21. Note that the moon set behind Popocatepec, a little tothe south of west from Cholula, while the sun sank behind 296Iztaccíhual, a little to the north of west from the city. Thismight well occur in summer.
182. —14. Fueron (lit. they were), they are no more. Inthis Latinism the preterit denotes that a thing or conditionthat once existed no longer exists. Cf. fuit Ilium ( Æneid, II,325), "Troy is no more."
186. —4-5. Que... seguir = que, en su vuelo, la turbadavista quiere en vano seguir.
190. —"Plácido": see note to p. 179.
Plegaria á Dios: this beautiful prayer was written a fewdays before the poet's death. It is said that "Plácido"recited aloud the last stanza on his way to the place of execution,and that he slipped to a friend in the crowd a scrap ofcloth on which the prayer was written.
191. —4. del... transparencia = á (in) la clara transparenciadel aire.
Avellaneda: see Introduction, p. xxxviii.
19. No... modelo = (la historia) no [dió] modelo á tu virtuden lo pasado.
21. otra = otra copia.
192. —1-2. Miró... victoria = la Europa miró al genio dela guerra y la victoria ensangrentar su suelo. The genio wasNapoleon Bonaparte.
4. Al... cielo = el cielo le diera al genio del bien. Note thatle is dative and al genio accusative.
This otherwise admirablesonnet is marred by the numerous inversions of the word-order.
193. —Ecuador is a relatively small and mountainouscountry, lying, as the name implies, directly on the equator.The two principal cities are Guayaquil, a port on the Pacificcoast, and Quito, the capital. Quito is beautifully situatedon a plateau 9300 feet above the level of the sea.
Theclimate is mild and salubrious, and drier than at Bogotá.The early Spanish colonists repeatedly wrote of the beautifulscenery and the "eternal spring" of Quito.
297
All of the present Ecuador belonged to the Virreinato delPerú till 1721, after which date Quito and the contiguous territorywere governed from Bogotá. In 1824 Guayaquil andsouthern Ecuador were forcibly annexed to the first Colombiaby Bolivar. Six years later Ecuador separated from Colombiaand organized as a separate state.
In the territory now known as Ecuador the first collegeswere established about the middle of the sixteenth century,by the Franciscans, for the natives, and by the Jesuits, aselsewhere in America, for the sons of Spaniards. Severalchronicles by priests and other explorers were written duringthe early years of the colonial period; but no poet appearsbefore the seventeenth century.
In 1675 the Jesuit Jacintode Evia published at Madrid his Ramillete de varias florespoéticas which contains, beside those by Evia, verses by AntonioBastidas, a Jesuit teacher, and by Hernando DomínguezCamargo, a Colombian. The verses are mediocre or worse,and, as the date would imply, are imbued with culteranism.
The best verses of the eighteenth century were collected bythe priest Juan de Velasco (1727-1819) and published in sixvolumes under the title of El ocioso de Faenza. These volumescontain poems by Bautista Aguirre of Guayaquil, José Orozco( La conquista de Menorca, an epic poem in four cantos),Ramón Viescas (sonnets, romances, décimas, etc.) and others,most of whom were Jesuits.
The expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 caused the closure ofseveral colleges in Ecuador, and for a time seriously hamperedthe work of classical education. But even before the edict ofexpulsion scientific study had been stimulated by the comingof French and Spanish scholars to measure a degree of theearth's surface at the equator. The coming of Humboldt in1801 still further encouraged inquiry and research. The newspirit was given concrete expression by Dr. Francisco Eugeniode Santa Cruz y Espejo, a physician of native descent, in 298 El nuevo Luciano, a work famous in the literary and the politicalhistory of South America. In this work Dr. Espejo attackedthe prevailing educational and economic systems of thecolonies, and his doctrine did much to start the movementtoward secession from the mother country.
Although the poetry of Ecuador is of relatively little importanceas compared with that of several other American countries,yet Ecuador gave to the world one of the greatestof American poets, José Joaquín de Olmedo. In the Americasthat speak Castilian, Olmedo has only two peers among theclassic poets, the Venezuelan Bello and the Cuban Heredia.Olmedo was born in Guayaquil in 1780, when that city stillformed part of the Virreinato del Perú. Consequently, twocountries claim him,—Peru, because he was born a Peruvian,and because, furthermore, he received his education at theUniversidad de San Marcos in Lima; and Ecuador, sinceGuayaquil became permanently a part of that republic, andOlmedo identified himself with the social and political lifeof that country. In any case, Olmedo, as a poetic genius,looms suddenly on the horizon of Guayaquil, and for a timeafter his departure there was not only no one to take his place,but there were few followers of note.
