Alonso de Ercilla, La Araucana
The epic of the Spanish war in Chile, written by a soldier who fought in it and often drafted on leather for want of paper. Its declared subject is Spanish valour; its argument is that the Mapuche chose their leaders by merit, had never been ruled by any king, and were defending their liberty against enemies the poet calls fierce and Spanish. It also states, from inside the army, that the war exceeded the laws of war.
Why this wins its question: La Araucana reaches English-language readers as a label — "the Spanish epic that praises its enemies", or a line about Chile's national poem — with the praise quoted and the war left out, or the war quoted and the praise left out. Read from the sheets, the interesting thing is that both are in the same book and often on the same page, and that the poet marks his own limits. This object puts on the record, as separate sourced claims, the prologue's statement that the poem was drafted on leather for want of paper; the prologue's own sentence calling the Spaniards fierce enemies and the Araucanians a people who redeemed their liberty with nothing but stubborn valour; the merit-not-birth description of Araucanian command printed with a dedication to the king; the Canto XXXII finding that the war exceeded the laws and limits of war and destroyed the expected fruit of the country; the Canto IV refusal to name names because the writing would be held suspect; and the disclaimer attached to the death of Caupolicán, where Ercilla says he was absent and that had he been present he would have stopped it. It also states the counterpoint at full strength: this is a combatant's poem, in Castilian octaves, in a European epic frame, and no Mapuche voice is independently attested in it.
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 one printed as the first item of volume XVII of the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, "Poemas épicos", Madrid 1851, under the heading "LA ARAUCANA, POR DON ALONSO DE ERCILLA Y ZUÑIGA, CABALLERO DEL ORDEN DE SANTIAGO, GENTILHOMBRE DE LA CAMARA DE LA MAJESTAD DEL EMPERADOR", with the dedication "AL REY NUESTRO SEÑOR". No sixteenth-century printing of the poem was reachable from this instance, and no date is asserted here for any earlier edition, none being stated on a page opened; the distance between an 1851 collected edition and the author's own printings is carried in the source's reliability and in this object's evidence tier rather than hidden.
The first octave announces a conventional imperial subject and nothing else: not ladies, not love, not the tokens and tendernesses of amorous affection, but "el valor, los hechos, las proezas / De aquellos españoles esforzados, / Que á la cerviz de Arauco no domada / Pusieron duro yugo por la espada." Everything that makes the poem unusual happens after that promise, and against it.
The description of Chile in the first canto is written as praise of an adversary. The province is "de remotas naciones respetada / Por fuerte, principal y poderosa", and the people it produces are so choice, proud and warlike "Que no ha sido por rey jamas regida, / Ni á estranjero dominio sometida." Arauco itself is small and is said so plainly — twenty leagues within its boundary stones, held by sixteen strong men — and it has nonetheless put the Spaniard in such straits as the poem will show.
The same canto describes an Araucanian polity organised on merit, and the contrast with the poet's own society is left for the reader to draw. Those who govern "No son por flacos medios proveidos, / Ni van por calidad ni por herencia, / Ni por hacienda y ser mejor nacidos: / Mas la virtud del brazo y la escelencia, / Esta hace los hombres preferidos, / Esta ilustra, habilita, perficiona." A knight of Santiago and gentleman of the emperor's chamber printed, in Madrid and with a dedication to the king, an admiring account of a people who allotted command by neither birth nor property.
The prologue explains the poem's physical composition and it is not a literary pose. The work was made "en la misma guerra y en los mismos pasos y sitios, escribiendo muchas veces en cuero por falta de papel, y en pedazos de cartas, algunos tan pequeños, que apenas cabian seis versos" — on hide when paper ran out, and on fragments of letters barely large enough for six lines. He asks the reader's indulgence for a work "criada en tan pobres pañales".
