Luis de Gongora
Luis de Góngora y Argote (Córdoba, July 11, 1561-Córdoba, May 23, 1627) was a Spanish poet and playwright of the Golden Age, the greatest exponent of the literary current later known as culteranismo or gongorismo.
Biography
He was born in the house called de las Pavas, owned by his uncle Francisco Góngora, ration keeper of the cathedral, located in the place that number 10 of the street now occupies, and in which the Hotel Casa de La Judería is currently located., although doubts remain about that. He was the son of the judge of assets confiscated by the Holy Office of Córdoba, Don Francisco de Argote, and the lady of the nobility Leonor de Góngora. He studied at the University of Salamanca, where he drew attention as a poet. He took minor orders in 1575 and was a beneficiary canon of the Cordovan cathedral, where he was admonished before Bishop Pacheco for rarely going to the choir and for chatting in it, as well as for going to profane amusements and composing satirical verses. From 1589, he traveled in various commissions of his council through Navarra, Andalusia (Granada and Jaén) and Castilla (Salamanca, Madrid, Cuenca, León or Toledo). He composed numerous sonnets, romances, and satirical and lyrical letrillas, and musicians such as Diego Gómez, Gabriel Díaz, and Claudio de la Sablonara were interested in setting these poems to music.
During a stay at the Court of Valladolid in 1603, he fell out with Quevedo, whom he accused of imitating his satirical poetry under a pseudonym, whether this was true or not. It does seem that Quevedo wrote against the bad taste of the satires that the Cordovan ingenuity exhibited at that time against the dirt of the Esgueva river that crossed the city, qualified as a Court and, therefore, very overpopulated. In 1609 he returned to Córdoba and began to intensify the aesthetic force and the baroque style of his verses. Between 1610 and 1611 he wrote the Ode to the taking of Larache and in 1613 the Polifemo, a poem in octaves that paraphrases a mythological passage from Metamorphoses of Ovid, a topic that had already been dealt with by his compatriot Luis Carrillo y Sotomayor in his Fable of Acis and Galatea; the same year he published in the Court his most ambitious poem, the incomplete Solitudes . This poem unleashed a great controversy due to its obscurity and affectation, and created a large legion of followers for him, the so-called culterano poets (Salvador Jacinto Polo de Medina, Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino, Francisco de Trillo y Figueroa, Gabriel Bocángel, Count de Villamediana, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Pedro Soto de Rojas, Miguel Colodrero de Villalobos, Anastasio Pantaleon de Ribera...), as well as enemies among conceptists such as Francisco de Quevedo and classicists such as Lope de Vega, Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola and Bartholomew Leonardo de Argensola.
Some of these, however, eventually became a member of its defenders, such as Juan de Jáuregui. The fact is that his figure was clothed with even greater prestige, to the point that Felipe III appointed him royal chaplain in 1617. To carry out this position, he moved to Madrid and lived in the Court until 1626, ruining himself to obtain positions and perks. to almost all of his relatives. The following year, in 1627, having lost his memory, he went to Córdoba, where he died of a stroke in the midst of extreme poverty. Velázquez portrayed him in 1622 with a broad, clear forehead, and from the lawsuits, documents and satires of his great enemy, Francisco de Quevedo, it is known that he was jovial, sociable, talkative and a lover of luxury and entertainment such as playing cards and bullfighting, to the point that he was frequently reproached for how little he dignified ecclesiastical habits. At the time he was considered a master of satire, although he did not reach the expressionist extremes of Quevedo or the very black inks of Juan de Tassis y Peralta, second count of Villamediana, who was his friend and one of his best poetic disciples.; being so difficult to please, he gave him high praise calling him rara avis in terra .
In his poetry, two periods were usually distinguished. In the traditional he makes use of short meters and light themes. For this he used tenths, ballads, letrillas, etc. This period lasted until 1610, when he changed to become a culter, making use of difficult metaphors, many mythological allusions, cultism, hyperbatism, etc., but Dámaso Alonso showed that these difficulties were already present in his first period and that the second is a intensification of these resources carried out for aesthetic reasons.
