[In the following essay, Gaylord examines Góngora's “Sonnet 80” (“Descaminado, enfermo, peregrino”) as a basis for discussion of the poet's reputed lack of personal voice in the Soledades.]

Few readers of the Soledades fail to note Góngora's linking, in the poem's striking first lines, of his pilgrim's physical footsteps with the movement of verse itself:

Pasos de un peregrino son errante
cuantos me dictó versos dulce Musa
en soledad confusa,
perdidos unos, otros inspirados.

[Such verses as my muse may grant / are steps upon a wandering pilgrim's way; / while some may go astray, / in lonely mazes, others live inspired.]

(Cunningham, p. 3)

Maurice Molho's extraordinary reading has illuminated the semantic density of this passage's (con)fusion of the peregrino's steps with the wandering ways of his verses (classically endowed with metric feet) and with the labyrinthian space-time of his Soledad.¹ Now lost, now inspired—but most important of all fused together—the physical figure of the protagonist, the physical shape of verse form, and the dictates of poetic inspiration march and meander their way through the poem. For Molho, Góngora's formal achievement is epic: “El genio de Góngora supo llevar a cabo la peligrosa empresa que consiste—aventura sin precedentes … —en conferir una estructura a la misma libertad, un orden al desorden, una coherencia a la incoherencia”² [Góngora's genius found the way to undertake the dangerous endeavor—an adventure without precedent—of giving a structure to liberty itself, an order to disorder, a coherence to incoherence]. Out of the treasure troves of his literary predecessors, that is to say, he creates a poem without precedent and without equal: the monumental silva/Soledad.³

This formidable formal triumph, however, is not had without a price. Even as Góngora celebrates the visit of the muse and her double gift of pasos/versos, even as he makes the love pilgrim's progress a figure for the poem itself, he elides—as Molho stresses⁴—the figure of the poet (evoked only obliquely in “cuantos me dictó versos”) and thereby effectively foreshadows his own subsequent “absence” from the long poem. Molho rediscovers this same move in the 1615 sonnet offered in the early editions as “Alegoría de la primera de sus Soledades,”⁵ where poetic foot and poem are once again fused, this time in the allegorical figure of Soledad: “Restituye a tu mudo horror divino, / amiga Soledad, el pie sagrado” [Soledad my friend, restore your holy foot to your divine, mute horror]. The first verses of this later piece would indeed seem to seal the marginalization of the poet, subordinating his figure to the literary ideal realized in his magnum opus. When the sonnet's tercets bring the poet back into view (or hearing) with the image of the “voz doliente” [pained voice] of the “tórtola viuda” [widowed turtledove], Molho acknowledges fully that figure's currency in the sixteenth-century lyric ballad as quintessential image for the voice of pure sentiment. Yet he interprets the turtledove's solitary voice here as the solitude of poetry, as a unique, self-made aesthetic solitude, and reads the allegory as a defense of the elitist poetry for which Góngora was so often attacked.⁶ Abstract interpretation of the sonnet's figure for voice, then, by subordinating voice to message, serves to confirm once again the studied impersonality of the poet of the Soledades and the elusiveness of his voice.⁷

But does displacement of the poetic voice necessarily signify its disappearance? Do these tropological metamorphoses of the lyric persona—into the poem Soledad, into the tortolica, into the poet-lover-pilgrim—work only to make that voice more philosophical, and thereby less personal and less lyrical? Concretely, when the poet uses figures of the voice of feeling as allegorical embodiments of his poetic journey, can we afford to conclude that aesthetic theory has overwhelmed, diminished, or even eliminated the discourse of sentiment that gives these tropes their energy? If the love lyric, as it emerges in the European Renaissances and in the Spanish Golden Age, serves indeed as one of the chief breeding grounds for the emerging self-consciousness of the modern subject, then it seems ill-advised to limit the significance of these figures, and particularly that of the poet-lover, who is perhaps the central figure in Góngora's verse for the mysterious experience of poetic creation.⁸

In order to get closer to that elusive lyric subject and perhaps to understand better his subsequent appearances in Góngora's verse, I propose to look at another, earlier poem in which verses or (voices) and feet once again find themselves in poetic proximity. The sonnet, “Descaminado, enfermo, peregrino”⁹ [“Wayward, sick, and wandering”], happens to be, moreover, a poem many readers including Salcedo Coronel have connected, via the outlines of its argument (“De un caminante enfermo que se enamoró donde fue hospedado” [Of a sick traveler who fell in love in the place he had been lodged]), to the later Soledades. I want to use the 1594 sonnet to pose the question of the nature and the role of voice—the voice of feeling, the voice of the poet—in Góngora's poetry and in poetry like Góngora's that, for whatever reasons, conspicuously eschews transparency of feeling and of meaning. This essay asks, in the case of a poet so committed to many-layered imitation of his predecessors as well as to the cultivated difficulty of learned language, what is at stake in such commitments. And it asks too whether there is any evidence that Góngora pondered these stakes as in each new poem he not only renewed but escalated his devotion to difficulty and to artifice. Did he meditate on what his elaborately wrought language stood to imperil or even lose, as well as what it hoped to gain? Or did he perhaps find in the labyrinth of controversial culterano rhetoric itself a powerful metaphor for the dilemmas and the limits of lyric self-expression?

I am aware that my title may for some have Derridean overtones, and that I might therefore be expected—by virtue of pressing feet and footsteps into footprints—to invoke supplementarity and the figure of the trace, written language as the leftovers of the work of signification in its restless movement from signifier to signifier. That theoretical shoe might indeed be made to fit Góngora's poetic foot, but that is not my project here. Instead, by shifting the focus from Góngora's literal verse/steps to their prints, I want to call attention to the poetic utterance as a physical itinerary, one whose verbal markers (rhetorical, lexical, grammatical) point the way not only toward sense but also inevitably toward that framing speaker who is always—whether or not he “speaks,” no matter how successful his disappearing acts—at least implicitly present in his poem. It is on this very material path, a path paved with words—new or used, familiar or foreign, sometimes bearing the conspicuous imprints of earlier travelers—that the poet and his readers must inevitably meet as they chart (or contest) the route to meaning.

