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The Overreaching Imagination: The Structure and Meaning of Aldana's Carta para Arias Montano

1988; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 65; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1475382882000365237

1469-3550

Robert Archer,

Libraries, Manuscripts, and Books

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeBSS Subject Index: ALDANA, FRANCISCO DE (1537–1578)ARIAS MONTANO, BENITO (1527–1598)CARTA PARA/EPÍSTOLA A ARIAS MONTANO [F. DE ALDANA]RELIGION [AS LITERARY, CULTURAL & IDEOLOGICAL THEME]STRUCTURE [AS LITERARY/CULTURAL TECHNIQUE]/ STRUCTURALISM Notes 1. Poesías castellanas completas, ed. José Lara Garrido (Madrid: Cátedra, 1985). Lara Garrido's edition reached me in time to allow me to revise parts of this article before going to press, but I have not been able to see the same scholar's other work on Aldana announced as in press in his bibliography ( 118). All references here are to his edition. 2. The bibliography of criticism on Aldana is still very small. His work as a whole is described in Rivers, Francisco de Aldana. El divino capitán (Badajoz: Institución de Servicios Culturales de la Excma. Diputación Provincial, 1955). Alfredo Lefebvre's monograph, La poesía del capitán Aldana (Concepción: Universidad de Concepción, 1953) is largely concerned with the ‘Carta para Arias Montano’, but makes some reference to the other poems. Rivers makes a review of the bibliography up to 1955 in El divino capitán, 125–48, and Lara Garrido gives further bibliography in Poesías castellanas, 117–19. Apart from Lefebvre's book and Lara Garrido's introductory essay to his edition, the most important studies of the Carta are: Manuel Morales Borrero, La geometría mística del alma en la literatura española del siglo de oro. Notas y puntualizaciones (Madrid: Universidad Pontifica de Salamanca/Fundación Universitaria Española, 1975), 267–91 (chapter on ‘Carta para Arias Montano’); Carlos Ruiz Silva, Estudios sobre Francisco de Aldana (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, Secretariado de Publicaciones, 1981); M. Louise Salstad, ‘Francisco de Aldana's Metamorphoses of the Circle’, MLR, LXXIV (1979), 599–606; Alexander A. Parker, The Philosophy of Love in Spanish Literature, 1480–1680 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U.P., 1985), 61–71. To the general list can also be added: Francisco de Aldana. Sonetos, ed. Raúl Ruiz (Madrid: Hiperión, 1984). 3. Lefebvre divides the poem into fourteen subsections: 1–6 (invocación a Montano), 7–42 (estado de su alma), 43–57 (propósitos de nueva vida), 58–66 (ideas sobre el destino del alma), 67–108 (aproximaciones hacia la unión divina), 109–23 (dificultades y esperanzas en la ascensión del alma a Dios), 124–258 (requisitos de la contemplación divina), 259–82 (entusiasmo y limitación del poeta), 283–94 (elogios a Montano), 295–303 (aspiración a convivir con Montano), 304–36 (alegoría del monte y los pecados capitales), 337–51 (alegoría del alma y el cuerpo), 352–432 (descripción del lugar de retiro), 433–51 (conclusión y fecha) (Lefebvre, 117–62). 4. Lefebvre (95) suggests that the subtitle may be Cosme's rather than Francisco's. 5. Lefebvre, 93. 6. Rivers, El divino capitán, 175. 7. Morales Borrero, La geometría mística del alma, 279. The study of the poem in Ruiz Silva, Estudios, 219–39, differs little from Lefebvre in the interpretation of its structure, but it is also suggested (231–32), none too convincingly, that Aldana may have been influenced in the Carta by Erasmian ideas still current among the Flemish Familist Sect, to which Montano is known to have belonged (for which, see B. Rekers, Benito Arias Montano [1527–1598] [London: Warburg Institute, 1972]). Parker, The Philosophy of Love, 68–71, briefly analyses the Carta to find in its second half the expression of ‘an innocent and pure love’ to be shared by poet and addressee. 8. Lara Garrido, 98–106. 9. While doblado tiro clearly has the sense described here, the similar phrase con doble trato (45) does not seem to mean anything more than ‘firmly’. The earlier allusion to dos infiernos (15) seems to be only partly related to the doble tiro, and means both the hell of battle and the Hell to which the soldier who pursues his career to the neglect of his soul runs the risk of condemning himself. 10. These are the Cartas to Cosme, whose own poem to his brother was published with it, as well as that to ‘Galanio’, and the epistle to Bernadino de Mendoza. 11. ‘¡Oh, venturoso tú, que allá tan alto, /por do rompiendo va nuestro navío, / tan lejos deste mar tempestuoso, / habitas, y por término y tan casto, /tan fuera el corporal uso del hombre, / buscas a Dios y en Dios todo lo cierto! /Yo no sabría pensar, ni creo ni entiendo, / ni se puede creer que el que así vive, / llegando por momentos a su causa, /que aquella liberal, piadosa mano, / aquella fuente de bondad inmensa /y aquel abismo de misericordias, /no se mueva a piedad de un tan ardiente, /tan eficaz y tan sincero afeto’ (Carta al señor don Bernadino de Mendoza, 11. 156–69, in Poesías castellanas, 352). 