Solving for X in Gerardo Diego’s Fábula de Equis y Zeda

One of the strangest and least-studied documents to come out of the 1927 commemoration of Góngora is Gerardo Diego’s Fábula de Equis y Zeda. Considerably longer than most of Diego’s poems, and considerably more difficult, it can try the patience of even the most determined reader. It yields little in the way of “fable” or narrative content, and often frustrates even basic expectations of visual or conceptual coherence: no sooner is an image conjured than it vanishes, giving way to another that seems to belong to an entirely different register. Here is a typical stanza:

La luna acecha esbelta sin remedioel cero ocho de los vendavalesy con la muerte se equilibra el tedioen la pureza de los dos pedalesPendiente sin opción pendiente en sumacruel como la conducta de la espuma

(193-98)¹

What exactly el cero ocho de los vendavales might mean, or how espuma can be cruel, is far from clear, and even in their larger context these lines remain enigmatic. Of course, difficult poetry is not unique to Diego or to his contemporaries; what distinguishes the Fábula de Equis y Zeda from other exercises in modernist or avant-garde obscurity is its antique form: the poem’s 246 lines are divided into 41 six-line stanzas, sextinas reales, made of up hendecasyllables and ending in a rhyming couplet. That Diego would dust off a baroque form for his own work might not seem particularly surprising, least of all at the height of his enthusiasm for Góngora, whose tricentennial events he took the lead in organizing.² Furthermore, since those events ended up providing a label for a whole group of poets, the “Generation of 1927,” one might expect the baroque to have a visible presence throughout the poetry of the day. But for all their enthusiasm, the members of the 1927 group seldom sought to imitate Góngora, and with the exception of a handful of homages (like Alberti’s and Lorca’s “Soledades”), their poetry bears little resemblance to his.

All this makes the Fábula de Equis y Zeda unusual. It constitutes a rare intersection of baroque structure and avant-garde imagery, and as such it casts a revealing light both on Diego’s poetics and on the broader significance of Góngora’s commemoration. In fact, Andrés Sánchez Robayna has called it “una pieza insustituible en la historia de la poesía española de vanguardia … cuya importancia no es inferior a la de textos tan decisivos como Altazor, de Vicente Huidobro” (57). Yet it has received little critical attention – a fact due no doubt largely to its difficulty. Prefacing the poem in 1970 for his Versos escogidos, Diego noted not without sadness that in the preceding forty years “parte de la crítica, incluso de la más benévola y por otra parte aguda, no ha entendido mi poema” (67). He refers here, it seems, to Dámaso Alonso, who dismissed the Fábula as “un delicioso casi pastiche” in which “sobre la anécdota [ha] triunfado el puro gozo verbal e imaginativo. Nada más que eso, o muy poco más” (269). Critics with a less dismissive view also hesitate to offer an interpretation. According to Ricardo Gullón, “[i]ntentar una lectura ‘lógica’ del poema no tendría sentido” (10). In fact, only a handful of critics have ever tried to make sense of it.³ More often the poem is regarded – when it is regarded at all – as a quaint museum piece, a footnote to Góngora’s centenary.

Yet a closer look at the poem can illuminate just what role Góngora played in the poetry of Diego and his generational companions. By the late 1920s, poets and critics had begun to find in Góngora’s dense verse an example of “pure,” “aseptic” or “dehumanized” poetry, that is, poetry freed from any prosaic content or narrative filler. He did not inspire this trend, as Miguel Ángel García observes, but was...