His remains are in the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba.
Works
Although Góngora did not publish his works (an attempt of his in 1623 was unsuccessful), they passed from hand to hand in handwritten copies that were collected and compiled in songbooks, ballads, and anthologies, published with or without his permission. The most authoritative manuscript is the so-called Chacón Manuscript (copied by Antonio Chacón, Lord of Polvoranca, for the Count-Duke of Olivares), since it contains explanations by Góngora himself and the chronology of each poem; but this manuscript, taking into account the high personage to which it is intended, dispenses with satirical and vulgar works. The same year of his death, Juan López Vicuña already published some Works in verse of the Spanish Homer which is also considered very reliable and important in fixing the corpus of Gón; his attributions are usually accurate; even so, it was collected by the Inquisition and later surpassed by that of Gonzalo de Hoces in 1633. On the other hand, Góngora's works, like previously those of Juan de Mena and Garcilaso de la Vega, enjoyed the honor of being widely glossed and commented on by figures of the stature of Díaz de Rivas, Pellicer, Salcedo Coronel, Salazar Mardones, Pedro de Valencia and others.
Although in his initial works we already find the typical conceptism of the baroque, Góngora, whose disposition was that of a discontented esthete (“I am the greatest prosecutor of my works”, he used to say), was dissatisfied and decided to try according to his own words "do something not for many" and further intensify the rhetoric and imitation of classical Latin poetry by introducing numerous cultisms and a syntax based on hyperbaton and symmetry; he likewise was very attentive to the sonority of the verse, which he took care of as a true musician of the word; he was a great painter of the ears and epicureanly filled his verses with sensory nuances of color, sound and touch. What's more, through what Dámaso Alonso, one of his main scholars, called elusions and alusiones, he turned each of his last minor and major poems into a dark exercise for minds awake and erudite, like a kind of riddle or intellectual emblem that causes pleasure in its decipherment. It is the Baroque aesthetic that was called gongorismo in his honor or, with a word that has made better fortune and that originally had a derogatory value due to its analogy with the word Lutheranism, culteranismo, since its adversaries they considered culterano poets authentic heretics of poetry.
Critics, since Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, have traditionally distinguished two eras or two ways in Góngora's work: the "Prince of Light", which would correspond to his first stage as a poet, where he composed simple romances and unanimously praised letrillas until the Neoclassical period, and the «Prince of Darkness», in which from 1610, when he composed the ode To the taking of Larache, he became the author of obscure and unintelligible poems. Until the romantic period, this part of his work was harshly criticized and even censored by the neoclassical Ignacio de Luzán himself. This theory was refuted by Dámaso Alonso, who demonstrated that complication and obscurity were already present in his early days and that as a result of a natural evolution he reached the daring extremes for which he has been reproached so much. In romances such as the Fable of Pyramus and Thisbe and in some letrillas, puns, allusions, concepts and a Latinized syntax appear, although these difficulties are masked by the brevity of its verses, its musicality and rhythm., and by the use of traditional forms and themes.
Poems
His poetry is usually grouped into two blocks, minor and major poems, corresponding more or less to the two successive poetic stages. In his youth, Góngora composed numerous romances, of literary inspiration, such as that of Angélica y Medoro, of captives, with a mischievous theme or with a more personal and lyrical tone, some of them autobiographical in nature, in which narrates his childhood memories or his trips:
In the pinars of the Jucar / I saw dance to some saws, / to the sound of the water in the stones / and to the sound of the wind in the branches.
Also numerous lyrical, satirical or religious letrillas and burlesque romances.