Olmedo ranks as one of the great poetic artists of Spanishliterature at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He isof the same semi-classic school as Quintana, and like him devotedto artistic excellence and lyric grandiloquence. Thepoems of Olmedo are few in number for so skilled an artist,and thoroughly imbued with the Græco-Latin classical spirit.His prosody nears perfection; but is marred by an occasionalabuse of verbal endings in rime, and the inadvertent employmentof assonance where there should be none, a fault commonto most of the earlier Spanish-American poets. Olmedo'sgreatest poem is La victoria de Junín, which is filled withsweet-sounding phrases and beautiful images, but is logically 299inconsistent and improbable. Even Bolivar, the "Libertador,"censured Olmedo in a letter for using the machina of the appearanceat night before the combined Colombian and Peruvianarmies of Huaina-Capac the Inca, "showing himself tobe a talkative mischief-maker where he should have beenlighter than ether, since he comes from heaven," and insteadof desiring the restoration of the Inca dynasty, preferring"strange intruders who, though avengers of his blood, aredescendants of those who destroyed his empire."
The Canto al general Flores is considered by some critics tobe the poet's most finished work, though of less substanceand inspiration than La victoria de Junín. This GeneralFlores was a successful revolutionary leader during the earlydays of the Republic; and he was later as bitterly assailed byOlmedo as he is here praised. Of a different type is the philosophicpoem, Á un amigo en el nacimiento de su primogénito,which is filled with sincere sympathy and deep meditation asto the future. With the coming of middle age Olmedo'spoetic vein had apparently been exhausted, and the Peruvianbard Felipe Pardo addressed to him an ode in which hesought, though to no avail, to stimulate the older poet torenewed activity ( Poesías, Valparaíso, 1848, Paris, 1853; Poesías inéditas, Lima, 1861).
For a time after Olmedo's muse had become mute, littleverse of merit was produced in Ecuador.
Gabriel GarcíaMoreno (1821-1875), once president of the Republic and achampion of Catholicism, wrote a few strong satires in thestyle of Jovellanos. Dolores Veintemilla de Galindo (1831-1857),who committed suicide on account of domestic infelicity,left a short poem, Quejas, which is unique in the olderSpanish-American literature by reason of its frank confessionof feeling. The reflexive and didactic poet Numa P. Llona(1832-___) was the author of passionate outpourings ofdoubt and despair after the fashion of Byron and Leopardi 300( Poesías, Paris, 1870; Cantos americanos, Paris, 1866; Ciensonetos, Quito, 1881). The gentle, melancholy bard, JulioZalumbide (1833-1887), at first a skeptic and afterwards adevout believer in Christianity, wrote musical verse in correctlanguage but of little force. Juan León Mera (1832-1894) wasone of the most prominent literary historians and critics ofthe Republic. Besides his Poesías (2d ed., Barcelona, 1893),León Mera left a popular novel, Cumandá (Quito, 1876; Madrid,1891), an Ojeada histórico-crítica sobre la poesía ecuatoriana(2d ed., Barcelona, 1893), and a volume of Cantares delPueblo (Quito, 1892), published by the Academia del Ecuador,which contains, in addition to many semi-popular songsin Castilian, a few in the Quichua language.
A younger generation that has already done some goodwork in poetry includes Vicente Pedrahita, Luis Cordero,Quintiliano Sánchez and Remigio Crespo y Toral.
References: Men. Pel., Ant. Poetas Hisp.-Amer. , III, p. lxxxiii f.;Blanco García, III, 350 f.; Ensayo sobre la literatura ecuatoriana,Dr. Pablo Herrera, Quito, 1860; Ojeada histórico-crítica sobre la poesíaecuatoriana, Juan León Mera, Quito, 1868, 2d ed., Barcelona, 1893; Escritores españoles é hispano-americanos, Cañete, Madrid, 1884; Liraecuatoriana, Vicente Emilio Molestina, Guayaquil, 1865; Nueva liraecuat. , Juan Abel Echeverría, Quito, 1879; Parnaso ecuat. , ManuelGallegos Naranjo, Quito, 1879; América poética, Juan María Gutiérrez,Valparaíso, 1846 (the best of the early anthologies: contains a fewpoems by Olmedo); Antología ecuat. , published by the Academy of Ecuador,with a second volume entitled Cantares del pueblo ecuat. (Edited byJuan León Mera), both Quito, 1892.