The trope of the poet's path is, of course, no newcomer to the Renaissance lyric. Before Góngora made his several versions, it had served Petrarch, Dante, Garcilaso, and countless others very well. Fernando de Herrera's look at the figure is particularly suggestive. For the author of the 1580 Anotaciones to Garcilaso's verse, the central image of his first sonnet (“Cuando me paro a contemplar mi estado” [When I pause to contemplate my present state]) conjures up the position of poets in general. Herrera's commentary moves metonymically from Garcilaso's survey of his sentimental camino to a far-reaching meditation on the shared literary itinerary of all poets. The sonnet becomes the commentator's pretext for an essay on poetry as imitation. He makes this poem, and the sonnet as a form, an Ur-scene for the poet, one in which he must gather up a great mass of material (by implication inherited), then condense and enclose it in a tiny, rigidly defined space, a space he must deserve (by comparison with his predecessors) to occupy. Like Garcilaso's lyric persona, the poet portrayed in the Anotaciones is poised between retrospection and prediction: as he looks back on the legacy of his predecessors and forward to an uncertain future, he too stands stopped. In short, Herrera thematizes the pasos of the Toledan poet's sentimental itinerary as poetry. And he helps us to see that many other poems that hang on the same well-worn geographical image also do just that. As a venerable figure for both writing and reading, then, the foot-printed poetic path may offer to us as well a powerful trope for conventional (that is, imitated) poetry and thus for the complexity of cultural continuity as it is acted out in the journeys through language and through time of poet-imitators and scholar-readers, who struggle to identify telltale footprints, who strain to hear echoes of their owners' voices.

Góngora has been, since the time of the first generations of his readers, the supreme figure of poetic difficulty. Pedro Salinas sees difficulty as the very essence of his “poetical way of being.”¹⁰ That quality has traditionally transformed the poet into either an angel or a demon. In his own time he was adopted as angel of the erudite elite, while for more fundamentalist readers his work provided definitive proof of Quintilian's gloomy prediction about the wages of runaway metaphor: too many metaphors lead to allegory, and allegory leads to enigma—that is, beyond the realm of meaning and of truth.¹¹ In the eyes of the most offended, Góngora's poetry appears finally to fall into nothingness. For these readers, Góngora's poetic revolution sins by subverting the traditional subordination of unit to whole (fable to episode), figure to ground, sound to sense, senses to intellect. By placing metaphor, sound, linguistic unit on top, Góngora becomes either the champion of poetic language for its own sake, or the emblem of nonsense. While readers in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries found his subversion to be alarming, obscene, sacrilegious, or simply in poor taste, the twentieth century has revindicated Góngora as the quintessential poet of metaphor. Lorca rhapsodized about the centrality in his verse of the figure and of the moment. For poets of the Latin American neobaroque, as for Barthes and Lacan,¹² Góngora's practice and even his name open poetry up to the vast spaces of non-sense, freeing the signifier from the binary prison of sense, setting it loose in the utopia of purposeless free play.

On one subject, enthusiasts and denigrators of the Cordovan poet concur: in Góngora the verbal vehicle, in its aestheticizing, hedonistic complexity, predominates over message; dulce completely eclipses utile. In the limit case, Góngora becomes a poet of pure language. And virtually all readers from both camps subscribe to the general principle that as language becomes more preeminent, meaning grows fainter, soon becomes superfluous, and finally disappears altogether. Yet even among the apologists of Góngora we find traces of a nostalgia for meaning. Paul Smith remarks that “the significance of the Soledades, then, is primarily, if at all, self-reflexive. … Góngora's text, motiveless and inconsequential, embodies the virtue of pure spectacle.”¹³ And Dámaso Alonso, to whom several generations of readers owe a large part of their wonder at Góngora's technical virtuosity, openly rues the superficiality of the linguistic surface and the wornness of what lies beneath it. For the father of modern critical gongorismo, the imitative practice that underwrites the poet's difficulty implies a loss of direct, original vision. Alonso places the blame for this loss squarely on the accumulation in the poet's language of inherited perceptions: “Constantemente, entre la imagen vista y la imagen pensada se le está interponiendo un recuerdo. Poco hay de original en el mundo de su representación”¹⁴ [For him, memory constantly interpolates itself between the image that is seen and the image that is thought. In his world of representation, very little is original]. It is a sad conclusion: Góngora has nothing new to say; his poetry, therefore, is in some sense not his own. In the cultivated linguistic confusion, the poet himself gets lost.

So widespread is this sense of the ephemerality of Góngora's verbal wonder show that issues that first haunted only readings of the longer and later poems, chief among them the Soledades, inevitably spill over into the earlier, more accessible poems. The introduction to the most recent edition of the Sonnets, for example, makes Góngora a poet of language and of technique to the nth power, his verses overflowing with the violence of encabalgamiento and hipérbaton, accumulation of words chosen for their musicality or plastic beauty, daring metaphors that pile up or invert terms of comparison, mythological allusions that eclipse reality. Góngora's stock of themes, typically baroque, are presented as hackneyed, almost beside the point. For the editor, Biruté Ciplijauskaité, the “tendencia de convertirlo todo en metáfora” announces a downhill slide: “la metáfora se lexicaliza” then becomes “tópico” and finally dies of stagnation.¹⁵ In short, the rampage of the signifier, briefly responsible for stylistic “dynamism,” soon becomes language's dance of death. And the most serious loss is that of the poet's emotion. Ciplijauskaité speculates that suppression of emotion is the price paid for formal perfection: “Casi se le ve [al poeta] luchar con sus sentimientos por obtener una obra más perfecta”¹⁶ [One can almost see the poet fighting his emotions in order to obtain a more perfect work]. So it would seem that perfection, Góngora-style, must be bought at the expense of meaning and of feeling. The love sonnets, with their “perfecta hechura arquitectónica,” are almost a contradiction in terms: “es difícil … clasificarlos como tales” [it is difficult to classify them as such].

Sí corresponden al tema, pero son completamente impersonales, fríos, puramente descriptivos, inspirados en modelos petrarquistas. No logramos imaginar detrás de ellos al poeta. … Ninguno de los sonetos amorosos ni de lejos se acerca a la pasión directamente transmitida por Lope o por Quevedo …, y si tuviéramos que juzgar por los sonetos, nos inclinaríamos a afirmar que el poeta nunca estuvo enamorado.¹⁷

[They correspond in theme, but they are completely impersonal, cold, purely descriptive, inspired by Petrarchan models. We cannot imagine the poet behind them … none of the love sonnets even begins to come close to the passion conveyed directly by Lope or by Quevedo …, and if we had to judge by the sonnets, we would be inclined to state that the poet had never been in love.]

Octavio Paz, in an essay on the long poem, echoes these very complaints: the Soledades are “una pieza de marquetería sublime y vana”¹⁸ [a sublime, empty exhibition of marquetry]. And, although the Mexican poet takes a somewhat more modern view of the products of pure aestheticism, the vanity of Góngora's verse consists for him precisely in the same human emptiness lamented by the editor of the sonnets:

El mundo de Góngora no es el teatro de las pasiones humanas o el de las batallas y amores de los dioses. Es un mundo estético y sus criaturas, tejidas por las palabras, son reflejos, sombras, centelleos, engaños adorables y efímeros. ¿Qué queda después de la lectura?¹⁹

[Góngora's world is not a stage for human passions or for the battles and desires of the gods. It is an aesthetic world, and its creatures, woven out of words, are reflections, shadows, glimmers, adorable and ephemeral tricks. What is left after the reading?]

It is ironic indeed that what Foucault could applaud as the modernity of Don Quijote—Cervantes' discovery of the mystery of representation—should be judged inexcusable in the culterano poet, inescapably typecast as an unrepentant, empty aestheticist.