Give me warm and laugh. / Bring others of the government / of the world and its monarchies, / while they rule my days / butters and tender bread, / and, winter mornings, / orange and aguardiente, / and laugh. / Eat in golden cheek / the prince a thousand cares, / like golden pills, / that I, in my poor table, / want more a bit / than in the scrambled roaster, / and laugh. / When I cover the mountains / white snow on January, / I have full brazier / of acorns and chestnuts / and who the sweet pebbles / of the king who raged tells me, / and laugh. / Find very in good hour / the merchant new suns; / me, shells and snails / between the small sand, / listening to Filomena / on the poof of the source, / and laugh. / Half night pass the sea, / and burning in loving flame / Leandro, to see your lady, / that I more want to pass / of the gulf of my lizard / the white or red current, / and laugh. / For love is so crüel, / that of Pyramus and his beloved / makes a sword to me, / do she and he join, / be my Tisbe a cake, / and the sword be my tooth, / and laugh (L. de Góngora, 1581).
The vast majority are a constant accumulation of conceptualist games, misunderstandings, paronomasias, hyperbole and typically baroque puns. Among them is the long romance Fable of Pyramus and Thisbe (1618), a very complex poem that was the one that cost its author the most work and was held in the most esteem, and where an attempt is made to elevate parody, a procedure typically baroque, a category as artistic as the others, but it already belongs to its last stage. Most of the letrillas are directed, as in Quevedo, to mock beggar ladies and to attack the desire for wealth. Satires against different writers also deserve their place, especially Quevedo or Lope de Vega, a genre in which he only had competitors in Francisco de Quevedo himself or the count of Villamediana.
Along with these poems, throughout his life, Góngora did not stop writing perfect sonnets on all kinds of topics (love, satirical, moral, philosophical, religious, circumstances, controversial, laudatory, funerary), authentic objects autonomous verbal due to their intrinsic aesthetic quality and where the Cordovan poet explores different expressive possibilities of the style he is forging or comes to herald future works, such as the famous «Misguided, sick, pilgrim...», which heralds the Soledades.
Detached, sick, pilgrim, / in dark night, with uncertain foot, / the confusion treading from the desert, / voices in vain gave, steps without dye. / Repeated beating, if not neighbor, / different heard of can always awake, / and in pastoral shelter badly covered / piety found, if not found way. / The Sun came out and, between hidden armies, / dreamy sweet saña / jumped to the unhealthy passenger. / He will pay for the lodging with life; / more it would be worthwhile to wander on the mountain / to die of the fate that I die. (L. de Góngora, From a sick walker who fell in love where he was staying, 1594)
Among the usual topics (carpe diem, etc.), however, those devoted to revealing the ravages of old age, poverty and the passing of time through poet, who are the last: "Less requested swift arrow...", "In this western, in this, Oh Licio!..." etc
In this western, in this "oh Licio! / airtight luster of life, / all evil affirmed foot is fallen; / all easy fall is precipice. / Does the step expire?, illustrate the joy. / Breaking the unified earth; / what prudence, of the preventable dust, / the rüine guarded the building? / The skin, not only sierpe venomous, / but with the skin, the years are naked, / and the man is not. Man's speech! / Oh that blissful one who puts it in a dumb stone, / the slight one gives the sovereign sapphire! (L. de Góngora, Infers, of the ashes of old age, close to the end that Catholic is encouraged, 1623)
The greatest poems were, however, those that caused the culterana revolution and the subsequent scandal, caused by the great obscurity of the verses of this aesthetic. They are the Fable of Polifemo and Galatea (1612) and the incomplete and misunderstood Soledades (the first composed before May 1613). The first narrates through the eighth real stanza a mythological episode from Ovid's Metamorphoses, that of the love of the cyclops Polyphemus for the nymph Galatea, who rejects him. In the end, Acis, Galatea's lover, is turned into a river. The complex and difficult culterano style is already tried there, full of symmetries, transpositions, metaphors of metaphors or pure metaphors, hyperbaton, periphrasis, Latin turns, cultisms, allusions and elusions of terms, trying to suggest more than name and dilating the form so that the meaning fades as it is being deciphered.
Loneliness
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The Soledades was going to be a poem in silvas, divided into four parts, each corresponding allegorically to an age of human life and a season of the year, and would be called Soledad de the fields, Soledad from the banks, Soledad from the jungles and Soledad from the wasteland. But Góngora only composed the dedication to the Duke of Béjar and the first two, although he left the latter unfinished, of which the last 43 verses were added some time later. The stanza was not new, but it was the first time it had been applied to such a long poem. Its form, of an astrophic nature, was the one that gave the poet the most freedom, who in this way came closer and closer to free verse and made the poetic language progress to extremes that only the poets of Parnassianism and French Symbolism would reach in the 17th century. XIX.