Peru. The literature of Ecuador is so closely associatedwith that of Peru, that the one cannot be properly treatedwithout some account of the other. The Virreinato del Perúwas the wealthiest and most cultivated Spanish colony inSouth America, and in North America only Mexico rivaled itin influence. Lima, an attractive city, thoroughly Andalusian 301in character and appearance, was the site of important institutionsof learning, such as the famed Universidad de SanMarcos. It had, moreover, a printing-press toward the closeof the sixteenth century, a public theater by 1602, and agazette by the end of the seventeenth century. The spreadof learning in colonial Peru may be illustrated by the factthat the Jesuits alone, at the time of their expulsion in1767, had twelve colleges and universities in Peru, theoldest of which dated from the middle of the sixteenthcentury and offered courses in philosophy, law, medicineand theology.
The Peruvians seem to have been content with their lot asa favored Spanish colony, and they declared for independenceonly when incited to do so and aided by Bolivar of Colombiaand San Martin of Buenos Aires. After the revolution, Peruwas torn by internal discord rather more than other Spanish-Americancountries during the period of adolescence; and itwas its misfortune to lose territory after territory. Bolivartook northern Peru, including the valuable seaport of Guayaquil,and made it a part of the first Colombia; and largelythrough the influence of Bolivar much of Upper Peru was madea separate republic, that of Bolivia. Lastly, Chile, for centuriesa dependency of Peru, became independent and even wrested aconsiderable stretch of the litoral from her former mistress.It is hard to realize that Peru, to-day relatively weak amongthe American countries, was once the heart of a vast Incaempire and later the colony whose governors ruled the territoriesof Argentina and Chile to the south, and of Ecuador andColombia to the north. With the decline of wealth and politicalinfluence there has come to Peru a decadence in letters.Lima is still a center of cultivation, a city in which the Castilianlanguage and Spanish customs have been preservedwith remarkable fidelity; but its importance is completelyeclipsed by such growing commercial centers as Buenos Aires, 302Montevideo and Santiago de Chile, and by relatively smalland conservative towns such as Bogotá.
In the sixteenth century Garcilasso Inga de la Vega (hismother was an "Inga," or Inca, princess), who had been welltrained in the Latin classics by Spanish priests, wrote inexcellent prose his famous works, Florida del Inca, Comentariosreales and Historia general del Perú. The second work,partly historical and largely imaginary, purports to be ahistory of the ancient Incas, and pictures the old Peru as anearthly paradise. This work has had great influence overPeruvian and Colombian poets. Menéndez y Pelayo ( Ant.Poetas Hisp.-Amer. , III, Introd. ) considers Garcilasso, orGarcilaso, and Alarcón the two truly classic writers thatAmerica has given to Spanish literature.
In the Golden Age of Spanish letters several Peruvian poetswere known to Spaniards. Cervantes, in the Canto de Calíope and Lope de Vega in the Laurel del Apolo make mention ofseveral Peruvians who had distinguished themselves by theirverses.
An unknown poetess of Huanuco, Peru, who signed herself"Amarilis," wrote a clever silva in praise of Lope, which thelatter answered in the epistle Belardo á Amarilis. This silva of
"Amarilis" is the best poetic composition of the early colonialperiod. Another poetess of the period, also anonymous,wrote in terza rima a Discurso en loor de la poesía, whichmentions by name most of the Peruvian poets then living.
Toward the close of the sixteenth century and in the earlydecades of the seventeenth century, several Spanish scholars,mostly Andalusians of the Sevillan school, went to Peru, andthere continued literary work. Among these were DiegoMexía, who made the happiest of Spanish translations ofOvid's Heroides; Diego de Ojeda, the best of Spanish sacred-epicpoets, author of the Cristiada; Juan Gálvez; Luis deBelmonte, author of La Hispálica; Diego de Avalos y Figueroa 303whose Miscelánea austral (Lima, 1603) contains a long poemin ottava rima entitled Defensa de damas; and others. Thesemen exerted great influence, and to them was largely due thepeculiarly Andalusian flavor of Peruvian poetry.
The best Gongoristic Poetics came from Peru. This is the Apologético en favor de D. Luis de Góngora (Lima, 1694), byDr. Juan de Espinosa Medrano.
In the eighteenth century the poetic compositions of Peruwere chiefly " versos de circunstancias"
by " poetas de ocasión."Many volumes of these were published, but no one reads themto-day.
Their greatest fault is excessive culteranism, whichsurvived in the colonies a half-century after it had passedaway from the mother country. The most learned man of theeighteenth century in Peru was Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo,the erudite author of some fifty volumes of history, scienceand letters. His best known poem is the epic Lima fundada(Lima, 1732). He wrote several dramas, one of which, Rodoguna,is Corneille's play adapted to the Spanish stage, andhas the distinction of being one of the first imitations of theFrench stage in Spanish letters. All in all, the literary outputof Peru during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries isdisappointingly small in quantity and poor in quality, in viewof the important position held by this flourishing colony.
