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• The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora by Felipe Valencia
• Ignacio Navarrete

FELIPE VALENCIA HAS WRITTEN a remarkable book, a wide-ranging study of early modern poetry, in the manner of Leah Middlebrook (Imperial Lyric, Pennsylvania State UP, 2009) and Isabel Torres (Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age, Tamesis 2013), but with a focus on the turn of the seventeenth century. It thus eschews narrative history for a synchronic description of “the medicalization of literary thought” (236). But it also establishes a dialogue with our own time, for his definition of melancholy is not exclusively based on early modern medical sources; it is also elucidated from the poetry itself and characterized with reference to gender theory. Indeed, while steeped in primary sources, throughout the book there is a remarkable in-depth dialogue with today’s critics,who are not merely cited, but engaged.

The process begins in the introduction, with an original close reading of Garcilaso’s sonnet 13, “A Dafne …,” Apollo chases Daphne, with him we see her transform into a tree, he weeps with frustration and thereby waters the tree, making it grow. The tears are a metonymy for poetry, which could not exist without frustrated desire, but the very process that gives Apollo poetic voice also deprives Daphne not just of voice, but of her humanity. The mortification and silencing of the female is a necessary complement to the exaltation of the male voice into lyric, which thus teeters on a tense borderline between feminization (weeping) and homosocial masculinity (courtiership). Valencia’s deep reading also encompasses Garcilaso’s predecessors (Ovid, Petrarch) and is in dialogue with other interpreters of the sonnet (Mary Barnard, Torres). From here he builds out a theory of lyric and melancholy that again reaches back to Renaissance theory (particularly Antonio Minturno, but also Spaniards such as Juan Díaz Rengifo and Francisco Cascales) and to contemporary discussions of lyricization.

The clash of epic and lyric occupies chapters devoted to Alonso de Ercilla and Fernando de Herrera. The former, in his life as in his work, is an epitome of masculinity, but tempers it with melancholy descriptions of the Araucanian women and quasi-lyrical descriptions of their suffering. Herrera chooses to [End Page 187] elaborate a myth around an inaccessible, but also silenced, love object: the creation of “Luz” as the unreachable desired makes him a poet like Apollo; the striving for solar status gives significance to his repeated invocations of Phaeton and Icarus, and to his insistence on his own daring (osadía). If lyric is a constant temptation to Ercilla, epic is the same to Herrera in his diction, his poems in praise of the Spanish empire, and his emphasis on lyric doing the work of epic. Chapter 2 focuses on Herrera’s 1582 collection Algunas obras, but also references the Anotaciones (1580) and closes with a reading of the “Égloga venatoria” (1582).

Reading this pastoral poem leads Valencia to the next two chapters on Cervantes’s La Galatea (1585) and Juan de Arguijo’s Versos (1612). In the former, Valencia emphasizes the outsize role of melancholy as driver of the plot, explanation for the shepherds’ emotional state and motivator of the enormous quantity of lyric embedded in the novel. In his reading of Cervantes, Valencia highlights the dialogic element: in contrast to lyric that pretends to be the poet’s own speech, in pastoral there is always a ventriloquizing, a self-conscious adoption by the poet of the shepherds’ voices. This goes back to Garcilaso’s first eclogue (“El dulce lamentar de dos pastores … he de cantar, sus quejas imitando”); it opens the door to older traditions (in Medieval lyric, in the Bible) of imitating women’s voices. Thus, in contrast to the silenced love objects of Garcilaso’s and Herrera’s sonnets, in La Galatea the shepherdesses are given important voices. But whether they embrace love or reject it, they remain trapped within the masculine need for melancholy impossibility, and Cervantes’s La Galatea is thus a lineal descendant of Salicio...

