[In the following essay, Rivers analyzes Polifemo y Galatea and other poems, arguing that in these works Góngora exhibits a mastery of Spanish oral traditions as well as the written traditions of Greek and Italian poetry.]

It is well known that in Spain the introduction of the Renaissance tradition of literary, hendecasyllabic poetry did not destroy the native tradition of oral, predominantly octosyllabic poetry. The oral traditions of lyric zéjel (stanzas with rhyming refrain) and of narrative romance (non-stanzaic sequence of lines with continuous assonance) survived both in rural society and in transcriptions, which were published in the form of single sheets and of more expensive quarto and folio collections. By the beginning of the 17th century learned poets had begun to write new poetry in these traditional forms, both for oral presentation in popular theaters and for a reading public. The major Baroque poets such as Góngora, Lope de Vega and Quevedo all participated in this renewal of traditionally oral forms of poetry.

Góngora is of particular interest because of the extreme contrast between his highly Latinized literary compositions, on the one hand, and his lyric songs and ballads on the other. A detailed comparison of his Polifemo, representing the former tradition, with his genuinely popular letrillas and romances reveals clearly the importance of the stylistic distinction between written poetry and spoken poetry. Although Góngora undoubtedly wrote down and revised his more popular poems, once circulated in ms. or recited they were learned and repeated orally, thus literally rejoining the spoken tradition to which they belonged genetically and generically.

We know from Góngora's reply to the Bishop of Cordova's accusations of frivolity that he, although a cathedral canon, was inordinately fond of bullfights, popular music and the theater. In his native Andalusia it was inevitable that Góngora should come constantly into contact with the predominantly illiterate, oral culture of the region, where the social arts of conversation, storytelling, recitation, song and dance are still more vitally alive than is the solitary reading and writing of texts composed for the literate minority. At the same time Góngora himself did belong to that minority, within which the most intricate elaborations of verbal arabesques were deliberately constructed as a barrier to popular, oral intelligibility. Nowhere else in 17th-century Europe were the oral and the written styles so far removed from one another, and no Spanish poet was more completely at home in either style than was Góngora. We have only to read and compare stanzas taken from his best-known works. Let us turn first to the oral tradition, to a cantiga de amigo, which represents the earliest known stage of Romance poetry in the Iberian peninsula; it is the cantiga de amigo which is reflected in the jarchas appended to Arabic and Hebrew muwasahas and which is very important in the first Gallego-Portuguese cancioneiros. This prehistoric tradition was still very much alive for Góngora, who deliberately strove, in his various revisions of this poem, to retain its ingenuous oral charm while refining it to artistic perfection. As Professor Wardropper has said in his study of three versions of this poem (SP [Spanish Poetry of the Golden Age] LXIII [1966], 661-676):

In addition to the complication inherent in the genre—the poet turns into a girl—we must recognize Góngora's own peculiar complexity, for his whole body of poems lies at the center of the struggles between the popular and culta traditions of Spanish poetry. In “La más bella niña” this interior struggle in which Góngora participated may be seen in all its splendid dynamism.

La más bella niña / de nuestro lugar, / hoy vïuda y sola / a ayer por casar, / viendo que sus ojos / a la guerra van, / a su madre dice, / que escucha su mal: / dejadme llorar / orillas del mar.

Every word here belongs to the most basic Spanish lexicon. The syntax and word-order hardly differ in any way from those of everyday spoken Spanish; only the adverbial phrases “a la guerra” and “a su madre” do not follow, but precede, the verbs that they modify: “a la guerra van,” “a su madre dice.” The only rhyme is the assonance of stressed “á” at the end of every other line. “Nuestro lugar” implies the existence of a village community within which a daughter addresses her mother in the absence of her husband, who has gone to war; matriarchy is clearly indicated as the fictionalized sociological context of this anguished plea for sympathy in a basic situation of sexual deprivation. Only the metaphorical “sus ojos” can not be taken literally; but even this phrase belongs to current oral idiom in which eyes are associated with endearment. The refrain is a simple plea for the inarticulate, but presumably audible, expression of grief: “dejadme llorar / orillas del mar.” No speaker of Spanish, whether belonging to the 17th or to the 20th century, could fail to understand this stanza if it were read to him aloud.

Turning now from this “romancillo” to stanza 5 of the Polifemo, we find ourselves within a radically different system of verbal communication.

Guarnición tosca de este escollo duro / tronco robustos son, a cuya greña / menos luz debe, menos aire puro / la caverna profunda, que a la peña; / caliginoso lecho, el seno obscuro / ser de la negra noche nos 10 enseña / infame turba de nocturnas aves, / gimiendo tristes y volando graves.