ThePeruvian writers, then and now, lack in sustained effort.
During and immediately following the revolutionary period,the greatest poet is Olmedo, who was born and educated inPeru and became a citizen first of the primitive Colombiaand then of Ecuador, only as his native city, Guayaquil,formed a part of one political division after another.
It iscustomary, however, to consider Olmedo a poet of Ecuador,and it is so done in this volume.
After Olmedo, the commanding figure among the classicalpoets of Peru is Felipe Pardo y Aliaga (1806-1868). Pardowas educated in Spain, where he studied with Alberto Lista. 304From his teacher he acquired a fondness for classical studiesand a conservatism in letters that he retained throughout hislife. In his later years he was induced to adopt some of themetrical forms invented or revived by the romanticists, butin spirit he remained a conservative and a classicist. He hada keen sense of wit and a lively imagination which made evenhis political satires interesting reading. Besides his Poesías yescritos en prosa (Paris, 1869), Pardo left a number of comediesportraying local types and scenes which are clever attemptsat imitation of Spanish drama. As with all the earlierpoets of Spanish America, literature was only a side-play toPardo, although it probably took his time and attention evenmore than the law, which was his profession. A youngerbrother, José (1820-1873), wrote a few short poems, but hisverses are relatively limited and amateurish. Manuel AscensiónSegura (1805-1871) wrote clever farces filled with descriptionsof local customs, somewhat after the type of the modern género chico ( Artículos, poesías y comedias, Lima, 1866).
The romantic movement came directly from Spain to Peruand obtained a foothold only well on toward the close of thefirst half of the century. The leader of the Bohemian romanticistsof Lima was a Spaniard from Santander, FernandoVelarde. Around him clustered a group of young men whoimitated Espronceda and Zorrilla and Velarde with great enthusiasm.For an account of the
"Bohemians" of the fourthand fifth decades in Lima [Numa Pompilio Llona (b. 1832),Nicolás Corpancho (1830-1863), Luis Benjamín Cisneros(b. 1837), Carlos Augusto Salaverry (1830-1891), ManuelAscensión Segura (b. 1805), Clemente Althaus (1835-1881),Adolfo García (1830-1883), Constantino Carrasco (1841-1877)and others, see the introduction to the Poesías (Lima, 1887)of Ricardo Palma (1833-___: till 1912 director of the nationallibrary of Peru).]
Not often could the romanticists of America go back to 305indigenous legend for inspiration as their Spanish cousins sooften did; but this Constantino Carrasco undertook to do inhis translation of the famous Quichua drama, Ollanta. It waslong claimed, and many still believe, that this is an ancientindigenous play; but to-day the more thoughtful critics areinclined to consider it an imitation of the Spanish classicaldrama, perhaps written in the Quichua language by someSpanish priest (Valdés?). The 8-syllable lines, the rime-schemeand the spirit of the play all suggest Spanish influence.In parenthesis it should be added that Quichuaverse is still cultivated artificially in Peru and Ecuador.
The two men of that generation who have most distinguishedthemselves are Pedro Paz-Soldán y Unanue, "Juan de Arona"(1839-1894), a poet of satire and humor; and Ricardo Palma(1833-___) a leading scholar and literary critic, best knownfor his prose Tradiciones peruanas (Lima, 1875
and 1899).
The strongest representative of the present-day " modernistas"in Peru is José Santos Chocano (1867-___), a discipleof Darío. Chocano writes with much grandiloquence. Hismany sonnets are mostly prosaic, but some are finished andmusical (cf. La magnolia). He is more Christian (cf.
Evangeleida)than most of his contemporaries, and he sings of the conquistadores with true admiration [cf. En la aldea, Lima,1895; Iras santas, Lima, 1895; Alma América ( Prólogo deMiguel de Unamuno), Madrid, 1906; La selva virgen, Paris,1901; Fiat lux, Paris, 1908].
A younger man is Edilberto Zegarra Ballón of Arequipa(1880-___), author of Vibraciones, Poemas, el al. His verseis simpler and less rugged than that of the more virileChocano.
References: Men. Pel., Ant. Poetas Hisp.-Amer. , III, p. cxlix f.;Blanco García, III, 362 f.; Diccionario histórico y biográfico del Perú,formado y redactado por Manuel de Mendíburu, 9 vols., Lima, 1874-80; Colección de documentos literarios del Perú, 11 vols., Manuel de Odriozola, 306Lima, 1863-74; América poética, Juan María Gutiérrez, Valparaíso,1846; Parnaso peruano, J.D. Cortés, Paris, 1875; La Bohemia limeñade 1848 á 1860, Prólogo de Poesías de Ricardo Palma, Lima, 1887; Liraamericana, Ricardo Palma, Paris, 1865.