Thus praise for technique does not succeed, or even want to succeed, in disguising a general disappointment. With Góngora, we can't imagine the poet behind the poem; we can't take his pulse, hear his voice. And that is, clearly, what is foremost in the minds of readers, whose fundamental expectation is that the lyric poem will speak or sing as though from an authentic, individual voice, and that its language will validate itself by reference to that voice. Even the classificatory activity of the editors of Góngora's sonnets constitutes a tacit confession of frustration. In José María Chacón, we find the sonnets categorized and separated as “Sacros, Heroicos, Morales, Fúnebres, Amorosos, Satíricos, Burlescos, Varios,”²⁰ whereby they become a kind of anthology of the topoi of their time, a repertory of depersonalized rhetorical stances, certainly not an image of the poet. Here we are a far cry from Petrarch, whose Rime sparse get their coherence from the illusion at least of their origins in life, or even from the cancioneros of Garcilaso or Lope de Vega, where that same illusion, even when frustrated, has nonetheless exerted a strong force on our readings.²¹

Góngora's voice, then, to the extent he is perceived to have one, is seen caught in a web of words, and worse still, in a web of other poets' words. What readers like Ciplijauskaité, Robert Jammes, Paz, and perhaps even the rest of us miss is a yo, like the one that presses itself on us in Garcilaso's first sonnet (“Cuando me paro a contemplar mi estado / y a ver los pasos por dó me han traído, / hallo …” [When I pause to contemplate my current state / and to look over the places my steps have brought me / I find …]), one that speaks insistently of its thoughts, feelings, experience, and of itself as voice.

In a subgenre like the love sonnet, linked as it is by convention to sentimental autobiography, elusiveness of voice is understandably vexing. And in Góngora's love sonnets, the poetic voice is in fact hard to get hold of. Although the mention of a you (tú, vosotros, vuestro) lets us know that an I is speaking, we rarely hear that I call himself by name. By contrast to the poetry of Petrarch or even Garcilaso, where first-person pronouns and verb forms dominate, in very few of Góngora's sonnets do we hear a yo call himself yo or even mí/me. While of course implicitly present in a lyric discourse that describes, admires, urges, or admonishes, he usually does not speak of himself, but rather stands aside like the mirón of the Soledades. The case of “Sonnet 80” appears to be the exception that proves the rule.

“DE UN CAMINANTE ENFERMO QUE SE ENAMORó DONDE FUE HOSPEDADO”

Descaminado, enfermo, peregrino
          en tenebrosa noche, con pie incierto
          la confusión pisando del desierto,
          voces en vano dio, pasos sin tino.
Repetido latir, si no vecino,
          distincto oyó de can siempre despierto,
          y en pastoral albergue mal cubierto
          piedad halló, si no halló camino.
Salió el Sol, y entre armiños escondida,
          soñolienta beldad con dulce saña
          salteó al no bien sano pasajero.
Pagará el hospedaje con la vida;
          más le valiera errar en la montaña,
          que morir de la suerte que yo muero.

[“OF A SICK TRAVELER WHO FELL IN LOVE IN THE PLACE HE HAD LODGED”

Wayward, sick, and wandering / in the dismal night; stepping through / the confusion of the desert with uncertain foot; / he cried out in vain, taking senseless steps. / A repeated beating-barking—nearby / if not at a distance—, he heard from an ever wakeful dog, / and in a poorly covered pastoral shelter / he found pity, if not his way. / The sun came up, and hidden in ermine furs, / a sleepy beauty, with sweet anger / assaulted the yet healed voyager. / He will pay for his lodging with his life; / he would have been better off wandering in the mountains / rather than dying of the fate of which I die.]

A number of previous readers have found the poem tantalizing as a potentially juicy autobiographical tidbit.²² Yet if we ask the question of who is the principal figure of the sonnet, simply on the level of language (grammar, syntax, lexicon), we get very different results. Even if we come to the poem without preconceptions about Góngora's impersonality, or any particular desire to know about his historical personality, carrying only the conventional expectations we would bring to any lyric poem, we still are likely to suppose that the verses represent the utterance of an implied speaking subject. In Petrarchan sonnets, convention causes us to expect that the speaking subject is quite likely also to be the grammatical subject of the utterance, probably identified not by a noun but by a first-person pronominal or verbal form. Alert for signs of his presence (convention tells us it is not her), listening in time, waiting for him to speak, we enter the textual space of this sonnet.

We are drawn into that space by the three words of the poem's first hendecasyllable, three terms in apposition—qualifiers, adjectives, or participles that could be nouns but here are suspended, referring beyond themselves, deferring meaning along a syntactic chain. To whom do they refer? We don't know. They might even constitute an apostrophe; that is, they might even refer to us, to the reader(s). But we are led on, first to a physical and affective time-space (“tenebrosa noche”); to a body (“con pie incierto”), implied owner of the foot who participates physically and perhaps mentally in its uncertainty. This might be the subject we are looking for; yet revelation is again deferred, while another abstract noun (“confusión”) holds out the hope that we may at least be about to find some personification of humanity. As the poem's first verb form (“pisando”) describes a physical action, we wonder if indeed a personified Confusion is treading with uncertain foot. Yet the prepositional phrase “del desierto” obliges us to revise that expectation and sends us back to the beginning of the line, to recognize “confusión” as object of the gerund “pisando.” If the concreteness of that verb, placed at the very center of the poetic line, seems to let the poem touch ground, as it were (we are still, after all, right to suppose that someone is taking steps), the same word destabilizes reading once again. For the action of stepping takes place in the sliding verb time of the unconjugated gerund, unattached to tense, still unconnected to any visible subject, even a personified one. And the ground being touched is, moreover, anything but terra firma. It is the shifty terrain, suspended between abstract and concrete, of “la confusión del desierto”: not even the desert itself but the vaguer aura of its confusion.

We thus arrive at the poem's fourth verse (noting that the poem's first complete sentence will end with the quatrain), to be confronted in the conspicuous accented first position with another noun (voces), which might be a candidate for the position of the grammatical subject, although its feminine plural conflicts with the expectations created by the masculine singular forms of line 1. The mystery doesn't last much longer: “Voces en vano” (ringing almost like a joke on our readerly impatience) is followed at last by a conjugated verb—dio—that falls squarely on the central, accentuated syllable of the quatrain's closing verse. At last we have a grammatical subject, the implicit third person contained in the form dio, which sends us back not only to the beginning of verse 4, to confirm voces (as well as the pasos that follow) as grammatical objects, but also to anchor the gerund pisando, the disconnected, wandering pie, and the first verse's three qualifiers to his organizing presence in the whole. Now we are prepared to recognize his mysterious figure as the grammatical subject of the three third-person preterite verb forms (oyó, halló, no halló) that follow in the second quatrain: it is “he” who hears the dog, who finds mercy at least, if not his way.