Though some of the words belong to basic Spanish, nine of them are relatively infrequent, if not rare: guarnición, tosca, escollo, greña, caliginoso, seno, infame, turba, nocturnas. The word-order and syntax cause the reader considerable difficulty. The hyperbole beginning with “a cuya greña …” must be paraphrased and greatly expanded before being intelligible as oral Spanish; translating Damaso Alonso's prose version, we convert 2[frac12] lines into a long sentence: “To the tight tangle of trees the deep cave owes even less daylight and fresh air than to the rock cliff (for if this cliff excludes a great deal of light and air, even more is excluded by the thicket in front).” The literary relative adjective “cuya” is elliptical for “de los cuales.” The “a” at the beginning of the clause is correlative with the “a” which comes almost at the end: “a cuya greña menos luz debe … que a la peña.” The syntax of the second half of the stanza is even more difficult to decipher; the Latinate infinitive phrase must in fact be turned into a clause with finite verb before it can approximate oral Spanish. The second person plural nos lo enseña in this context does not imply the existence of a primitive matriarchal community, but of a sophisticated masculine community of classical scholars who can see anew the Ovidian cave of Polyphemus through the deliberately obscure eyes of a highly literate virtuoso. Metaphorically, the birds convert the cave into the bedroom of Night. The ottava rima stanza provides a rich sequence of rimes: duro, gréna; puro, peńa; obscuro, enseńa; aves, graves. And this complex phonetic level is further enriched by such a line as “infame turba de nocturnas aves.” Only the classically educated connoisseur can fully appreciate the art of literary composition exemplified by this stanza, syntactically incomprehensible if presented orally. As Damaso Alonso comments, “There are few stanzas more densely baroque than this one, … [in which] monstrousness, blackness and ominous gloom are masterfully piled up to produce a cumulative sensation of obscurity and horror.”

Let us keep these two touchstones in mind: the first stanza of the romancillo of the lonely girl's lament to her mother; and the fifth stanza of a baroque symphony on themes drawn from the classical story of Polyphemus, Galatea and Acis, with its roots, not in the oral tradition of Spain, but in the written tradition which begins with Homer and Theocritus and leads through Virgil and Ovid to its culmination in Góngora. With these two antithetical passages clearly in mind, we can analyze Góngora's entire works in terms of a constant interplay, tending toward fusion in his minor romance masterpieces, Angélica y Medoro and Píramo y Tisbe, an interplay between these two clearly defined stylistic norms. Góngora's satirical wit belongs primarily to the oral mode; but it is perhaps this conceptismo which underlies and unifies his work as a whole, bridging the gap between the girl's simple song and Polyphemus's cave.

Góngora's poetry naturally receives considerable space in the late Eduardo M. Torner's Lírica hispánica: relaciones entre lo popular y lo culto (Madrid: Castalia, 1966). In fact, I should like to bring to the attention of members of this congress this important posthumous work, a source-book of no fewer than 248 themes found in Spanish popular poetry. Here are a few examples of Góngora's participation in this tradition:

A la dina, dana, dina—la dina, dana—vuelta soberana;
a la dana, dina, dana—la dana, dina—mudanza divina.

Here nonsense words depend upon musical rhythmus and variations, and in turn set the rhymes; such reversals in rhyme words are basic to the so-called parallelistic stanzas, which are common in the Gallego-Portuguese tradition.

A village girl loses her jewelry at a feast day dance:
En el baile del ejido / (nunca Menga fuera al baile) / perdió los corales
Menga / un disanto por la tarde.

Góngora's satire too has its roots in the antitheses of popular song:

Dineros son calidad:
i verdad!
Más ama quien más suspira:
i mentira.

In some cases it is hard to determine whether Góngora got a refrain from the popular tradition, or whether the popular tradition got it from Góngora:

Las flores del romero,
niña Isabel,
hoy son flores azules,
manaña serán miel.

Occasionally Góngora will raise the musical and verbal structure of a popular dance and joke to the highest level of refined poetry. The popular text reads thus:

No son todas palomitas las gue pican en el montón,
no son todas palomitas, que algunos palomitos son.

On the basis of this, Góngora constructs his subtle letrilla:

No son todos ruiseñores / los que cantan entre las flores, / sino campanitas de plata / que tocan al alba, / sino trompeticas de oro / que hacen la salva / a los soles que adoro.

Popular jokes about Negroes were inevitable when “negro” was a current negative epithet:

Por una negra señora / un negro galán boliente / negras lágrimas derrama / de un negro pecho que tiene …

In conclusion, it would be hard to find another poet who demonstrates so constantly as Góngora a complete familiarity, both with the written tradition of Greek, Latin and Italian poetry (a familiarity voluminously documented by Vilanova with respect to the Polifemo), and also with the oral traditions of his native land. From all we know of his life, it was divided between solitary library study and composition, and a social life so gay that his bishop had to protest. His “written” style and his “oral” style belong to two distinct literary institutions, or establishments, in which he participates as an individual poet.