193. —Olmedo: see preceding note.
8. Á, with.
194. —15-17. The following is a translation of a note tothese lines which is given in Poesías de Olmedo, Garnier Hermanos,Paris, 1896: "Physicists have attempted to explain theequilibrium that is maintained by the earth in spite of thedifference of mass in its two hemispheres" (northern andsouthern). "May not the enormous weight of the Andes beone of the data with which this curious problem of physicalgeography can be solved?"
195. —4. The religion of the ancient Peruvians, before theywere converted to Christianity by the Spaniards, was basedon the worship of the sun. The chief temple of the sun wasat Cuzco.
25. Bolivar was a native of Caracas, Venezuela; but, whenthis poem was written, Colombia comprised most of the presentStates of Venezuela, Colombia, Panama and Ecuador.Moreover, Colombia is probably used somewhat figurativelyby the poet to designate the "land of Columbus."
26. The Peruvians and the Colombians were allies. It isan interesting fact that in the war for independence wagedby the Spanish Americans against Spain, the leaders of theAmericans were nearly all of Spanish descent, while the majorityof the rank and file of the American soldiery was Indian.To this day, a majority of the population of SpanishAmerica, excepting only Chile, Argentina and the WestIndian Islands, is indigenous, and their poets still sing of
"indigenousAmerica," but they sing in the Spanish tongue! Seep. 211, l. 7.
307
196. —21. See note to p. 162, l. 8. The Peruvian flag hasan image of the sun in its center.
23. It is reported that the first onslaught of the Spanish-Americancavalry failed, partly by reason of their impetuousness,and that they would probably have been defeated ifBolivar had not rallied them and led them on to victory.
198. —10. The battle of Junin began at about five o'clock inthe afternoon, and it is said that only night saved the Spaniardsfrom complete destruction.
11. El dios oía: destiny did not permit the god to stay hiscourse for an hour, but the god left behind him his circlet ofdiamonds (the stars).
199. —Mexico. The Virreinato de Nueva España was afavored colony, where Spanish culture took deepest root. Ithad the first institution of learning in America (opened in1553 by decree of Charles I) and the first printing-press(1540?). Some 116 books were printed in Mexico City duringthe sixteenth century, most of which were catechisms or grammarsand dictionaries in the native languages. In the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries several Spanish poets,mostly Sevillans, went to Mexico. Among these were DiegoMexía (went to Mexico in 1596); Gutierre de Cetina, Juan dela Cueva, and Mateo Alemán (published Ortografía castellana in Mexico in 1609). Certámenes poéticos ("poetic contests")were held in Mexico, as in other Spanish colonies, from timeto time. The first of importance occurred in Mexico City in1583, to which seven bishops lent the dignity of their presenceand in which three hundred poets (?) competed.
Afterthe discovery and conquest of the Philippines, great opulencecame to Mexico on account of its being on a direct route ofPacific trade between Europe and Asia, and Mexico becamean emporium of Asiatic goods (note introduction of Mexicandollar into China).
The first native poet deserving of the name was Francisco 308de Terrazas (cf. Cervantes, Canto de Calíope, 1584), who leftin manuscript sonnets and other lyrics and an unfinished epicpoem, Nuevo mundo y conquista. It is interesting that in theworks of Terrazas and other native poets of the sixteenthcentury the Spaniards are called " soberbios," " malos," etc.Antonio Saavedra Guzmán was the first in Mexico to writein verse a chronicle of the conquest ( El peregrino indiano,Madrid, 1599). Coloquios espirituales (published posthumouslyin 1610), autos of the
"morality" type, with much localcolor and partly in dialect, were written by Fernán GonzálezEslava, whom Pimentel considers the best sacred dramaticpoet of Mexico. Sacred dramatic representations had beengiven in Spanish and in the indigenous languages almost fromthe time of the conquest. According to Beristain, at leasttwo plays of Lope were done into Nahuatl by Bartolomé deAlba, of native descent, and performed, viz. : El animal profetay dichoso parricida and La madre de la Mejor.
The first poet whose verses are genuinely American, exoticand rich in color like the land in which written (a rare qualityin the Spanish poetry of the period), was Bernardo de Balbuena(1568-1627: born in Spain; educated in Mexico). Balbuenahad a strong descriptive faculty, but his work lackedrestraint (cf. Grandeza mexicana, Mex., 1604; Madrid, 1821,1829
and 1837; N.Y