 审阅者：

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  忧郁的空虚：贡戈拉时代的抒情与阳刚之气作者：费利佩·瓦伦西亚
•  伊格纳西奥·纳瓦雷特

费利佩·巴伦西亚写了一本非凡的书，对早期现代诗歌进行了广泛的研究，以利亚·米德尔布鲁克（ 《帝国抒情诗》 ，宾夕法尼亚州立大学，2009 年）和伊莎贝尔·托雷斯（ 《西班牙黄金时代的爱情诗》 ，Tamesis 2013）的方式，但重点是十七世纪之交。因此，它避开了叙事历史，而是对“文学思想的医学化”进行了共时描述（236）。但它也与我们这个时代建立了对话，因为他对忧郁的定义并不完全基于早期现代医学资料；它也从诗歌本身来阐明，并参考性别理论来表征。事实上，尽管全书大量采用第一手资料，但整本书都与当今的批评家进行了引人注目的深入对话，他们不仅被引用，而且参与其中。

整个过程从导言开始，原著细读了加西拉索的十四行诗第13首“达芙妮……”，阿波罗追逐达芙妮，在他的陪伴下，我们看到她变成了一棵树，他沮丧地哭泣，从而给树浇水，让它成长。眼泪是诗歌的转喻，如果没有受挫的欲望，诗歌就不可能存在，但赋予阿波罗诗意声音的过程也不仅剥夺了达芙妮的声音，还剥夺了她的人性。女性的屈辱和沉默是对男性声音提升为抒情诗的必要补充，因此，抒情诗在女性化（哭泣）和同性男性气质（献礼）之间的紧张边界上摇摇欲坠。瓦伦西亚的深度阅读还涵盖了加西拉索的前辈（奥维德、彼特拉克），并与十四行诗的其他诠释者（玛丽·巴纳德、托雷斯）进行对话。从这里，他建立了一种抒情和忧郁的理论，再次追溯到文艺复兴时期的理论（特别是安东尼奥·明图诺，但也包括胡安·迪亚斯·伦吉福和弗朗西斯科·卡斯卡莱斯等西班牙人）和当代抒情的讨论。

史诗与抒情诗的冲突占据了阿隆索·德·埃西拉和费尔南多·德·埃雷拉的章节。前者，无论在他的生活中还是在他的作品中，都是男子气概的缩影，但通过对阿劳卡尼亚妇女的忧郁描述和对她们苦难的准抒情描述来调和它。埃雷拉选择[完第187页]围绕一个难以接近、但又沉默的爱情对象阐述一个神话：创造“卢兹”作为遥不可及的欲望使他成为像阿波罗一样的诗人；对太阳地位的追求赋予了他对辉腾和伊卡洛斯的反复召唤，以及他对自己大胆的坚持（ osadía ）的意义。如果说抒情诗对埃西拉来说是一种持续的诱惑，那么史诗对埃雷拉来说也是一样，他的措辞、赞美西班牙帝国的诗歌以及他对抒情诗发挥史诗作用的强调都是一样的。第 2 章重点介绍埃雷拉 1582 年的作品集《Algunas obras》 ，但也参考了《 Anotaciones》 （1580 年），并以阅读《Égloga venatoria》（1582 年）作为结束。

阅读这首田园诗，瓦伦西亚将进入接下来的两章，内容是塞万提斯的《加拉蒂亚》（ La Galatea ，1585 年）和胡安·德·阿吉霍的《韦尔索斯》（ Versos ，1612 年）。在前者中，瓦伦西亚强调了忧郁作为情节驱动力、对牧羊人情绪状态的解释以及小说中大量抒情诗的动机的巨大作用。在阅读塞万提斯时，瓦伦西亚强调了对话元素：与假装是诗人自己的言语的抒情诗相反，在田园诗中总是有一种腹语，诗人自觉地采用了牧羊人的声音。这可以追溯到加西拉索的第一首牧歌（“El dulce lamentar de dos Pastores ... he de cantar, sus quejas imitando”）；它为模仿女性声音的古老传统（中世纪抒情诗、圣经）打开了大门。因此，与加西拉索和埃雷拉十四行诗中沉默的爱情对象相反，在《加拉蒂亚》中，牧羊女们被赋予了重要的声音。但无论他们拥抱爱情还是拒绝爱情，他们仍然被困在男性对忧郁的不可能的需求中，而塞万提斯的加拉蒂亚因此是萨利西奥的直系后裔……