Special Issue “Essays on Góngora’s Polifemo and Soledades,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 90.1 (2013) ed. by Terrence O’Reilly and Jeremy Robbins (review)

REVIEWS 222 Terrence O’Reilly and Jeremy Robbins, eds. Special Issue “Essays on Góngora’s Polifemo and Soledades,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 90.1 (2013). ISSN: 1475-3820 (Print) 1478-3428 (Online) The 450th anniversary of Luis de Góngora’s birth in 2011 produced a veritable boom in critical studies of the poet’s work. Notable among them is an excellent special issue of the Bulletin of Spanish Studies, deftly edited by Terrence O’Reilly and Jeremy Robbins. The issue is comprised of essays on the Polifemo and Soledades by six distinguished Hispanists from the United Kingdom. Their contributions attend to contextualization and reader response, complementing a similar focus among continental critics on the continuities (and discontinuities) of poetic structures as they develop across the Gongorine corpus. In the first essay, “Nautical Votive Offerings and Imaginative Speculation in Góngora’s Soledad primera,” Tyler Fisher studies the peregrino’s ritual offering of the plank from his shipwreck to the rocks (I. 29-33) and the later description of Magellan’s ship, the Victoria (I. 477-80). Examining descriptions of ex-votos in Golden Age sermons and histories, he elucidates the ancient and contemporary context of such nautical votive offerings. Fisher considers the ambiguous final disposition of the Victoria, supposedly memorialized in Seville. Whether or not relics had been preserved from the ship at some point since its historic circumnavigation, modern historians, he notes, maintain that the ship was lost at sea, and indeed, that is where it is hung (“en el húmedo templo de Neptuno”) in Góngora’s Soledades. Fisher argues that the transposition by Góngora of the Victoria’s temple to “littoral space” conditions the readers to seek potential votive signs in other parts of the poem such as the “verde robre” which represents the boat and the narrative of its life. Fisher reinforces Elizabeth Davis’s original work on ex-votos as well as Mary Gaylord’s notion of “capsule histories,” while providing fresh material in early modern cultural studies, painstakingly researched, and with a renewed focus on reader response. In the second essay, “Sonoro cristal: Pedro Soto de Rojas and the Eloquent Galatea,” Anne Holloway reads Soto’s “Fábula de la Naya” (1623) as a reply to Góngora in which the “Polyphemic lament” is expressed by a female lyric voice, and “fissures and unresolved tensions at the heart of Petrarchan poetics” are reasserted in poignant “metaphors of fragility, fragmentation and shattering” (39). In addition, Holloway RESEÑAS 223 signals uncommon mythological allusions in the poem that relate to sexual transgression, the “fractured parental relationship,” monstrosity, and appetite. Her argument for post-Gongorine features in Soto’s poem is fundamentally thematic rather than stylistic, with even the matter of “new poetry” expressed less in typical Gongorine forms than in references to poetic contest and creation in narrative variants. Holloway’s fine research brings to light many little known sources, including a newly discovered poem by Soto, the “Fábula de Alfeo and Aretusa” (soon to be published in a critical edition by Rosa Navarro Durán); she argues that this new “Fábula,” along with “Fábula de la Naya” and the Polifemo, is implicated in Gerardo Diego’s “Fábula de Equis y Zeda.” Indeed, Holloway’s work promises further innovative forays into peninsular Gongorism and the Generation of ‘27 case of Peninsular Neobaroque. Terence O’Reilly’s essay, “The agudeza of Góngora in Stanza XI of the Polifemo,” offers a groundbreaking analysis of stanzas X and XI of the Polifemo that takes as its point of departure the sentence—which has stumped commentators for centuries—beginning “Erizo es el zurrón de la castaña.” In a nutshell (so to speak), O’Reilly argues for the possibility of three clauses in stanza XI, summarized as follows: “‘El zurrón es cercado de la fruta; es erizo de la castaña y de la manzana; y [es] el tributo de la encina.’ The hypothesis has in its favor a certain simplicity: it removes the need to suppose that Góngora omitted de before el tributo” (44). O’Reilly then notes, “But it raises a further problem: what sense does...