At the beginning there is a dedication to the Duke of Béjar:
Steps of a pilgrim are, errant, / how many gave me sweet verses Musa, / in confusing solitude, / lost ones, others inspired. / Oh you, that of handicapped venablos, / walls of fir, hives of diamond, / bats the mountains that, of armed snow, / giants of crystal fears the sky, / where the horn, of the echo repeated, / beasts exposes you that, to the dyed soil, / dead, asking for disformed terms, / sparkling coral give alms. / Up to a braking brake...
The plot of the First Solitude is quite unconventional, although it is inspired by an episode of the Odyssey, that of Nausícaa: a young castaway arrives on a coast and He is picked up by some goatherds. But this argument is only a pretext for a true descriptive frenzy: the poem's value is lyrical rather than narrative, as Dámaso Alonso pointed out, although more recent studies vindicate its narrative relevance. Góngora offers an arcadian nature, where everything is wonderful and where man can be happy, aesthetically purifying his vision, which is nevertheless rigorously materialistic and epicurean (he tries to impress the senses of the body, not only the spirit), to make everything disappear. ugly and nasty. In this way, through evasion, a periphrasis makes an ugly and unpleasant word disappear (the jerky becomes "purple fine-grained threads" and the tablecloths "spun snow", for example).
The Soledades caused a great scandal due to their aesthetic audacity and their hyper-cultivated darkness, and sometimes behind this debate is disgust at homosexual themes. They were attacked by Francisco de Quevedo, Lope de Vega, the Count of Salinas and Juan de Jáuregui (who composed a considered Antidoto contra las Soledades and a Poetic Exemplary against them, but nevertheless ended up professing the same or very similar doctrine), among many other poets, but it also had great defenders and followers, such as Francisco Fernández de Córdoba, abbot of Rute, the count of Villamediana, Gabriel Bocángel, Miguel Colodrero de Villalobos, Agustín de Salazar and, beyond the Atlantic, Juan de Espinosa Medrano, Hernando Domínguez Camargo and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Góngora's influence extended even more over time, to the point that his countryman José de León y Mansilla composed and printed a Soledad tercera in 1718 and Rafael Alberti ("Soledad tercera" 34;, in Cal y canto, 1927) and Federico García Lorca (Insecure Solitude) wrote two more in the 19th century XX. With the Soledades, the Castilian lyric was enriched with new words and new and powerful expressive instruments, forging a looser and freer syntax than until then.
Góngora's poems deserved the honors of being commented upon shortly after his death as contemporary classics, as those of Juan de Mena and Garcilaso de la Vega had been long ago in the XVI. The most important commentators were José García de Salcedo Coronel, author of an annotated edition in three volumes (1629-1648), José Pellicer de Ossau, who composed some Solemn Lessons on the works of Don Luis de Gongora y Argote (1630) or Cristóbal de Salazar Mardones, author of an Illustration and defense of the fable of Pyramus and Thisbe (Madrid, 1636). In the 18th century and 19th century , however, reacted against this extreme baroque style, at first using the style for low and burlesque themes, as did Agustín de Salazar, and soon after, in the XVIII, relegating the second phase of the Gongora lyric and its larger poems to oblivion. However, due to the work of the Generation of '27 and especially by his scholar Dámaso Alonso, the Cordovan poet became a model admired also by his complex major poems. The admiration reached such an extreme that the continuation of the poem was even attempted, fortunately in the case of Alberti (Soledad tercera).
Theater
Luis de Góngora also composed three plays, Las firmezas de Isabela (1613), the Comedia venatoria and El doctor Carlino, this last unfinished and later recast by Antonio de Solís.
