Luis de Góngora's Solitudes, perhaps forming letters on the pellucid paper of the heavens

Today I revisit to an old favorite of Wuthering Expectations, the baroque genius of the Spanish Golden Age, Luis de Góngora.  I last mentioned him here when a fragment of Los Soledades, in English The Solitudes (ca. 1613), appeared in The Hudson Review, newly translated by Edith Grossman.  I finally got around to reading the whole thing, a Penguin Classics edition from 2011.

A “shipwrecked youth, one scorned and desolate,” washes ashore.  He comes across goat herds who are having a party for a wedding.  That covers the first canto or solitude.  In the second, the castaway joins a group of fishermen who take him to an island, where he meets more fisherman, and some comely fisherwomen.  Then they all go bird watching.  Apparently two more solitudes were apparently planned but never written.

This sounds like nothing.  It is close to nothing.  All that matters is the elaboration, the imagery, the metaphors, and the complex classical references.

And so they all passed by, and in good order
as at the equinox we see furrowing
    through oceans of open air
    not flights of galley ships
    but flocks of swift-sailing cranes,
moons perhaps waxing, perhaps on the wane
    their most distant extremes,
perhaps forming letters on the pellucid
   paper of the heavens with
   the quill feathers of their flight.  (601-610)

“They” are just the shepherds, walking in formation, like ships, no, cranes; the cranes are like the moon in certain aspects.  In the most fanciful touch, Góngora writes, quill in hand, that the metaphorical birds may also be writing with their quills, which almost logically transforms the sky from water (“oceans of open air”) to paper.

The entire poem is written in this fashion.  Rabbits are “ignorant of fulminating lead (del plomo fulminante, 281-2),” meaning bullets, “the saliva of mute stars” (293) is dew, the Atlantic Ocean is

                      Fortune’s theater,
    the voracious, the profound
    graveyard thirstily drinking
from goblets of fir all that the New World
– I mean the tributes from the Americas –
pays in mausoleums of short-lived spume.  (394-9)

Góngora thought this was so obscure he had to explain it.  Sometimes he gives the answer to the riddle, other times not.  Turning a ship into a goblet is nuts, unless you are thinking at the right mythological scale.

The range of reference in The Solitudes is the greatest mystery to me.  I recognize, broadly, Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses are the source of many of the transformative substitutions so necessary for Góngoran metaphor.  But I have no idea how much actual outside text is woven into the poem, how many images or phrases or key words are borrowed from Horace or Petrarch or earlier Spanish poets known to me by name if I am lucky.

The whole thing is an elaborate, sophisticated 400 year old poetic riddle.  The reward for solving a piece of it is a little burst of delight.  How kind of Edith Grossman to help us marvel at this preposterous object.

I hope Grossman continues translating Golden Age poetry.  She cannot be doing it for the money.

Spanish poetry and the translations thereof in The Hudson Review

The warm and engaging hosting service of Wuthering Expectations took an unexpected but well-deserved personal day yesterday.  Some pool time in the afternoon, a mani-pedi, a hot stone massage, and then some solid TV watching, catching up with the first season of Treme.  Now, relaxed, energized, Blogger has returned to work refreshed  and alert.

A few comments from yesterday seem to have been temporarily misplaced.  I will be recreate them from my email soon if they do not turn up on their own.  There were some good ‘uns.  Yesterday’s post about Bolaño, Aira, and Argentine literature was pretty good, too.  Actually, that sounds a mite strong.  Let me look back for a minute – yesterday’s post was on a highly interesting subject, and might be worth reading for that reason.

I had planned to spend a few minutes writing about the poetry in the Spanish Issue of The Hudson Review, a magazine that has become, for better or worse, my primary source of contemporary poetry.  For better, I think; I gave Poetry magazine an honest effort a few years ago, but abandoned them just before being bored almost to death, although I do owe them my introduction to Kay Ryan.  My point, my point – the poetry in The Hudson Review is typically excellent, but not so typically by the all-star cast of the Spanish Issue:  Luis de Góngora, Ruben Darío, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Silvino Ocampo.

