Juan de Castellanos, Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias (first part, 1589)
A verse history of the Indies written by a beneficed priest of Tunja who had spent his life in them, first printed in 1589 and reprinted here from the Madrid edition of 1852. Its royal censor licensed it and praised it for carrying an abundance of Indian names into Castilian metre without breaking the metre. Its first canto refuses mythology and promises only things the author saw; the same canto calls the peoples cruel barbarians and says they were forced to take new customs.
Why this wins its question: Castellanos reaches English-language readers, when he reaches them at all, as a bibliographical superlative or as a footnote inside somebody else's history of Colombia, and the poem itself is almost never quoted. Read from the sheets, the interesting documents are the ones bound in front of it. This object puts on the record, as separate sourced claims, the censor's report that licensed the book in the Consejo Real - which states that the history was written first in prose and took more than ten years to turn into octave rhyme, praises the poem specifically for grafting an abundance of Indian names into Castilian metre without forcing it, and argues that every other book on the Indies is obscure and defective without the beginnings this one supplies; the commendatory verses signed by men resident in Santa Fe de Bogotá and born in Tunja, which is evidence of a Latin-and-Castilian reading public in the Andes of New Granada in the 1580s; and the poem's own opening, which refuses mythology in favour of "la verdad pura" of things the author saw, and which in the same breath calls the peoples cruel barbarians and says they were forced to take new customs. It also prints the counter-case at full strength from the 1852 editor, who calls Castellanos not a creating poet but a scrupulous historian and lists the poem's anachronisms, pedantry and ignorance of natural science.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The text read here is the reprint that opens tome IV of the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles. Its series title page reads "BIBLIOTECA DE AUTORES ESPAÑOLES, DESDE LA FORMACION DEL LENGUAJE HASTA NUESTROS DIAS, ordenada por D. BUENAVENTURA CARLOS ARIBAU", with the work named in blackletter as "Elegías de Varones ilustres de Indias, POR JUAN DE CASTELLANOS", the words "SEGUNDA EDICION", and the imprint "MADRID. IMPRENTA Y ESTEREOTIPÍA DE M. RIVADENEYRA, SALON DEL PRADO, 8. 1852."; the running foot of the first page of text reads "T. IV". No sixteenth-century printing of the poem was reachable from this instance and none is asserted here; the distance between a Madrid reprint of 1852 and the book of 1589 is carried in the source's reliability and in this object's evidence tier rather than hidden.
The author states his own subject and his own residence in the dedication to Philip II. He proposed, he writes, "cantar en versos castellanos la variedad y muchedumbre de cosas acontecidas en las islas y costa de mar del norte destas Indias occidentales, donde yo he gastado lo mas y mejor del discurso de mi vida" - the islands and the north coast of the Indies, where he had spent the greater and better part of his life. He says friends pressed him because notable deeds were being left "para siempre encarceladas en las escuridades del olvido", and that having written the discovery and the conquests of the islands and part of the mainland as far as the sea of Venezuela he had meant to hold the volume back until a second part was ready, and was made to publish the first alone.
The book carries the censor's report that licensed it, and the report places the author in the New Kingdom of Granada. Agustín de Zárate, writing to the Consejo Real as "contador de mercedes", records that he was ordered to examine "un libro que ha compuesto Juan Castellanos, beneficiado en la iglesia de Tunja del nuevo reino de Granada", and states how it was made: Castellanos "escribió primero el discurso desta historia en prosa", then "la tornó á reducir á coplas, y no de las redondillas que comunmente se han usado en nuestra nacion, sino en estilo italiano, que llaman octava rima", and, on the testimony of trustworthy men, "gastó mas de diez años en reducir la prosa en verso."
The censor's single strongest praise is for the indigenous vocabulary the poem absorbs. What most shows the author's fluency, Zárate writes, is "en injerir en sus coplas tanta abundancia de nombres bárbaros de indios, sin fuerza ni violencia del metro y cantidad de sílabas, con ser los tales nombres tan dificiles que apenas se pueden pronunciar con la lengua" - the grafting of so great an abundance of Indian names into the verse without forcing the metre, names so difficult they can hardly be got round the tongue. He adds that they are of the kind Martial calls hateful to the muses, and that this is the praise chiefly given to Alonso de Ercilla for the Araucana. The quality a royal censor singled out in 1589 is the retention of American proper names inside Castilian verse.
The same report recommends more than a licence, and gives an argument about the state of knowledge. Zárate holds that the Council might not only order the licence granted but count the labour a service, "teniéndole en servicio el trabajo que en componer tan largo libro ha gastado, por solo servir á su república, sin otro interese alguno"; and that without the beginnings this book treats, "los demás libros que se han compuesto de todas las provincias y regiones de las Indias quedan escuros y defetuosos, como obras que carecen de los principios de donde dependen." Earlier in the report he states the defect he means: many books had been composed on Peru and New Spain, and all of them "quebaban defectuosos y sin principio, por no haber habido quien tomase á su cargo declarar cómo y cuándo, y por quién se comenzó á descubrir."