But who is making his way in “Sonnet 80”? The poem's language still has not let us know with certainty where he is going, even who he is. Problems of identity and direction are compounded as the poet tampers with the syntax of ordinary language. So insistent are constructions that invert usual subject-verb-object word order (e.g., “la confusión pisando,” “voces … dio,” “latir … oyó,” “piedad halló”; even in “si no halló camino,” a possible pun lurking in “si no”—sino[destino] or signo—would give “sino/signo halló”) that Góngora here comes nearly to the point of normalizing the inversion. In the sonnet, this nearly systematic inversion of transitive verbs is only turned around following the standard colloquial “Salió el Sol” (v. 9) when the sun's intransitive appearance is succeeded metonymically by the somnambulent beauty's physical assault on the “no bien sano pasajero” (v. 11). This is the first unambiguous appearance (i.e., the first time he is named, designated by a noun, albeit a generic noun) of the figure who was grammatical subject of the quatrains. Thus, paradoxically, the first straightforwardly reported actions belong not to that subject but to the new grammatical subject(s) of the first tercet (Sol / soñolienta beldad). After all his meanderings, the mysterious subject of the quatrains is named only after he has become, in grammatical terms, an object.

But we still have not resolved the question of who is the subject—the speaking subject—of “Sonnet 80.” We have only succeeded in tracking down a grammatical subject, and only at the point where he metamorphoses into grammatical object at the hands of the serrana. And, although he is a look-alike for the ill-fated poet-lover, exiled to misery or absence, of the poetry of Dante, Petrarch, the Spanish cancioneros, and Garcilaso, he is not the traditional lyric subject. Rather he is a third person: belatedly named, repeatedly modified, dismembered by synecdochic evocation, scattered in abstract time-space; in short, descaminado, nearly lost. This displaced person is the non-person of Benveniste, who denies the third person of Western morphology the status of true person, because he or she never speaks as an I to a you, from a present place and moment, from a here and now. The same verses that have withheld from the poem's ostensibly central figure his syntactic preeminence have also exiled him from the present of the poem's discourse. And now, in the poem's penultimate line, the traveler passes from this temporal exile to the multiple displacements of “más la valiera errar en la montaña”: he is returned figuratively to the mountains, to atemporal wandering (via the conditional value of the imperfect subjunctive valiera); and he is relegated to the grammatical position of indirect object. Scarcely an improvement, though better, the speaker assures us, than his own (the speaker's) death.

And here at last, the lyric pact is honored. A person—a first person—speaks, as an I, in a here and now. The original lyric subject, or persona, of the sonnet's first three sentences turns out to be not their grammatical subject but the implicit speaker who defines the entire poem's enunciation. And in the sonnet's very last breath, that speaker, having described what happened to another him, back then, over there, now turns to speak of himself (yo) in the moment of his speech and to sum himself up in the powerful first-person present “yo muero.” Something of a tardón, like the Pyramus of Góngora's romance, this yo comes at the end of a long syntactic line. He is not even the subject of the poem's final sentence: “que yo muero” is a relative clause, modifying a noun (“suerte”) in a prepositional phrase modifying “morir,” a nominalized infinitive. Furthermore, the poem's syntax seems to place the speaking subject at the very limit of meaning. The phrase “morir de la suerte que yo muero” is part of a comparative structure: A (“errar en la montaña”) would be better (“más le valiera”) than B (“morir de la suerte que yo muero”). But the introduction of B here creates a perfectly circular structure. Contrary to the expected function of a comparative term, B clarifies nothing: we know nothing about the manner (suerte) of the subject's death. The fate of his fate is to remain unspecified, intensified to be sure by semantic (suerte = destino) and phonetic (suerte/muerte) reverberations, referred to only by the grammatically relative but subjectively absolute standard of “yo muero.” So our journey through the utterances of the lyric voice brings us finally to the moment of utterance and to the voice itself, whose yo can only announce its own death.

Robert Jammes becomes uneasy at this point in the poem, when the figure of the traveler he wants to cast as the poet is eclipsed by a different speaking yo. How, he puzzles, can él be yo?²³ The problem is not trivial. Not only do he and I part grammatical and logical company in the sonnet's final line: it is the manner of their disjunction that is unsettling, particularly in its implications for the status of the lyric subject. If indeed he were summoned as a figure for I, then the gist of this poem (as in countless love sonnets and Vergilian similes) would be “As he is, so am I.” He would exist for the sake of I; the protracted, proleptic comparison would serve to prepare the emergence, however brief, of the speaker he images. In Góngora's sonnet, that expectation is thwarted by syntax: when yo makes his brief appearance at the end of the poem, it is in the role of the comparative term, in the service of él. Consequently the project of verbalizing the manner of the yo's own death is deferred indefinitely.

In characteristic fury over culterano unintelligibility, Francisco Cascales asks at one point whether Góngora is one of those writers Cicero mocked for affecting obscurity in order to deceive others and even themselves into thinking they possess some superior knowledge, out of reach of the common man. Does Góngora know something his reader does not? Is he teasing us, armed with a library of authorities, with riddle-poems that could be turned inside out or right side up at will to reveal what “he” or his yo “really means” to say? Or would he simply like us to assume he knows something, when he really means to say nothing? “Sonnet 80,” with its overwrought narrative foreground that all but eclipses the poem's speaking subject, might be read in this light, as the perfect figure for authorial teasing, or as early evidence for the willful disappearance of the poet from his poem that Molho finds in the later work.

Yet neither of these possibilities seems sufficient to explain the importance of the speaking subject in the poem we have been looking at. Syntactically contingent though he may be, the appearance he makes in the sonnet's final lines is nonetheless highly dramatic. And for all that he is made, by the logic of grammar, to serve as comparative term for the descaminado peregrino, whose story dominates the poem's foreground, his final words turn the comparison inside out, revealing the pilgrim's tale as part of a narrative hyperbole in the service of the lyric subject himself. The sonnet slyly uses the figure of one possible subject as displaced reflection of the other. The mute pilgrim who, rather than speak intelligibly, only cries out in vain (voces en vano dio), appears in the end as trope; his suffering fades into a pale copy of the pain of the speaker who pleads, “yo muero,” before he too falls silent. In that doubling alone is ample confirmation of Góngora's preoccupation with the fate (suerte/muerte) of the lyric subject and his voice. Yet it is still eminently worth asking why Góngora places so many obstacles between us and his lyric persona, why he chooses to hedge him about with linguistic difficulty. Another way to pose the question would be to ask why we as readers have been so slow to find Góngora's poetic voice, and what we can learn about that voice as we make our way through the thicket of his words.