The Neruda poem, “Ode to my Socks,” is a curious one.  Its translator is William Carlos Williams, who is careful to turn Neruda into WCW, mostly with the line breaks:

I stretched out
my feet
and pulled over them
the
beautiful
socks
and
then my shoes.

Once properly shod, Williams proceeds to eat Neruda’s plums because they are so sweet and so cold and chop down his house because the beams are so inviting.

The lead feature is given to fragments of a 16th century masterpiece, Soledades (The Solitudes) of Luis de Góngora, expertly translated by Edith Grossman, more fruit of her turn to the Spanish Golden Age.  I read the poem several years ago in a different, vaguely remembered translation; even vaguer is a memory of reading part of it in Spanish, which must be wrong.  The long poem, an imitatio of Virgil’s Georgics, is enormously complex, not merely in its syntax so much as its extraordinary range of classical allusions and intricate and obscure metaphors.  Here a traveler has stumbled upon the preparations for a rustic wedding:

        You, oh singular bird,
arrogant splendor – for it is not comely –
        of the remote Occident:
hang the wrinkled nacre of your forehead
down over the kinked sapphire of your neck,
for Hymeneus wants you on his tables.

The exotic, ugly bird now on its way to the wedding (“Hymeneus”) feast is the American turkey.  The nacreous forehead foreshadows the piscatorial second book of the poem, which is about fishermen.   Góngora  demands patience and concentration:

A rebellious nymph, now a humble reed,
obscures  the margins of a small lagoon,
        where a kingbird inspects
even the smallest flake of its flying snow.

The snow is the foamy surf; the nymph is Syrinx; etc., etc.  How wonderful that Góngora’s poem will be available again, soon,  from Penguin Classics.  Who on earth is the audience?

But I suppose I could ask that about many of my favorite parts of The Hudson Review – one of my all-time favorites was an essay about the great pleasures of reading Clarissa!  Any reader widely curious about literature will find a lot to enjoy.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz - es un vano artificio del cuidado

Sonnet 145 of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, "To Her Portrait":

Este que ves, engaño colorido,
que del arte ostentando los primores,
con falsos silogismos de colores
es cauteloso engaño del sentido

éste, en quien la lisonja ha pretendido
excusar de los años los horrores,
y venciendo del tiempo los rigores
triunfar de la vejez y del olvido,

es un vano artificio del cuidado,
es una flor al viento delicada,
es un resguardo inútil para el hado:

es una necia diligencia errada,
es un afán caduco y, bien mirado,
es cadáver, es polvo, es sombra, es nada.

A reader doesn't need much Spanish to see a lot in this poem. It's all one sentence. Seven of fourteen lines start with "es", while three more start with "éste" and "excusar". And then "es" appears again and again in the last line.

Look at the rhyme words. Four lines end in "-ores", but the rest are "-ido", "-ado", and "-ada", similar sounds, slant rhymes.*

Does a good translation need to keep all of this? See yesterday's post for Edith Grossman's version. Here is Margaret Sayers Peden:

This that you gaze on, colorful deceit,
that so immodestly displays art's favors,
with its fallacious arguments of colors
is to the senses cunning counterfeit,

this on which kindness practiced to delete
from cruel years accumulated horrors,
constraining time to mitigate its rigors
and thus oblivion and age defeat,

is but artifice, a sop to vanity,
is but a flower by the breezes bowed,
is but a ploy to counter destiny,

is but a foolish labor ill-employed,
is but a fancy, and, as all may see,
is but cadaver, ashes, shadow, void.

A lot of this is pretty close to the text. Peden keeps the "is/ this" structure, although not in the last line. Grossman tries a parallel structure ("a corpse, some dust, a shadow, mere nothingness"). Peden keeps the rhyming cognates (horrors/ rigors/ colors). There's no "sop" to vanity in the original, nor are the horrors "accumulated". Still. Edith Grossman's horrors are "stark", which isn't Sor Juana either. What else can a poor translator do?


