“¡Qué Bien Sabéis Persuadir!”: : Petrarch, Don Juan, and Ana Caro

" j Q U E B I E N S A B E I S P E R S U A D I R ! " : P E T R A R C H , D O N J U A N , A N D A N A C A R O Dian Fox Brandeis University Don Leonardo, bastan ya las lisonjas, que imagino que el ruisenor imitais, que no canta enamorado de sus celos al compas, porque siente o porque quiere, sino por querer cantar. (Caro 1046-55) I In Part One of Garcilaso de la Vega and the Italian Renaissance, Daniel L. Heiple addresses a modern inclination to applaud Garcilaso's lyric for its sincerity. Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo, Rafael Lapesa, Damaso Alonso and others find that such poems as the Egloga I convey a sense of naturalness and truth, an impression encouraged by a "rhetoric of sincerity " and the conviction that the poetry refers to Garcilaso's love for Isabel Freire (1-9). What Heiple calls "sincerity," Paul Julian Smith refers to as "presence " (see also Rivers, "Garcilaso de la Vega" 102). Smith has observed that we generally locate the verse of Luis de Gongora at the opposite pole from Garcilaso's in sincerity or presence, with Fernando de Herrera's lyric and theory occupying an inconsistently intermediate position. Herrera writes more often in favor of plain poetic speech than of ornamentation. An example is this criticism of apostrophe, "'cuando revocamos y volvemos nuestra habla al ausente, aunque este presente, torciendola de su derecho y natural curso a otro alguno.'" However, at times Herrera sees the object as benefitting from the supplementation of persuasive language , as in his approval of repitition: "'Usamos de ella en los grandes efectos, porque significa la perpetuidad de la representacion.'"1 .Culminating the process of verbal complication advanced by Herrera, according to Smith, Gongora's "linguistic excess" draws attention away from the sentiment and toward the spectacle of the language itself, his love poetry paradoxically promoting a sense of personal absence or distance from the emotion. This effect is one of the reasons for the poet's controCALfOPE Vol. 6, Nos. 1-2 (2000): pages 35-51 36 «5 DianFox verted reputation, among his contemporaries as well as more recent readers (Smith, 232,238-39). Smith asserts that while early modern theorists esteemed Garcilaso's transparency and his ability to stir emotions in the reader, it is the reader in a modern post-romantic setting who is so inclined to impute feeling in the other direction, to the poet, erring by imposing sentimental biography on the task of analysis.2 It must be acknowledged, however, that the tradition of a biographical interpretation of European lyric boasts impeccably venerable bloodlines. Rivers ("Garcilaso de la Vega" 102) cites the Renaissance practice of reading pastoral characters as historical personages . Speculation about the writer's life also figures prominently in some early-modern approaches to the poems of the most important model for Renaissance love poetry, Francesco Petrarca. Many of his Rimesparse (Scattered Rhymes) detail or pretend to detail the psychological vicissitudes over time of the poet's unrequited love for Laura. The verses' first-person narrator languishes in a perpetual state of desire, pining for his mistress , who is beautiful yet inaccessible, cold and distant. The lover suffers from her cruelty Often he describes Laura physically by comparing or equating her body and its parts with natural objects. For example, she is "whiter and colder than snow" ("piu bianca et piu fredda che neve," Song 30); her eyes are two suns (Sonnet 173); hair is gold (Sonnet 90); her fingers are "the color of five oriental pearls" ("di cinque perle oriental colore," Sonnet 199). Indeed, Robert Durling notes that sixteenth-century scholars "imagined abiographical basis for each poem" (4), and academics have always speculated over Laura's exact identity. Still, there is little evidence—beyond Petrarch's writing itself—of Laura's existence. And even though he names Laura and refers to her in many poems, the verses are not really about her. They center on the poet's persona: on his emotional self, the effects of unrequited love on his own psyche, rather than on the ineffable object...