Access and Excess: Review Article of Jammes’ Critical Edition of the Soledades

ACCESS AND EXCESS: REVIEW ARTICLE OF JAMMES' CRITICAL EDITION OF THE SOLEDADES Betty Sasaki Colby College To summarily review Robert Jammes' critical edition of the Soledades is almost as challenging a task as reading the poem, not for any linguistic or conceptual difficulty,but for the sheer abundance of information contained within the 730pages that comprise it. While he modestly states, in a prefatory note, that he intends this masterwork to offer students "los elementos indispensables para una lectura inteligente [que] no excluye la sensibilidad poetica" (179),the erudition of his preliminary study, the meticulously noted presentation of the poetic text, which includes a paraphrased version of the poem, and the two appendixes, replete with additional textual notes, and a chronological, annotated list of the most notable texts and commentaries written in response to the Soledades during the seventeenth century are invaluable resources for any serious scholar of Gongorine poetics. Like Damaso Alonso and Antonio Carreira, whose modern editions he consults with frequency, Jammes establishes his own text closely following the Chacon manuscript. Thus he conserves almost all of Chacon' s orthographic variations, justifying this editorial decision on the fact that "no se puede saber de momento como Gongora pronunciaba y escribia estas palabras" (175). In many instances, he forgoes academic norms of accentuation, in order to preserve the rhythmic equilibrium of verses by respecting cases of sineresis. Jammes diverges from the Chacon manuscript , however, by uniformly adopting the "loista" form of the personal pronoun, arguing that Chacon' s "lefsmo" is "contrario al andalucismo constante de Gongora" (175).He further eschews the punctuation imposed by many earlier scribes, who sought to facilitate the comprehension of-readers , insisting that "es mejor para el lector dejar que la frase se extienda en su soberbia plenitud" (176). In response to what Jammes considers to be modern editorial excesses, he preserves the parentheses of the Chacon manuscript, and rejects Alonso's divisions of the poem into strophic periods separated by a blank line in order to maintain the poem's consonant rhyme system. Instead, he again adopts Chacon' s textual presentation: aligned verses with an occasional displacement toward the left of certain ro AcCEssAND ExcEss / REVIEW ARTICLE 03' 87 verses to mark a transition. To counterbalance the potential challenges that both his editorial decisions and the inherent difficulty of Gongora' s poetic language pose to the modern reader, Jammes includes a paraphrased version of the poem at the bottom of each page of the text. In general, he follows the paraphrasing of Pellicer and Coronel, occasionally using more current vocabulary for certain latinisms and particularly audacious metaphors. Much to the readers' benefit, the critical notes are conveniently located on the opposite page, and marked according to verse number. The notes constitute a compendium of information that, in most cases, exceeds the critical commen 1 tary of other modern editions, often expanding or modifying the explications of contemporary editors. Since the parafrasis addresses many of the poem's syntactical and semantic difficulties, Jammes' critical notes often move beyond purely linguistic questions to the less explicit historical issues underlying the controversial reaction to the poem. As a result, the notes provide an excellent parallel discussion to the poetic text that both facilitates and complicates his readers' comprehension of the poem's impact upon and relationship to the historical moment in which it was written . In his notes to the passage on navigation in the first Soledad,for example , Jammes both cites and examines the responses of G6ngora's commentators to his critique of expansion, and underscores the conflation of national and literary concerns. Similarly, in the case of many classical and mythological allusions, Jammes not only identifies the source text, but also locates and discusses such references within the context of the seventeenthcentury debate around Gongora' s nueva poesia. Consequently, the notes are filled with extensive quotations from commentaries by both Gongora' s supporters and detractors. While Jammes's scholarly aspiration to provide his readers with as comprehensive and accessible an edition as possibleis admirable, the sheer volume of information might prove overwhelming to some readers, specifically those readers unfamiliar with the complex interweaving of the critical debates surrounding the Soledades.And it is for those...