Much of Góngora's difficulty, I believe, is bound up with the question of time. For all that twentieth-century readers subscribe to Antonio Machado's celebrated axiom about poetry as “la palabra en el tiempo,” Góngora's difficult syntax still tends to detemporalize our readings of his texts. It can push us to the extreme of actually diagramming sentences, as we would with Latin, in order to “normalize” them. This normalizing is straightforward enough in the typical case of hipérbaton, but it is less simple in the area of subject-verb-object positions. When we claim to normalize, furthermore, we do not only mean that we are reproducing “normal” sequences, but that we are excluding from the poetic text ambiguities or uncertainties that are often present in ordinary language, where objects are commonly made to precede verb and/or subject, and where prolepsis creates multiple possibilities that sometimes can only be sorted out with reference to context. In the first quatrain of “Sonnet 80,” interpretive normalizing of syntax is likely to obscure the particular way the passage's grammatical subject makes his appearance haltingly, mysteriously, in time.

That personal appearance takes places, of course, not in abstract time but with reference to the time of reading apprehended by the reader. Central to recent critical and theoretical meditations on the nature of lyric is the idea that the single most important convention of that genre is its link with the speaking voice, its implicit status as “speech overheard.”²⁴ Yet, while much Renaissance and some later poetry cultivates its ties with speech and with song (countless cancionero poets, the traditional lyric, romances, Garcilaso, Cetina, and others were all being set to music), Góngora's texts seem to carry us far away from the immediacy of either speech or song. The poet himself, in the famous letter in defense of the Soledades, suggests that his work should be read like that of a Latin poet, that is, textually (as opposed to aloud).²⁵ And he recommends for its understanding the standard technique of medieval textual exegesis: “quitar la corteza para descubrir lo misterioso que encubre”²⁶ [remove the outer shell to discover the mysteries it hides]. The traditional trope of corteza/meollo turns the texts into an object (visible, palpable) that can be looked at, touched, contemplated, one that remains stable and can be examined and reexamined by a reading subject who is free to shift his position in the act of contemplating it. It is a startling fact of Góngora criticism that our sense of his texts as objects has kept all manner of readers—philological, stylistic, New Critical, semiotic—focused on his poems as products. We look at individual linguistic signs—sometimes only at signifiers, sometimes at signifieds, sometimes at both—as though they were exquisitely crafted museum pieces, often scrutinizing them at the expense of the discourse that produces and frames them.

On the other hand, the very same emphasis on the text as object can be turned around to focus on this reading subject who engages in exegesis as a kind of adventure, as heroic exercise of entendimiento and voluntad, moving as in a quest or a hunt toward discovery (“el fin de el entendimiento es hacer presa en verdades”²⁷ [the object of understanding is to capture truths]). With the restlessness of Augustinian consciousness and the effort of an act of valor (“vacilando el entendimiento en fuerza de discurso” [the understanding wavering with the strength of reason], he strives to overcome obstacles and reach satisfaction, conviction, content, repose. What Góngora describes as the heroic activity of understanding spells out the narrative of an active itinerary of reading, a distinctly temporal journey of the mind through time, toward a truth—or a mystery—that is invoked in subjunctives of readerly discovery and delight: “en tanto quedará más deleitado, cuanto, obligándole a la especulación por la obscuridad de la obra, fuera hallando debajo de las sombras de la obscuridad asimilaciones a su concepto”²⁸ [he will be more pleased to the extent that, obliged to speculate by the work's obscurity, under the dark shadows he find similarities with his concept]. The itinerary reaches toward, assimilates, approximates, but never quite reaches the atemporal clarity of concepto. Like Augustine's confessional self, the reader and reading are irrevocably situated in time. Indeed, this later evocation of the journey of exegesis makes the “descaminado, enfermo, peregrino” of the sonnet as much a literary cousin of the reader of Góngora as of the pilgrim protagonist of the Soledades. (Perhaps, after all, the sonnet's first line is also an apostrophe.)

In any case, before we stumble upon the sonnet's elusive grammatical and thematic subject, before we know its first words refer to him and not to us, the poem's first itinerary is our itinerary as readers, through the temporal sequence that unfolds as word follows word, verse follows verse, stanza follows stanza. The organization of poetic discourse in verses or lines, with meter (counted syllables or feet) and rhyme, has a paradoxical relation to the temporality of poetic language. For if meter and rhyme keep time with the sonorous march of words, they also produce a stop-and-start effect. With and without the aid of punctuation marks, we are continually made to wonder whether the formal end of the line is actually the end, whether sound is meant to stop or pause with scripted or printed sign, and whether sense is meant to stop with sound. Few poets have had a more acute sensitivity to this paradox of poetic meters than Góngora. What he does, I believe, is to use syntax to disrupt absolutely the regular march of meter, at the same time that he uses meter to confound the ordering power of syntax. The result is what Cascales uncannily called (apropos of the Soledades) a “modo de hablar peregrino” [wandering way of speaking] that moves like a wolf (“camina como el lobo, que da unos pasos adelante y otros atrás, para que, así confusos, no se eche de ver el camino que lleva”²⁹ [he moves like a wolf, taking some steps forward and others backward so that, in this confusion, his path should not become apparent]). The philologist laments that in the confusion of its steps the poem's path is obscured; amid all the backtracking, words and even thoughts become unrecognizable.³⁰

And, as though Góngora's relentless subversion—via Latinate syntax and the artificial demands of meter—of the expected march of speed were not enough, the difficulty they create is intensified by yet another factor. Not only does the poet's idiosyncratic word order do violence to familiar patterns of speech; he very often plays as well with the precarious logic of ordinary language. In the famous “Carta en respuesta,” Góngora tells his critic in a loud whisper a “secret” about the victims of the mythic disaster of Babel, alleging that “no los confundió Dios a ellos con darles lenguaje confuso, sino en el mismo suyo ellos se confundieron, tomando piedra por agua y agua por piedra”³¹ [God did not confuse them by giving them confused languages; it was rather in their own languages that they became confused, taking stone for water and water for stone]. The brunt of confusion falls not simply on rocks and water: “Sonnet 80” shows the lyric subject himself in equal peril. Many of the candidates for grammatical subject of the sonnet's first two sentences (ones that turn out to be objects—confusión, voces, latir, piedad) in fact denote what we might call operations of subjectivity or of being: feeling, cries, speech, heartbeats. Because of their semantic nature, they seem to press their claim, already made tentatively by syntax, to the status of grammatical subject or even, allegorically, for the position of speaking subject.

The Spanish expression dar voces offers a telling example of language's built-in confusions: one (a speaker or subject) apparently gives voice, utters cries or words, produces sound as the voluntary, physical act of the subject. Yet it is also cries, words, and voice that point to, identify, give voice to the speaker himself. “Repetido latir … oyó” is another such case. By way of syntactic translation, the latir turns out to belong to the “can siempre despierto” of line 6. But with its double semantic reach—to the dog's barking and to the heart's beating (the primary sense of latir, which resists the pressures of context)—latir is pulled between the beast and the deepest seat of human feeling and consciousness. Whether or not it occupies the grammatical position of subject of the sentence, latir is a powerful center from which sound, sense, and finally being radiate. The qualifiers “si no vecino, / distincto” report that the subject of oyó hears that sound (reversing order) as “distincto si no vecino.” The Gongorine “si no” adds an option without either confirming or denying it. Is the sound near or far away? Does the subject hear the dog's barking or the beating of his own heart—a speaking heart? Moreover, to limit the reference of the qualifiers “siempre despierto” would be to restrict their possible senses arbitrarily: the masculine subject of oyó (he) could as easily be “ever wakeful” as the dog, attentive to the animal's barking or to the pulsing of his own heart.