Old Editions
- Works in verse of the Spanish Homer, who recogio Iuan Lopez de Vicuña. To the most illustrious and reverend Lord Antonio Zapata, Cardinal of the Holy Church of Rome, General Inquisitor in all the Kings of Spain, and of the Council of State our lord. Madrid: Viuda de Luis Sánchez, 1627. Dámaso Alonso made an edition of this work: Madrid: CSIC, 1963.
- All the works of Don Luis de Góngora in several poems collected by Don Gonzalo de Hozes and Córdova, a native of the city of Cordova, directed to Don Francisco Antonio Fernández de Córdova, Marquis de Guadalcázar, etc. Madrid: Imprenta del Reino, 1633 (two editions this same year, one with smaller preliminary and one more sonnet). In 1634 there were two others, also of the same editorial and compiler cradle, Madrid the first, counter-made in Seville the second; the Madrid suppresses several dozens of poems, surely for inquisitorial denunciation. There was another in 1644, also Madrid: Imprenta Real, and Seville: Nicolás Rodríguez, 1648; copy the second in Madrid, 1633. Another one: Madrid, íd., 1654, and a countercha that imitates it but is more or less 1670. Another important one All works is Zaragoza, 1643
- Works. Part One and Part Two, Lisbon, Paulo Craesbeck Office, 1646-1647. Follow the Madrid editions. It was reprinted in 1667, with the addition of “Song to the Lunch by Camoēs, who translated from Portuguese in Spanish Luis de Gómez de Tapia».
- Works, Brussels: Francisco Foppens, 1659. It follows a copy of the 1634 edition of Madrid, until at a certain time it is replaced by another full one.
- Delights of the Parnasus, encrypting all the Lirico Romances, Amorous, Burlescos, glorious, and decimas satiricas of the [sic] muses the prodigious Don Luis de Gongora. Collected all of their originals, and corrected from the mistakes with which they are corrupt, Barcelona: 1634. Coedición by Pedro Esquer and Pedro Lacavallería. Two broadcasts were made, one for each editor, and includes romances, letters and selected tenths. Another edition: Barcelona: Pedro Lacavallería, 1640. Three others from Zaragoza, 1640-1642?, 1643.
- Polifemo, commented by García de Salcedo Coronel, Madrid: 1629.
- Solemn Lessons..., by José Pellicer de Salas, Madrid: 1630.
- Soledades y Polifemocommented by Salcedo Coronel, Madrid: 1636.
- Illustration and Defense of the Pyramus and Tisbe Fable, by Cristóbal Salazar Mardones, Madrid: 1636.
- First part of the second volume of the works of Don Luis de Góngora, commented by Salcedo Coronel, Madrid: 1644.
- Second part of the second volume of the works of Don Luis de Góngora, commented by Salcedo Coronel, Madrid: 1648.
- Apologetic for Don Luis de Góngora, by Espinosa Medrano, Lima: 1662.
- Apologetic for Don Luis de Góngora, by Espinosa Medrano, Lima: 1694.
Modern Editions
There are several modern editions of the work of Luis de Góngora; The first was undoubtedly that of the French Hispanist Raymond Foulché Delbosc, in Obras poéticas de Góngora (1921); then followed those of Juan Millé Giménez and his sister Isabel Millé Giménez, (1943) and the editions and studies of Dámaso Alonso, (critical edition of Soledades, 1927; The poetic language of Góngora , 1935; Estudios y ensayos gongorinos; Góngora y el Polifemo, 1960, three vols.); Complete Sonnets ed. from Biruté Ciplijauskaité (Madrid, Castalia, 1969); Romances ed. by Antonio Carreño (Madrid, Chair, 1982); Soledades editions by John R. Beverley (Madrid, Cátedra, 1980) and Robert Jammes (Madrid, Castalia); Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea ed. by Alexander A. Parker (Madrid, Chair, 1983); Letrillas ed. by Robert Jammes (Madrid, Castalia, 1980); Songs and other poems of major art, ed. by José M.ª Micó (Madrid, Espasa Calpe, 1990), Romances, ed. by Antonio Carreira (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1998) and Sonnets ed. by Juan Matas Caballero (Madrid, Chair, 2019).
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