Brian Jorge Bizio, Whitman College
The anonymous poem Discurso en loor de la poesía (“Discourse in Praise of Poetry”) has cultural transference at its core. First, the work was published as the prologue to Diego Mexía de Fernangil’s translation of Ovid’s Heroides (Sevilla, 1608). Second, though it praises the Spanish translator and does not preface Ovid’s poem, it transfers the anonymous female lyric voice from the margins to the center: like an Atlas of sorts, the heroic task of praise is set on “a woman’s spider-like shoulders” (“ombros de muger que son d’araña”, 54; cf. 608-9; Perilli 2004-2005; del Barco 2017). Third, the Discurso is said to be composed by “una señora principal d’este Reino”, a lady of the Spanish realm who was active in the Viceroyalty of Peru (“Testigo me serás, sagrada Lima”, 520; cf. 22: “Aquí, Ninfas d’el Sur, venid ligeras”). Probably, rather than a Peruvian criolla, she was a Spanish noble linked to Mexía’s Academia Antártica, and like its members, engaged in the transatlantic mission of culturally colonizing the new Spanish territory (Vinatea 2021). Accordingly, she claims that just as Mars gave the Spaniard “his sword to terrorize the pagans” (“su espada, porque el solo | fuesse espanto, i orror de los Paganos”), so Apollo gave him “his quill to fly from the ancient axis to our new pole” (“su pluma, para que bolara | d’el exe antiguo a nuestro nuevo Polo”, 469-74).
This sword-quill analogy is striking. I use it to argue that Latin poetry inspired in ‘La Anónima’ the idea that the poet, the heroic maker, eminently has a civilizing mission (Fernández 2017). As the god who gives the inspiration of poetry and builds the walls of culture, Apollo was said to be a translation of Christ in Spanish poetics-treatises (cf. 742-50). Most influential to the Discurso’s ideology was the treatise Cisne de Apolo (Carvallo 1602), through which Horatian poetics was filtered (Cornejo Polar 2000). Just as Horace claims to be the first Latin poet to transfer Aeolian song to Italian meters (princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos | deduxisse modos, C. 3.30.13-4), so ‘La Anónima’ professes to be the first woman to invoke the nymphs of the south (“la primera qu’os imploro”, 23): i.e. to transfer Latin poetry to the Spanish colony in Italian terza rima. Like Horace, she claims that the poet’s mission is to delight and to teach (“deleytar: i dotrinar”, 291; cf. A.P. 333: prodesse…aut delectare), and, as examples, she draws on the myths of Orpheus and Amphion to present divine music as a relocational force that tames “savage living” (271-9; cf. A.P. 391-401). Finally, just as Horace links Orpheus to Augustus when he conquers eastern peoples (C. 1.12.6-60), so she links the Roman poet laureate to the victor laureate who tames “bárbaras gentes” (325-330), thus legitimating the Crown and Church’s colonization of the southern pagans.
Rather than entailing an innocent Apollonian chain of transmission (31-6, 295-300; cf. C. 4.6.29-30), this Spanish laudatio absorbed the cultural agenda of the Augustan imperium, and, as such, testifies to the moral issues involved in Greco-Roman relocations.