In the context of this sonnet, voces dio and latir … oyó are not simple instances of mechanically inverted word order but rather highly charged syntactic signs of the troubled connection between speaker and speech, between cries and words, and between both of these and the voice from which they issue and to which their reference keeps returning. “BOZ” is given in Covarrubias³² as “propiamente el sonido que profiere el animal por la boca” [the sound that an animal utters through its mouth]—primordial sound, shouts or cries, related to animals, to musical instruments and other inanimate objects. “Dar vozes, exclamar y hablar descompuestamente” [to call out, to exclaim and to speak without composure]. The Tesoro inexplicably (along with many modern dictionaries) fails to register the secondary meaning of voz as palabra, clearly present in the Latin vox, and so widespread in Golden Age usage that it cannot be doubted that so active a Latinizer as Góngora would have cultivated the word's multiple resonance, especially in the poem at hand, whose speakers teeter precariously, with their words and cries and barks, on the threshold of meaning.

If words are next of kin to cries, then we may now want to risk pressing one step further the autonomy of units of sound from the organizing lexical, morphological, and syntactic forces of sense. When we try to read these verses blind, to hear their voces first not as already formed words, but as sounds still unfettered by graphic signs, then these lines produce some astonishing results. Inside the labyrinth (or the superorder) of Góngora's Latinate syntax, when sounds are allowed to move apart and merge together once again under the pressure of voice, then what we get is this: “Voces en vano dio, pasos sin tino” (v. 4) could also give “pasos sin ti, no” or even “[él] no dio pasos sin ti, no.” “Repetido latir si no vecino” (v. 5) could yield “sino [= destino] vecino” or “sino [= signo] vecino,” or even “si [él] no ve [= verbo] sino [o signo].” And finally, “Distincto oyó” (v. 6) could give the simple, but dazzling “Distincto YO.”

Is it legitimate, someone is sure to ask, to violate the integrity of language's organizing units when we read poetry? In the case of Góngora, I think the answer has to be a resounding yes. Although Herrera would undoubtedly have cast a disapproving eye on the consequences—both the verses and the possible readings I suggest here—, I suspect that Góngora is in part heeding precisely his fellow Andalusian's challenge to poets who would find a voice of their own in order to break, to open up, to distance language from itself.³³ Herrera loved the Castilian tongue, because the virile solidity of its forms resists the poet (“ni añade sílabas, ni trueca ni altera forma” [it doesn't add syllables, nor does it switch or change form]), unlike a softer, effeminate Italian, which virtually collapses under the force of speech (“muda i corti i acrecienta los vocablos” [mutes, shortens, or increases the words]). Yet Herrera insisted at the same time that, in verse, form should not dictate (i.e., force) content, but rather that content should exert pressure on form.³⁴ Góngora takes that principle to its limit, forcing the resistant morphology, syntax, and lexicon of Spanish to yield under his poetic pressure.

What seems most remarkable to me about the pressure of poetic will on form, as it appears in these examples from “Sonnet 80,” is that Góngora first forces Spanish into neo-Latin contortions, obliging it to take a form other than its own, making it all but unintelligible, and then—as if by magic—he pulls a simple, almost diaphanous marriage of sound and sense out of the very same verbal hat. Bruce Wardropper³⁵ has observed “the complexity of the simple” in the Soledades' subtle attention, via the poetic image, to the imposing beauties of the natural world. Indeed, in Góngora, the complex and the simple regularly coexist as interfaces for one another; but not only does the simple turn out to be complex. Here in the brief verses of “Descaminado, enfermo, peregrino,” the other side of complexity yields a dazzling simplicity: “sin ti no” (“no dio pasos sin ti no”); “si no ve si(g)no”; “Distincto yo.” By pushing (with the poet) the unity of sound and sense to the very limit, even beyond, we come around, through the thicket of difficulty, to a kind of claro de bosque—the clarity of conventional, direct utterance. Góngora's game rests, I think, on the intuition that the passage from sound to sense is always a troubled one, and that it always involves doing a kind of violence to both.

The surprise appearance of simple, direct usage in the thicket of complexity may well be a “joke” Góngora enjoyed more than once in complicity with, and at the same time at the expense of, learned readings of his work. It is inscribed, I think, in as conspicuous a place as the first line of the Soledades, where our critical pilgrimage began: “Pasos de un peregrino son errante.” In order to glimpse the inscription, however, we must first suspend our eagerness to complete the utterance by reading “son” as a verb and pursuing the likelihood that the copula will produce a metaphorical equivalent to “pasos.” We must also, paradoxically, suspend our learned expectations of pervasive hipérbaton in Góngora's syntax. If we do this, letting the end of the metric line arrest our reading, we then hear the verse by itself: “Pasos de un peregrino son errante,” with “son” functioning as a noun with two modifiers (peregrino, errante). The result—in English, “the steps of a strange and wandering sound”—would then give precisely the figure for the utterance's deferral of grammatical logic and of meaning. It is an unsettling reading, though, because it separates the pasos (partly at least) from the body of the pilgrim and associates them with the much more elusive movement and imprint of sound itself on the senses, and ultimately on sense. Like Cascales' critique (and even like Herrera's reading of Garcilaso's poetic pasos), it makes us wonder whose steps we see/hear, and therefore whom we are following, on what camino. Do sounds or words or images have a life of their own? When we hear voices in a poem, what or whom are we hearing? Does a speaker give voice to a poem, or does the poem give its voice to him? As the poet and the reader tread the path of poetic tradition, are they leading or following?

Centuries of readers who have struggled with, tried to embrace, or rejected Góngora have come back again and again to the familiar vision of his brilliant, difficult, obscure, blinding language in the foregound, at the expense of the speaker. That often invisible framing voice of discourse, his intentions and meanings, even his very status as speaking subject, have in general been pushed into the shadows. It is a mystery indeed that a scholarly tradition which has celebrated the poet's great linguistic and formal achievements should have—sometimes conspicuously, at other times imperceptibly—deprived him of nothing less than his poetic voice. This critical impasse brings us back to the poetic mystery that, as Salinas maintained, is also a key to Góngora. Difficulty—the difficulty of pure language—is that mystery key, though in a way that I believe has not yet been articulated. For me, the meaning of Gongorine difficulty is this: the route through the twisted path of verse form is the route of and to his poetic persona. Leading through morphology and syntax and semantics, through the space-time of utterance that warps and folds constantly back on itself (like Cascales' wolf or perhaps for us like the spaces of Einsteinian relativity) before lurching forward, we know not where, that route belongs not only to the deciphering reader but to the speaking subject who gives voice both to meaning and to himself. His voice delivers him from the labyrinth of words, a prison which also paradoxically offers him the only way out.

