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Pedro Salinas and Courtly Love. The ‘amada’ in La voz a ti debida : woman, muse and symbol

1979; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1475382792000356123

1469-3550

Robert Havard,

Libraries, Manuscripts, and Books

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeBSS Subject Index: LOVE [AS LITERARY/CULTURAL THEME]*SALINAS, PEDRO (1892–1951)SYMBOLISM/SYMBOLSVOZ A TI DEBIDA, LA [P. SALINAS]WOMEN/GENDER ISSUES — SPAIN & PORTUGAL Notes 1. Pedro Salinas, Jorge Manrique o tradición y originalidad (Buenos Aires 1962), 29. This is henceforth referred to as J M and is followed by a number indicating the page of reference. A second abbreviation is Salinas, Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry (Baltimore 1966), referred to as RP. All quotations of Salinas’ poetry are from Poesías completas (Madrid 1955) when the page of reference alone will be given in parenthesis. 2. Leo Spitzer, ‘El conceptismo interior de Pedro Salinas’, RHM, VII (1941). 3. C. B. Morris, A Generation of Spanish Poets (Cambridge 1969), 164, 142. 4. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London 1951), 287. 5. In Gerardo Diego, Poesía española contemporánea (Madrid 1962), 303. 6. Spitzer (69) is quoting F. de Onís. 7. That both Spitzer and Morris continually qualify their remarks about the amada’s reality confuses but does not alter their main thesis that the poetry is intellectual and mental respectively. We should remember that Spitzer was a colleague of Salinas’ in 1941 ; a partial explanation for his determination to view the amada as impersonal is found in the revealing: ‘no cometeré la indiscreción, aunque la "actitud científica" pudiera justificarla, de querer penetrar el misterio biográfico de ese Tú femenino tan aéreo y tan emocionadamente cantado’ (33). This approach would have been entirely understandable had it not been so overdone and had not the persuasive Spitzer had such an adverse effect upon subsequent criticism. The point is that the poetry itself demands further penetration, not precisely on a biographical level, but simply bearing in mind Salinas’ statement ‘Mi poesía está explicada por mis poesías’ (Gerardo Diego, op. cit., 303). 8. See Guillén's introduction to RP, xxix. 9. S. Gilman, ‘The proem to La voz a ti debida’, MLQ XXIII (1962), 355n, 356. 10. The motif of future competition is soon clarified in ‘cuando llegue alguien …/ a pedírmela / (es su dueño, era suya)’ (139). 11. J. M. Aguirre, ‘La voz a ti debida: Salinas y Bergson’, RLC, LII (1978), 98–118. 12. ‘The proem to La voz a ti debida’, 355. 13. ‘Salinas and Proust’, RLC, XLIV (1970), 210. 14. Courtly Love and Petrarchism were often attacked by those who practised it. Equally famous broadsides are Shakespeare's ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’ (sonnet CXXX) and Lope's ‘Señora mía, si de vos ausente / en esta vida duro y no me muero, / es porque como y duermo …’ (sonnet CLII). Salinas’ poem may be read as a more veiled comment on hyperbole. 15. Noteworthy is that ‘Me estoy labrando tu sombra’ was the only poem to which Salinas gave a title in his original versions; it was called ‘Por imposible tu cuerpo’, see Diana Ramírez de Arellano, Caminos de la creación poética en Pedro Salinas (Madrid 1956), 136. 16. Other instances among many in Garcilaso are his ‘el no osar decir’ (sonnet XXXVIII), ‘en lo demás soy mudo’ (XXVIII), and most explicitly, ‘Canción yo he dicho más que me mandaron / y menos que pensé; / no me pregunten más, que lo diré’ (Canción II). 17. In this connexion it may be revealing to note what Salinas expunged from earlier drafts of the poems. The following three points are indicative rather than exhaustive: (1) A reference to a walk in ‘los patios de Córdoba’ (Arellano, 114), which would have been the only place-name. (2) A description of the amada as ‘morena’ (ibid., 147), and then (3) the detail of the amada who ‘Miraba el reló / creyendo que era tarde’ (ibid., 55). Arellano comments: ‘El detalle de lo cotidiano aparece. La amada tiene que irse; ha consultado su reloj, ya es tarde’ (ibid., 54). It may be that the statement was too indecorously realistic in the light of ‘encuentros fugaces’. 18. Salinas discusses the fortaleza conceit in Jorge Manrique: ‘Su fortaleza se entiende en el doble sentido que hoy damos a la palabra: ciudadela y virtud’ (JM, 20). 19. Indeed, the original and barely recognizable version of this poem was largely an expansion of the nieve/fuego conceit found in Garcilaso's same sonnet (see Arellano, 126). Salinas’ decision to discard these excesses seems sound enough. 