Peden does one thing more. Her essay "Building a Translation, the Reconstruction Business: Poem 145 of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz"** compares nine(!) translations of Sor Juana's sonnet, including one by Samuel Beckett. She provides the handy diagram on the right to help us see what each translator is really doing. Most of them, regardless of decisions about rhyme and language, stay right on top of this schematic. The ones that don't are terrible.

This is all I really want. Every translation of a poem in multiple versions with an accompanying essay, and diagrams. Is this so much too ask?

Bonus fun: compare the last line of Sor Juana's sonnet to that of the Luis de Góngora sonnets I posted two days ago. The Sor Juana poem is from sixty or seventy years later, I think.

* Does Spanish prosody have slant rhymes, or am I importing a foreign English concept?

** From John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte, eds., The Craft of Translation, The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Poems of the Spanish Golden Age - earth, vapor, shadow, dust, nothing at all

Here's a hopeless task. Two, really. The Golden Age: Poems of the Spanish Renaissance (2005) is Edith Grossman's anthology of old Spanish poems, from the Coplas of Jorge Manrique in the 15th century to the sonnets of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz at the end of the 17th.* In between: Petrarchan innovator Garcilaso de la Vega, mystics Fray Luis de Léon and San Juan de la Cruz, ornamentalist Luis de Góngora, the prolific Lope de Vega, and the great satirist Francsico de Quevedo (pictured, left).

They're all lyric poets, so fundamentally untranslatable. That's the first hopeless part. The second is my attempt to evaluate the translations. I read, say, Grossman’s version of one of Luis de Góngora’s baroque bonbons, and think: that’s pretty good. Then I look at the Spanish and see that this word is omitted by Grossman, and that word appears out of nowhere, and although the rhythm is close, the music is completely gone. So I turn to the same sonnet in another collection, where I see that Grossman’s infelicities are corrected only at the cost of brand new problems, often worse.

This happened every time I checked one version against another, or any version against the Spanish. A Professional, a scholar or a translator, may know how to play this game, but I was stumped every time. I’ll try again tomorrow, with some scholarly assistance.

Grossman's new translation of Jorge Manrique is valuable. Longfellow's translation is a masterpiece, but anyone who finds him archaic or fussy should take a look at Grossman. The handful of poems of St. John of the Cross are some of the finest, strangest religious poems ever written, and should be read in their entirety (John Frederick Nims trumps Grossman here). Fray Luis de León and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz are almost as good. Luis de Góngora is a more difficult case, perhaps genuinely hopeless, although still worth the very real effort (my selected poems of Góngora includes his “Defense of Poetic Obscurity” - that should give you an idea of the problem). Grossman convinced me that Garcilaso de la Vega and Francisco de Quevedo's poems are also worth further attention.

This is really an admirable book. Each poet gets a pithy biography, and a portrait - there's a rather severe Luis de Góngora on the right. There's facing-page Spanish, as there should be in every translation of poetry. My only actual complaint is that the book is much too short - only 80 or so pages of poems, really. I want a sequel, preferably longer. And then a volume of 19th and 20th century poets - Becquer, Dario, Jimenez.

Here's Góngora, Sonnet CLXVI, per Grossman, on the transience of beauty, gather ye rosebuds while ye may, etc.:

As long as burnished gold gleams in the sun

in vain, attempting to vie with your hair;

and your brow, white as snow, views with mere scorn

the lily so fair growing in the plain
and each lip waiting to be gathered draws

more avid eyes than first carnation blooms;

and as long as your neck so full of charm

outshines brilliant crystal with proud disdain
revel in neck and hair, in lip and brow

before what was in this your golden age

gold, lily, carnation, and crystal bright
turn to silver, to violets crushed and sere,

and you and they together must become

earth, vapor, shadow, dust, nothing at all.


* I know, neither of these poets is actually from the Spanish Golden Age.

A profile of Edith Grossman, at Bookforum.