Far from rejecting clarity, meaning, feeling, so as to inhabit a neutral space of language, Góngora takes up precisely—as his principal poetic subject—the journey of language: the pilgrimage of the speaker (and the reader) through language, his efforts to make himself heard, and our struggle to understand (“vacilando el entendimiento en fuerza de discurso”). That journey takes him—and us with him—into the heart of all the old linguistic orders: grammar, syntax, lexicon; canonical genres and their codes; classical mythology; the idiolects of great poets; Spanish popular tradition. Góngora invokes their authority, then tests their limits, but bears steady witness to the fact that we can only speak, can only communicate with inherited, shared language(s). And Góngora's journey “ends”—in the sonnet we have been reading, and in his work generally, I am convinced—not by writing the epitaph of the Western poetic tradition but by voicing a very modern intuition about the relation of the subject to the languages through which she or he speaks, about the unsayability of feeling and intent and self, and by offering a profound insight into the troubled relation between the subject and the world.

What have emerged in our readerly journey through complexity to clarity are precisely utterances of and about the subject latent in the poem. The possible reading “si no ve sino [or signo]” intensifies the sonnet's focus on the third-person grammatical subject's imagined interiority, otherwise only faintly visible, and suggests that much more than we thought may be at stake in his perceptions. And, in the midst of the distance that appears to separate the poem's implied speaker from this mute figure who is seemingly the protagonist of his poem, sequences like “pasos sin ti no” and “distincto yo” cause the controlled preterites of historical narrative to erupt without warning into the powerful present of Benvenistian discourse. These unexpected eruptions underline dramatically the status of the love-pilgrim's figure as displaced version of the poet, who speaks—or does not speak—in and through his wandering other self.

Yet the poem goes way beyond simply doubling the poet's image: the poem's voices themselves, in the layered jumble of their discourse, are made to serve as signs of poetic speech itself. Its words, cries, sounds—produced all at once by the poet, his pilgrim double, a wakeful watch-dog, the beating of a heart—together bespeak, give voice to the difficulty of utterance and understanding. They bear troubled, sometimes semiaudible witness to the agony of the lyric subject and indeed of all human subjects. And together they constitute an eloquent sign—a signo that is also a sino—of the risks, the near-impossibility, and yet the urgency of speaking about consciousness, about self, about death. Even the poem's final words, apparently its most direct—“yo muero”—unmask themselves too as displacement, as still figured. For the death of the body, used here as trope for emotional or physical suffering in vita, cannot logically say itself directly in words. In the end, then, the poem's subject (is it truly a distincto yo?) is never quite distinct, never wholly extricated from the language of its figures; because the moment when all of metaphor's debts are paid, when the subject's self-images finally collapse into self-sameness, is not only the moment of the death of imagination. It is the moment of death itself.

Once, thinking to scoff at culterano language, Lope told the story of a man who “quitaba … las plumas a un ruiseñor; y descubriendo tan débil carne, dijo: Vox tu es, et nihil praeterea”³⁶ [was removing … the feathers from a nightingale, and on discovering such paltry meat exclaimed: You are sound, and nothing else]. Although he undoubtedly meant to chide his contemporaries for making verses out of meaningless, insubstantial sound (the first meaning of voz in the Golden Age), the Latin adage of his punch line gives an uncanny portrait of Góngora, in a sense Lope probably did not intend.

My recent readings persuade me that Góngora was concerned, throughout his career, to the point of obsession, with the category of voice.³⁷ If Chacón's dating of “Descaminado, enfermo, peregrino” is right, then in 1594, nearly twenty years before the writing of the Soledades, Góngora was mapping—or erasing the map of—the itinerary of the speaking, writing, reading subject. And he gave it a series of problematic representations, beginning with the sonnets and romancillos of the early period, such as “Lloraba la niña” (1590),³⁸ continuing through his maturity in the Soledades and the Polifemo, and finally culminating in the extraordinary Fábula de Píramo y Tisbe (“La ciudad de Babilonia” [1618]), which he considered his crowning achievement. This long meditation on voice gets its energy in part, as “Sonnet 80” suggests, from the tenacity and the tensions of the lyric tradition of Petrarchism. In the Soledades, Góngora launches the Petrarchan lyric subject onto a landscape that hovers between pastoral and epic, that even threatens to become a transatlantic, imperial landscape, in search of a place from which to speak; and then watches him settle, reluctantly, for the role of mirón (“muda la admiración, habla callando” [wonder, though mute, in silence speaks (Cunningham, p. 19)]), speechless witness to the world and to other speakers that silence him and perhaps speak metaphorically for him. In part the energy comes from mythology, as in the Polifemo, where the silence of perfect lovers, and their rhetoric of mute signs and speaking bodies, contrasts with the horrific “music,” natural and monstrous, destructive and self-destructive, of Polifemo's voice. And in the Píramo, the text in which the poet most clearly makes audible his own voice in the face of mythopoetic tradition, Góngora remakes the fable of erotic communication or noncommunication into a story of the fate of voices. Here his energy comes not only from the same mythological and lyric sources: it comes in addition from the traditional Spanish romances. In the old ballads, Góngora found poems made not of events but of their telling, not of physical acts but of speech acts, not of narrated history but of narrating voices. And he exploited the complex relation of the romance's organizing speaker and its audience to the times both of the poem's historical subject and of its utterance. Above all he found a principal speaker who constructed his own speaking voice out of both the ellos of his story (“non-persons” from the past) and the vosotros of his audience, present in formulas like “Bien oiréis lo que decía.” In these poems, the absence of a single voice signals not the absence of voice altogether, but rather the presence of many voices.

In that plural may lie a “secreto a voces” about Góngora's (or his poems') speaking subject. During a recent discussion of resonances of authorial voices within and between other Spanish Renaissance texts, my colleague Roland Greene asked whether we might not gain something by suspending, at least temporarily, our concern with the unified subject positions of singular authors. That question resonates forcefully with the nature of voice in Góngora's verse. What do we gain if we stop asking Góngora to speak with one voice—that is, with “his own” voice? Or what do we lose? What we have to give up, I believe, is the fiction that because we don't hear one clear, distinct, unique voice, it must be that Góngora either couldn't or didn't want to produce one. When we accept that he does speak with many voices, we may also be able to imagine that his syntactic and metaphorical dances with voices (or with wolves) constitute a profound engagement with language—not with a rarified language he alone can understand, but with the mystery of all language and the self that must inevitably speak through it.

