas, ed. Alan M. Gordon and Evelyn Rugg (Toronto: Toronto U. P., 1980), 115–17; José María Micó, El ‘Polifemo’ de Luis de Góngora. Ensayo de crítica e historia literaria (Barcelona: Península, 2001), 26.

⁷Vilanova, Las fuentes y los temas, I, 546.

⁹Micó, El ‘Polifemo’ de Luis de Góngora, 25. Micó notes (25–26) that Jorge Guillén had reached the same solution independently, in his Notas para un comentario de la poesía de Góngora (1925). Milner's solution was published in 1931: see Alfonso Reyes, ‘La estrofa reacia del Polifemo’, Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 8 (1954), 295–306 (p. 297).

¹⁰Vilanova, Las fuentes y los temas, I, 550.

¹¹Vilanova, Las fuentes y los temas, I, 550–51.

¹²Alonso, Góngora y el ‘Polifemo’, 471.

¹³‘Más valdría entonces mil veces conceder que se ha equivocado y suspirar por aquella “segunda esponja” a que siempre se mostró tan reacio con respecto a la estancia xi, confesándola como la hija lisiada y predilecta. Después de todo, también los grandes poetas padecen ofuscaciones’ (Reyes, ‘La estrofa reacia del Polifemo’, 306).

¹⁴ The Metaphysical Poets, ed. Helen Gardner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), 21.

¹⁵‘De suerte que se puede definir el concepto: es un acto del entendimiento que exprime la correspondencia que se halla entre los objetos’ (Discurso II, in Baltasar Gracián, Agudeza y arte de ingenio, ed. Ceferino Peralta, Jorge M. Ayala and José M^a Andreu, 2 vols [Zaragoza: Univ. de Zaragoza, 2004], I, 27).

¹⁶Antonio de Nebrija, Lexicon ivris civilis (Lugduni: Apud haeredes Iacobi Iuntae, 1561), 620 (my translation). There is a modern critical edition: Iuris Ciuilis Lexicon, ed. José Perona (Salamanca: Univ. de Salamanca, 2000). The Lexicon was first published in 1506, as part of Nebrija's Aenigmata iuris civilis (Salamanca: Juan de Porras?), where it was accompanied by a Spanish translation: ‘GLANS (bellota) tiene varios significados, pero todos ellos derivados de la encina (árbol de las bellotas), del cual Plinio enumera trece clases. Un juriconsulto, sin embargo, da a esta palabra un sentido mucho más amplio […]: “Bajo el nombre de Bellota están contenidos todos los frutos” ’ (Elio Antonio de Nebrija, Léxico de derecho civil. Textos latino y castellano, ed. Carlos Humberto Nuñez [Madrid: CSIC, 1944], 287). Between 1506 and 1612 the Lexicon went through thirty further editions: see Bibliografía Nebrisense. Las obras del humanista Antonio de Nebrija desde 1481 hasta nuestros días, ed. Miguel Ángel Esparza Torres and Hans-Josef Niederehe (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999), 62, 298.

¹⁸ The Digest of Justinian, IV, 954–55.

¹⁷ The Digest of Justinian, ed. Theodore Mommsen and Paul Kruger, trans. Alan Watson, 4 vols (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania U. P., 1985), IV, 615.

¹⁹Laurence Brockliss, ‘Curricula: The Faculty of Law’, in A History of the University in Europe, ed. Walter Rüegg, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1992–2011), II, 599–608; Thomas Kuehn, ‘Law’, in Encyclopaedia of the Renaissance, 6 vols (New York: Scribner, 1999), III, 388–96. On the university studies of Góngora, see Alonso, Góngora y el ‘Polifemo’, 35. The passages on glans in the Digest do not feature in Nebrija's partial commentary on the text: Annotationes in libros pandectarum, ed. Antonio García y García (Salamanca: Univ. de Salamanca, 1996). They do feature, however, in Antonio Agustín's study of the Digest, which I have consulted in the following edition: Emendationum et opinionum libri IIII (Heidelbergae: Apud Iosam Harnish, 1594), 278–79. Agustín's study was first published in Venice in 1543. Its genesis and content are examined in Nicholas Barker, ‘Antonio Agustín's Letter to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza’, in Antonio Agustín between Renaissance and Counter-Reform, ed. M. H. Crawford (London: Warburg Institute, 1993), 21–29. On the Renaissance commentary tradition inspired by the Digest, see Carlo Dionisotti, ‘Filologia umanistica e testi giuridici fra quattro e cinquecento’, in La critica del testo. Atti del Secondo Congresso Internazionale della Società Italiana di Storia del Diritto, 2 vols (Firenze: Olschki, 1971), I, 189–204, and the doctoral thesis of Douglas James Osler, ‘Humanist Philology and Justinian's Digest’ (University of Cambridge, 1983).

²⁰Ambrogio Calepino, Dictionarium (Venezia: Aldus, 1592). On this work, first published in 1502, see John Considine, Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2008), 29–31.

²⁵Vilanova, Las fuentes y los temas, I, 559–60, who cites the description of the hedgehog in Book 8, Chapter 56 of Pliny's Natural History, a passage translated as follows by Gerónimo de Huerta: ‘Los erizos se proveen de la misma suerte de mantenimientos para los Inviernos, y rebolcandose sobre las mançanas, las cojen en sus espinas, y las llevan a las concavidades de los arboles, llevando sola una en la boca’ (Traducion de los libros de Caio Plinio Segundo, de la Historia Natural de los Animales. Primera parte [Madrid: Luis Sanchez, 1599], 234^v).