20. ‘La voz a ti debida: Salinas y Bergson’, RLC, LII (1978), 113. 21. C. Feal Deibe, La poesía de Pedro Salinas (Madrid 1965), 81–84. 22. José Antonio Maravall, ‘Poesía en deuda con la poesia’, RO, XLIII (1934), 215–20. 23. ‘The proem to La voz a ti debida’, MLQ XXIII (1962), 353–59. 24. See Gerardo Diego, 303. 25. Ibid., 303. 26. The critical lines are from Mallarmé's ‘Toast funèbre’: Le Maître, par un oeil profond, a, sur ses pas, Apaisé de l’éden l'inquiète merveille Dont le frisson final, dans sa voix seule, éveille Pour la Rose et le Lys le mystère d'un nom. 27. Refer especially to Guillén's theory of verbal incarnation in Jorge Guillén, Lenguaje y poesía (Madrid 1962), 240, 247, etc., which is discussed in R. G. Havard, ‘The reality of words in the poetry of Pedro Salinas’, BHS, LI (1974), 28–47. 28. Salinas chose to omit one flecha image: ‘Si me la da’, yo pienso ‘llegaré adonde nunca llegó flecha ni afán.’ (Arellano, 101). 29. Wallace Fowlie, Mallarmé (Chicago 1962), 225–26. 30. Other poems have similar echoes: ‘Empújame … a navegar’ (166), the lovers are ‘nadadores celestes, / náufragos de los cielos’ (170), and ‘Atravesando mares…/…descubrimos las minas / de llamas o de azares’ (200–01). 31. The combined influence of Bécquer and Mallarmé on Salinas’ poetics of chance is again apparent in his discussion of Jorge Manrique (RP, 37–38). When considering how a poet, who, in all other respects mediocre, could have composed the magnificent ‘Coplas’, Salinas refers us to the theories represented in a throw of a dice (Mallarmé) and a harp awaiting a hand of snow. Particularly revealing is the following: ‘Is he (the poet) merely a vital effort, uncertain and wavering, a throw of the dice upon the absolute, which will win only if mysterious and unforeseeable circumstances—which we stupidly call chance—concur?’ The stupidity, I presume, lies in not seeing that chance is fatal, seguro. 32. ‘The reality of words in the poetry of Pedro Salinas’, BHS, LI (1974), 28–47. 33. The following references are to the twenty-fourth edition, Henri Bergson, L'Evolution créatrice (Paris 1921). 34. Joaquín Casalduero, Cántico de Jorge Guillén (Madrid 1953), 26. 35. Change now appears as the vital aspect of Bergson ‘s philosophy despite the omission of the word in the titles of his major works. Critics focus on this; as, Julien Benda, Le Bergsonisme ou Une Philosophie de la mobilité (Paris 1918), H. Wildon Carr, Henri Bergson: The Philosophy of Change (London, 1911? undated) where Carr tells us the title was suggested by Bergson himself, viii. A later work by Bergson is La Pensée et le mouvant (Paris 1934). 36. It will need a further separate study to argue the full measure of entropy as situating the coincidence of philosopher and poet. While, in the context of Salinas, the principle of randomness will already be plain, for Bergson, I can here only refer the reader to Satosi Watanabé, ‘The concept of time in modern physics and Bergson's pure duration’ in Bergson andthe Evolution of Physics, ed. and trans. P. A. Y. Gunter (Tennessee 1969), 62–67, ‘the central problem of his (Bergson's) philosophy can be revealed in the light of the principle of entropy’. One further point needs clarification. The above connecting of Salinas and Bergson on the grounds of chance/movement/disorder (entropy) would seem to run counter to J. M. Aguirre's analysis wherein the connexion between poet and philosopher is based on the amada’s capricious changeability representing the conventional, nonessential self, as Bergson argued in his earlier work, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889). However, there is no conflict here: changeability in La voz has both the traditionally negative associations with human frailty and, at the same time, the positive function of correlating Salinas’ view of essence. Rather than a contradiction we are dealing with, to quote Salinas, transformation: ‘the projection of human events onto a higher plane; their transformation into ideas’ (RP, 92), and it is all the more reassuring when Bergson's theories apply on both levels. Nonetheless, reservations have to be stated with regard to Aguirre's interpretation of ‘sombra’ in Salinas as equivalent to Bergson's ‘ombre’ (op. cit., 109). It seems to me that Salinas’ ‘sombras’ have the quite usual connotation of things non-material. How else to explain ‘Me estoy labrando tu sombra’ and the whole sequence of ‘sombra’ poems at the end of La voz when the poet is alone following the termination of the affair?