The prologue then states the case for the enemy in the author's own prose. Looking at their upbringing, customs and manner of making war, he writes, "veremos que muchos no les han hecho ventaja, y que son pocos los que con tan gran constancia y firmeza han defendido su tierra contra tan fieros enemigos como son los españoles" — few have defended their land so steadily against enemies as fierce as the Spaniards. He specifies the odds: the Araucanians hold no more than twenty leagues, have in all of it neither a formed town nor wall nor strong house for their shelter, nor arms even of the defensive kind, the long war and the Spaniards having consumed them, and they are ringed by three Spanish towns with two fortified places in their midst; and with pure valour and stubborn determination they have redeemed and sustained their liberty. He adds that the women go to the war and sometimes fight as men.
Canto XXXII contains the poem's judgement on the conduct of the war, and it is delivered by a man who served in it. Glory does not consist in conquering alone, the passage argues, but in knowing how to use the victory and illustrate it further with clemency; the running of the rigorous knife is excusable while the fury lasts, but afterwards, in cold blood, "Es venganza, crueldad y tirania." Then the accounting: "La mucha sangre derramada ha sido, / Si mi juicio y parecer no yerra, / La que de todo en todo ha destruido / El esperado fruto desta tierra: / Pues con modo inhumano han escedido / De las leyes y términos de guerra, / Haciendo en las entradas y conquistas / Crueldades inormes nunca vistas." The charge is not that the war was hard but that it broke the law of war, and it is printed inside a poem dedicated to the king.
Canto IV shows the limit of what a serving officer would put in print, and Ercilla marks it himself. Having argued that justice must be firm without being inhuman, and having described the man who with unjust hand, without measure, cause or foundation, out of mere frivolity and vainglory wants to leave a memorial of his own wickedness, he stops: there would be no shortage of matter and occasion to show his pen curious here, but he does not wish to enter such depths, the thing being unimportant and dangerous. Time will tell it and not his writing, which they might perhaps hold suspect. He closes with a proverb that says what he will not: it is the opinion of wise men "Que adonde falta el rey se sobran agravios."
The execution of Caupolicán in Canto XXXIV is the poem's most cited scene and its most self-limiting. The captive walks to the stake himself with a countenance that seemed to hold the terrible moment as nothing; he objects that a man so distinguished should be put to death by so abject a hand, and that to use such a procedure with him is inhuman vengeance and not punishment; he kicks the executioner rolling to the ground; he is seated on the point of the sharpened stake, and the penetrating shaft, for all that it tore his entrails and bored through his body, was not enough to make him yield to the pain — with calm bearing and countenance, without lip or brow moving, he stayed composed as though seated on a marriage bed. Six chosen archers then shoot him at thirty paces. Ercilla immediately disclaims the scene: this barbarous case, he says, he did not attend, having left for the conquest of remote and never-seen people, "Que si yo á la sazon allí estuviera / La cruda ejecucion se suspendiera."
The nineteenth-century editor of this printing sets out both the reading that has made the poem famous and the objections to it, and the objections belong here. His Advertencia holds that the Spaniards, fierce as any conquerors and impatient of resistance, repelled by their cruelty the young, noble and generous soul of Ercilla, who, being Spanish too, would have wished to see his compatriots clean of every stain, while the Araucanians, victims in the end of an undeserved fate, were defending their religion and their liberty. The same editor lists what he takes to be the poem's faults: unevenness of style, the negligence into which it sometimes falls, the incoherence and dislocation of its episodes, prolixity in detail, and worst of all a poor choice of subject, barren in itself and small. He also records that it went through many editions and was read and cited with general applause.
What the poem is bounds what it proves, and three limits should travel with every quotation from it. It is a soldier's work by a participant in the campaigns it narrates, dedicated to the king whose war it is; its most famous act of witness is one the author states he did not witness; and every Mapuche in it speaks Castilian octaves inside a European epic frame, so that the praise of Araucanian liberty is evidence of what one Spanish combatant was prepared to argue in print, and not an independent record of what the people he fought thought or said. That is a great deal, and it is not the same thing as their testimony.