²¹Discurso XXXIII, in Agudeza y arte de ingenio, II, 381. See the comments of Ponce Cárdenas in Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, 215–16. Wordplay in the Polifemo is discussed in Elias L. Rivers, ‘El conceptismo del Polifemo’, Atenea, 153 (1961), 102–09 (pp. 106–07).

²² Góngora y el Polifemo, 469. On Alonso's argument see Vilanova, Las fuentes y los temas, I, 557–59.

²³ s.v. erizo, in Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española [1611], ed. Felipe C. R. Maldonado, 2^nd ed. (Madrid: Castalia, 1995).

²⁴Vilanova, Las fuentes y los temas, I, 552.

²⁶See Alexander A. Parker, Luis de Góngora. ‘Polyphemus and Galatea’. A Study in the Interpretation of a Baroque Poem, verse translation by Gilbert F. Cunningham (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1977), 41.

²⁷Discurso XIX, in Agudeza y arte de ingenio, I, 215–16.

²⁸Parker, Luis de Góngora. ‘Polyphemus and Galatea’. 23.

³¹ Georgics, Book I, ll. 147–49, in Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1986), 90–91. On the classical tradition of the Golden Age, see the detailed discussion in Catherine Ware, Claudian and the Epic Roman Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2012), 171–230. A classical relief of the Flavian period in the Villa Albani in Rome shows Polyphemus seated beneath a spreading oak tree whose mighty size, when compared with his, seems much reduced. It is reproduced in Tonio Hölscher, The Language of Images in Roman Art (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2004), 11.

²⁹Isabel Torres, The Polyphemus Complex. Rereading the Baroque Mythological Fable, Special Monograph Issue, BHS, LXXXIII:2 (2006), 38.

³⁰Book I, ll. 89–124, in Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. and trans. Frank Justus Miller, 3^rd ed. rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1977), 8–11.

³⁵Discurso IV, in Agudeza y arte de ingenio, I, 40. Gracián is concerned in this passage with ‘conceptos por correspondencia y proporción’, but his words apply as well to the other types of concepto that he goes on to consider. See Mercedes Blanco, Les Rhétoriques de la Pointe: Baltasar Gracián et le Conceptisme en Europe (Genève: Slatkine, 1992), 254–57 (‘C'est comme si dans ce mode particulier qui ouvre la série, était contenue en germe la série toute entière’ [254]).

³²Arthur Terry, Seventeenth-Century Spanish Poetry: The Power of Artifice (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1993), 81.

³³Terence O'Reilly, ‘A. A. Parker and the Polifemo’, in Golden-Age Studies in Commemoration of A. A. Parker, ed., with an intro., by Terence O'Reilly and Jeremy Robbins, BSS, LXXXV:6 (2008), 69–78 (pp. 72–75).

³⁴Vilanova, Las fuentes y los temas, I, 561.

³⁶Vilanova, Las fuentes y los temas, I, 530.

³⁷Vilanova, Las fuentes y los temas, I, 530.

³⁸Book 16:8, in Pliny, Natural History, trans. H. Rackman, 10 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1968), IV, 398–99. In the translation by Gerónimo de Huerta the passage reads: ‘La vellota que propiamente se tiene por tal, la produze el roble, la encina, el quegigo, el cerro, la coscoja, y el alcornoque. Contienense asidas en un aspero vaso, que abraça su cuero, mas y menos, segun el genero de cada una’ (Historia Natural de Caio Plinio Segundo, 2 vols [Madrid: Juan Gonçalez, 1624-29], II, 84). Andrés de Laguna, in his commentary on Dioscorides, draws attention to the texture of the acorn's bristly cup, observing that in this respect the acorns of the quercus (la encina) are harsher (mas austeras) than those of the ilex (el roble): see his Acerca de la materia medicinal y de los venenos mortiferos (Salamanca: Mathias Gast, 1563), 93.

³⁹Alonso, Góngora y el ‘Polifemo’, 466.

⁴⁰Vilanova, Las fuentes y los temas, I, 538.

⁴¹Alonso, Poesía española, 357–58.

⁴²Cited in Julio Cejador y Frauca, Diccionario fraseológico del siglo de oro (Fraseología o estilística castellana), ed. Abraham Madroñal and Delfín Carbonell (Barcelona: Ediciones del Serbal, 2008), 393. See too Ponce Cárdenas, Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, 216–17.

⁴³The point is argued forcefully in Patrick Gallagher, ‘La manzana hipócrita: erotismo cromático, humor e ironía en las agudezas orgánicas del Polifemo de Góngora’, in Estudios dedicados a James Leslie Brooks, presentados por sus colegas, amigos y discípulos, ed. J. M. Ruiz Veintemilla (Barcelona: Puvill, 1984), 45–60.

⁴⁴‘The fantasy of the golden age […] was both a vision and a warning. The golden age contained the seeds of its own destruction; man's desire to advance would lead him inexorably to the desire for gold and the corresponding desire for war’ (Ware, Claudian and the Roman Epic Tradition, 181). See also Torres, The Polyphemus Complex, 38.