Toward a Colonial Subtext of Sin in Quevedo's Poetry

Abstract

Heráclito cristiano, Francisco de Quevedo's early collection of moral poetry, contains microtextual and subtextual allusions to America that renew classical topoi and anchor the sinner's lyrical voice close to historical circumstance; in the process, metaphysical worries of sin and conversion, which hold an equally important weight for the imperial project, become re-semanticized by way of the speaker's inner evolution as he echoes, criticizes, and embraces those notions aided by melancholic doubt. The resulting lyrical voice unfolds a psychology partly structured by the tensions and crises of colonial history contained in the renewed metaphor of greed.

Keywords:

• America
• colonial history
• conversion
• Francisco de Quevedo
• Heráclito cristiano
• sin

Notes

1. Lía Schwartz Lerner explains this strategy: The poet recognizes the predecessors’ auctoritas; he then imitates and contaminates their topoi via an ars combinatoria that “would turn the poetic text into an homage and memory” of those famous models (6).

2. Just how many poems belong in the collection has been debated, or even if it should exist as such. I do not address this problem and focus on the twenty-eight included by Blecua, and Schwartz and Arellano (Quevedo, Poesía 19–40; Quevedo, Heráclito lxxviii, 15–52). The last two editors agree with Alfonso Rey's hypothesis that Heráclito was an early project the poet decided to abandon and then incorporated into his later output (lxxvi).

3. Greek: “miss the mark, esp. of spear thrown,” “miss road”; “fail of one's purpose, go wrong”; “fail of having, be deprived of”; “do wrong, err, sin” (“μαρτανω”). Latin: “to miss or mistake something; to do amiss, to transgress, to commit a fault, to offend, sin” (“pecco”). Similarly, Cobarrubias: “omnem deviationem vel declinationem a rectitudine opera debita sive in naturalibus sive in moralibus (any deviation or falling off from righteousness of due works either in natural or moral behavior)” (858).

4. This interpretation would not fit the significantly different version of the sonnet edited by Schwartz and Arellano, which favors a mostly “pagan” reading with words like Ponto and deidad and without santos, oraciones, and devociones (Quevedo, Heráclito 41).

5. The somewhat licentious romance “Las Columnas de Cristal,” attributed to Quevedo or Luis de Góngora, refers to the woman's pudenda as secretive colonial spaces: “descubriendo maravillas / y otro Nuevo Mundo en ellas […] Aquí el estrecho famoso / de Magallanes comienza […] Aquí el mar del Sur se encoge / entre sus hondas riberas” (Íñigo-Madrigal 54).