12. See ‘Correspondencia del Doctor Benito Arias Montano con Felipe II, el secretario Zayas y otros sujetos, desde 1568 hasta 1580’ in Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España, XLI (Madrid, 1862), 127–418. Writing from Flanders on 9 February 1574, he asks to be permitted to return to Spain in order to ‘emplear los pocos días que me quedan de vida en procurar la salud de mi ánima, recogiéndome para ello en la Peña o en algún otro retraimiento más apartado’ (310). 13. Marsilio Ficino, Sopra lo Amore ovvero Convito di Platone, ed. G. Rensi (Lanciano, 1914); cited by E. H. Gombrich, Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, II: Symbolic Images (1972; rpt. London: Phaidon, 1978), 168–70. See also Ficino's ‘In Platonis Ionem, uel de furore poetico, ad laurentium medicum uirum magnanimum Epitomae’, Opera Omnia (Basle, 1576; fascimile edn. Turin: Monumenta Politica et Philosophica Rariora, 1962), II, 277–80. 14. Ficino, Sopra lo Amore, Orazione VII, Chapter 13. Quoted by Gombrich, 233. 15. Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, in Opera Omnia, ed. A. C. Peltier (Paris: Ludovicus Vives, 1868), 1–21, and Bonaventure. The Soul’s Journey into God. The Tree of Life. The Life of St. Francis trans. Ewert Cousins (New York: Paulist Press, 1978). Quotations in English are taken from Cousins' translation. 16. Cousins, 63; Itinerarium, 5. The mystical ropos of Jacob's Ladder is also to be found in San Juan de la Cruz, Commentary to Noche oscura, II, 18.4, in Vida y Obras de San Juan de la Cruz, ed. Lucinio del SS. Sacramento, O.C.D. (Madrid: Editorial Católica, 1964), 602. 17. Cousins, 63; Itinerarium, 5: ‘Haec autem consideratio dilatatur secundum septiformem conditionem creaturarum, quae est divinae potentiae, sapientiae et bonitatis testimonium septiforme, si consideretur cunctarum rerum origo, magnitudo, multitudo, pulchritudo, plenitudo, et operatio, et ordo’. 18. Cousins, 69; Itinerarium, 6: ‘Notandum igitur, quod iste mundus sensibilis … intrat ad animam nostram, quae dicitur microcosmus … per portas quinque sensuum, secundum ipsorum sensibilium apprehensio-nem, oblectationem et dijudicationem’. 19. Cousins, 71–74; Itinerarium, 7–9. 20. Cousins, 72; Itinerarium, 8: ‘Dijudicatio igitur est actio, quae speciem sensibilem, sensibiliter per sensus acceptam, introire facit, depurando et abstrahendo, in potentiam intellectivam’. 21. For the poetic frenzy, see Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964; rpt. London: Roudedge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 223–24. Yates describes Palingenius’ Zodiacus Vitae in terms which could easily be applied to the Carta (even though the two works have little else in common): ‘. . . the poem is punctuated by outbursts of enthusiasm or furor in which the mens makes ascension into the heavens’ (224). 22. Baldassare Castiglione, Il Libro del cortegiano, in Opere di Baldassare Castiglione. Giovanni delia Casa. Benvenuto Cellini, ed. Carlo Cordié (Milan: R. Ricciardi, 1960), 359. 23. Poem VIII, 11. 76–80, in Fray Luis de León. Poesías, ed. Oreste Macrí (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1982), 220. 24. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, ed. H. E. Butler (London: Loeb, 1921), VII, vi, 47–48. 25. In my interpretation of the ‘dos elementos’ I differ from Lefebvre (171) and Arthur Terry, An Anthology of Spanish Poetry, I (Oxford: Pergamon, 1965), 161, who interpret these as the sea and the land. Aldana describes the view out to sea, and it is on the sea that he focuses his attention in 364–66; this is still the case when he refers to it in 373 as allá. The sea, although ‘desigual’ on its surface, is nevertheless ‘fijado sobre su mismo peso establecido’ and ‘de mil colores’. The air is ‘igualado’, since it presents a smooth surface appearance, but is moved by the winds (‘movido del aéreo desdén’), while having the colouring proper to the heavens. The attribution to the sea of ‘mil colores’ may seem odd to eyes accustomed to our grimy modern oceans, but at least one other contemporary (1563) view concurs with that of Aldana: ‘La mar no tiene color mirada de cerca porque nuestra vista no para en la superficie del agua, mas deciende abaxo, y mirada de lexos, tiene diuersos colores’ (Pedro de Medina, Svma de Cosmographía, ed. Juan Fernández Jiménez [Valencia: Albatros, 1980], 82–83). 26. R. O. Jones, A Literary History of Spain. The Golden Age: Prose and Poetry. The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Benn, 1971), 103: ‘The description breathes a sense of wonder at the manifold beauties of being. Aldana the Neoplatonist could love and admire the visible while yearning for what lay beyond’; Lara Garrido, 104–05. 27. Introducción del símbolo de la fe (1583), in Obras del V.P.M. Fray Luis de Granada, ed. José Joaquín Mora, I (Madrid: B.A.E., 1848), 202. 28. Introducción del símbolo de la fe, 203. 29. Introducción del símbolo de la fe, 229. 30. Lefebvre, 160–61. See also Arias Montano, Naturae Historia (Antwerp: Plantin, 1601), 283–93 (Escorial, 49–V–47), where Montano discusses various kinds of crustacea, and Lara Garrido, 104–05. 31. As the vehicle through which Aldana ‘acts out’ the spiritual struggle that prompts him to write the poem, the Carta belongs to a submerged genre of ostensibly formless poems within which also has to be included the great fifteenth–century account of another man's spiritual anxiety—Ausiàs March's Cant Espiritual. See my ‘“E ja en mi alterat és l'arbitre”: Dramatic Representation in Ausiàs March's Cant Espiritual’, BHS, LIX (1982), 317–23.