But it is not so easy for us as readers of lyric, I think, to welcome plural voices as warmly as we do the singular voice. In a four-line fragment of a poetics, titled “Contra los recitales,” José Emilio Pacheco protests:

Si leo mis poemas en público,
le quito su único sentido a la poesía:
hacer que mis palabras sean tu voz
por un instante al menos.(39)

[If I read my poems in public, / I remove poetry's one meaning: / to make my words be your voice / at least for an instant.]

It is likely, precisely because the first person of lyric is so inviting, because it insists that we stand momentarily in its place, that for this very reason we have chosen to give Góngora's speaker(s) a wide berth. For to occupy the shifty, murky locus of his poetic persona, even for a moment, is not only to risk the analytical “objectivity” of our critical business-as-usual, but to endanger the integrity of that personal voice—beyond poetry and criticism—by which we try to know ourselves.⁴⁰

Notes

1. Maurice Molho, Semántica y poética. Góngora, Quevedo (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1977).

2. Ibid., p. 81. Italics mine.

3. For a recent, still more radical view of the generic novelty of the Soledades, see Nadine Ly's “Las Soledades: ‘Esta poesía inútil …’,” Criticón 30 (1985): 7-42.

4. Molho, Semántica y poética, p. 60.

5. Luis de Góngora, Obras completas, ed. Isabel and Juan Millé y Jiménez (Madrid: Aguilar, 1943), no. 341; Sonetos completos, ed. Biruté Ciplijauskaité (Madrid: Castalia, 1987), no. 159.

6. “La soledad del Poeta es, para Góngora, la consecuencia de su singularidad, que le lleva a concebir una poesía hermética, reservada a unos pocos elegidos” (p. 77).

7. “El poeta, por el hecho de su genio extraordinario y singular, es un ser solitario entre los hombres que lo rodean, y no se mezcla con ellos sino como expectador de su indiferente existencia. ¡No hay rastro de melancolía en la soledad de Góngora! La ha elegido y no existe más que para ella: ella es su orgullo y la razón de su vida” (pp. 78-79). Implicit in what follows in the present essay is my conviction that melancholy cannot be so neatly scripted out of Góngora's poetic voice.

8. Antonio Vilanova, “El peregrino de amor en las Soledades de Góngora,” in Estudios dedicados a Menéndez Pidal (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1952), 3:421-60.

9. Millé, no. 258; Ciplijauskaité, no. 80. I refer hereafter to this poem as sonnet 80, since Millé's numbering includes compositions of all forms.

10. Pedro Salinas, Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1940), p. 137.

11. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 8.6. 14-15; Joel Fineman, “The Structure of Allegorical Desire,” in Allegory and Representation, ed. Stephen J. Greenblatt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 26-60.

12. See Paul Julian Smith, “Barthes, Góngora, and None-Sense,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 101 (1986): 82-94.

13. Ibid.

14. Dámaso Alonso, Estudios y ensayos gongorinos (Madrid: Gredos, 1960), pp. 71-72.

15. Ciplijauskaité, Sonetos completos, pp. 16-17.

16. Ibid., p. 18.

17. Ibid., p. 21.

18. Ibid., p. 22.

19. Ibid., p. 23.

20. Ibid., p. 126.

21. The autobiographical illusion, widespread in much interpretation of lyric, is discussed in John Freccero, “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 20-32; Guiseppe Mazzotta, “The Canzoniere and the Language of the Self,” Studies in Philology 75 (1978): 271-96; Inés Azar, “Tradition, Voice, and Self in the Love Poetry of Garcilaso,” in Studies in Honor of Elias Rivers, ed. Bruno Damiani and Ruth El Saffar (Potomac, Md.: Scripta Humanistica, 1989), pp. 24-35; and Mary Gaylord, “Proper Language and Language as Property: The Personal Poetics of Lope's Rimas,” Modern Language Notes 101 (1986): 220-46.

22. Chacón, Dámaso Alonso, and R. O. Jones (all cited by Ciplijauskaité, p. 145) all claim to glimpse life experience behind its lines. Robert Jammes ties the sonnet to Góngora's travels, then uses the short poem to ground the more abstract landscape of the Soledades in an “authenticité poétique” made up of the poet's sentiments and memories (Robert Jammes, Etudes sur l'oeuvre poétique de don Luis de Góngora y Argote [Bordeaux: Institut d'Etudes Ibériques et Ibéro-Américaines, 1967], p. 587). Bruce Wardropper in “Góngora and the serranilla,” Modern Language Notes 77 (1962): 178-81, links the composition primarily to the traditional Castilian serranillas, but at the same time points to the explicitness of its reference to a sexual encounter, as if by way of rescuing Góngora from abstraction.

23. Jammes, Etudes, p. 587.

24. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 249; Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker, eds., Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 17, 38, and passim.

25. Margit Frenk, who has expanded immeasurably our awareness and appreciation of orality in Golden Age literary culture, has now gathered convincing evidence that even Góngora's most difficult verse was regularly read aloud during the poet's time. I am much indebted to her for sharing this idea with me in conversation, for it has pressed me to rethink his verse from the standpoint of its oral reception.

26. John Beverley, ed., Soledades (Madrid: Cátedra, 1980), p. 172.

27. Ibid., pp. 172-73.

28. Ibid., p. 173.

29. Francisco Cascales, Cartas filológicas, ed. Justo Garía Soriano (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1959), 1:188.

30. Ibid., 1:220.

31. Beverley, Soledades, p. 173.

32. Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la Lengua Castellana o Española (1611) (Madrid: Turner, 1979), pp. 232-33.

33. “Pero cuando quiere alguno acompañar el estilo conforme con la celsitud i belleza del pensamiento; procura desatar los versos, i muestra con el deslazamiento i particion cuanta grandeza tiene i hermosura en el sugeto, en las vozes i en el estilo.” Fernando de Herrera, Obra Poética, ed. José M. Blecua (Madrid: Anejos del Boletín de la Real Academia Española, 32, 1975), p. 69.

34. Ibid., pp. 75, 74, 68.

35. “The Complexity of the Simple in Góngora's Soledad primera,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 7 (1977): 35-51.

36. Herrera, p. 280; cited by Wardropper (“The Complexity,” p. 37).

37. This reading had its origins in my preparation for a Harvard graduate seminar on “Góngora and the Poetics of Reading” in the fall of 1990 and in the intensely rewarding discussions of that group, which devoted nearly three long sessions to sonnet 258. I am grateful to the members of that seminar—Michael Armstrong-Roche, Mark De Stephano, Fernando Espejo-Saavedra, Carmen Hsu, Julieta Muñoz, and Juan Silva—for their insights and for their extraordinary enthusiasm.

38. Gaylord, “The Grammar of Femininity in the Spanish Traditional Lyric,” Revista/Review Interamericana 12 (1984): 115-24.

39. José Emilio Pacheco, Tarde o temprano (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980), p. 145.

40. I want to acknowledge the presence, in my thoughts, throughout the latest remaking of this piece, of my treasured friend Ruth El Saffar, who always spoke in so strong and so personal a voice, and who emboldened others of us to follow that example.