The preliminary Elogios de la obra por varios ingenios are evidence of a reading and writing public in the Andes of the New Kingdom of Granada. Among the pieces printed there are Latin epigrams by the Dominicans Albertus Pedrero and Petrus Verdugo and by "Domini MICHAELIS DE ESPEJO, præfecti ærarii Ecclesiastici Ecclesiæ Sanctæ Fidei Novi Regni", and Castilian poems headed "Del licenciado CRISTÓBAL DE LEON, vecino de Santa Fé en el Nuevo reino" and "De SEBASTIÁN GARCÍA, natural de Tunja en el Nuevo reino." Men resident in Santa Fe de Bogotá and born in Tunja were writing commendatory verse, in Latin and in Castilian, for a book printed in Spain.
The poem opens by refusing the equipment of epic and promising documentary truth instead. Canto Primero of Elegía I declines the gods of false religions, Olympus, Cytherea, Vulcan, Juno, Neptune, Doris and Nereus and Proteus, and states the choice: "Pues como canto casos dolorosos, / Cuales los padecieron muchos dellos, / Parecióme decir la verdad pura / Sin usar de ficion ni compostura." It undertakes "De proceder sin mácula el hilo / De la verdad de cosas por mí vistas / Y las que recogí de coronistas", and repeats the undertaking: "no diré cuentos fingidos, / Ni me fatigará pensar ficiones / A vueltas de negocios sucedidos." Where the verse falls short of polish, the author asks that the matter make up for it.
The cost is in the same opening octaves as the promise, and in the poet's own words rather than a critic's. The reader is told "Aquí se contaran casos terribles, / Rencuentros y proezas soberanas: / Muertes, riesgos, trabajos invencibles, / Mas que pueden llevar fuerzas humanas, / Rabiosa sed y hambre perusina"; that he will see few and nearly lost men "Sujetar increibles muchedumbres / De bárbaros crüeles y atrevidos, / Forzados á tomar nuevas costumbres"; and that others came to such misfortune "Que el suelo les negaba sepultura." The phrase "forzados á tomar nuevas costumbres" is the poem's own account of what the conquest did to the peoples it describes, printed as part of its praise of the conquerors, and the peoples are called cruel barbarians in the line above it.
Canto Primero also preserves the story of the unnamed pilot, and names the authority Castellanos leans on for it. Columbus, residing in Madeira, is said to have lodged the poor with his own hand, and among them once "un piloto castellano", himself a great navigator, whom a tempestuous levante forced so far that he ran until he saw lands neither seen nor set down by any chronicler; he reached Madeira gravely weakened and died there with the other men who had escaped the sea, "Pero dejó cumplidas relaciones / Del prolijo discurso navegado", which Columbus noted "con suma diligencia." Castellanos records that others say the storm befell Columbus himself, that "el varon adelantado / Don Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada" gave grounds for the account in his works, and that others hold Columbus found it in writing. This object records the poem's report and the authorities it cites; it does not assert that any such voyage occurred.
The 1852 prologue states how little was known about the author, and its own biographical claim should be handled as its claim and not as a fact. The reprint is offered because the work had become "una de aquellas curiosidades bibliográficas de que pocos tienen noticia, y cuya reimpresion llena un gran vacío en nuestra literatura antigua"; almost everything known of Castellanos, it says, is the little he says of himself in the Elegías, research in archives and libraries having found mention of his name and works only in Nicolás Antonio and in the notes Juan Bautista Muñoz left at the Academia de la Historia. It reports that Nicolás Antonio gives to understand that Castellanos was born in Tunja - a statement this corpus records as the prologue's and asserts no birthplace of its own on - and that the first part of the Elegías "vió la luz pública en 1589, sin lugar de impresion." It adds that Muñoz noted on a copy the signature of Miguel de Ondarza Zavala, "sin duda" the secretary through whom the printing licence was dispatched "á consecuencia de la aprobacion de Ercilla."
The same prologue prints the case against the poem, and it belongs beside the praise. Castellanos, it argues, "no quiso elevarse á la altura de la poesía épica" and is "menos ambicioso que Lucano y Ercilla": "No es un poeta creador: es un historiador escrupuloso, que prefirió la octava rima á la prosa." His versification, "aunque á veces demasiado trivial y desaliñada", does not stop at "la exactitud numérica de las fechas, ni los estraordinarios nombres de los indios y de los puntos geográficos de las regiones que habitaban." Its defects are then listed: "anacronismos insignificantes, ostentacion pedantesca de importuna y mal traida erudicion, ignorancia de las ciencias naturales envueltas todavía en la infancia, inversion no motivada de sucesos, y esa propension á retruécanos y antítesis." The editor sets against them the patience the accumulation implies and "la exactitud en la descripcion de las localidades."
What the book is bounds what it proves, and three limits should travel with any quotation from it. It is the work of a Spanish cleric who served in the conquests it narrates, dedicated to the king whose conquests they were and licensed by a royal accountant who recommended that the crown reward the author; the American names and words it preserves are transcribed inside Castilian octave rhyme by that Spaniard, so they are evidence of what one participant recorded and not testimony from the peoples named; and the text quoted here is a Madrid reprint of 1852, three centuries after the first part was printed, with no collation of any earlier copy stated in its front matter.