Goddess on the Edge: The Galatea Agenda in Raphael, Garcilaso and Cervantes

GODDESS ON TI-IEEDGE:THE GALA TEAAGENDA IN RAPHAEL, GARCILASO AND CERVANTES EdwardDudley StateUniversityofNewYork,Buffalo In attempting to identify a Galatea agenda for Garcilaso and Cervantes , the task is complicated by the intricate fabric of impulses, political, artistic and erotic, that animate their work and the work of their contemporaries at two crucial periods in the development of sixteenth-century Spanish power and poetics. In the case of Garcilaso , his use of the name Galatea marks the specific triumphs of his developing pastoral scenario in the Primeraegloga .(ca. 1531),,while for Cervantes the lifelong preoccupation with his intermfoable Galatea project spans almost the entire range of his writing career, from before his Italian residence in 1569to his death in 1616.In both cases, however, the Galatea engagement coincided with a youthful poet's efforts to find a new poetic voice, a new manner of expression in order to confront a changing political and aesthetic environment . This challenge constituted for Garcilaso the pristine moments of his personal translatiopoetiiof Italian metrics to the more sober resonances of Castilian, and for Cervantes a tentative step toward a more novelesque "poiesis" needed to sustain a prolonged narrative fiction carried forward in both prose and verse. For Cervantes the underlying factors of a new "poiesis" were of course altered by the radically changed cultural and political situation of Spain and Italy by the 1570s.The Holy Alliance against the Turk was to be in many ways the last papal crusade, carried out in spite of uncomfortable underlying tensions between Phillip II and Pius V, between the old Rome and the new Rome. This discomfort may have intensified the need for a double agenda of a translatiopoetii and a translatioimperiifor the young Cervantes. It must be kept in mind also that the view that Garcilaso was the pioneer, the innovative poet of a brave new discourse, while Cervantes was the late-comer in the tradition of Italian verse and novelesque formulas, is contradicted by what can be identified as another CAL[OPEVol. I, Nos. 1-2 (1995):pages27-45 2.8 ..i-EdwardDudley_(., translatiopoetii that marked the arrival of El Greco's Mannerist agenda in Spain in the 1570s.This revolution in aesthetic strategies was in fact to reach its climax in the Toledo of Phillip II rather than in the Rome of Pius V. Thomas Hoving's comment that El Greco's "View of Toledo" is "one of Mannerism's finest moments" indicates the powerful presence of a Mannerist aesthetic in Spain, perhaps more powerful than in Italy.1 But another reversal was also to occur with Cervantes' abrupt personal translation to Italy in the winter of 1569-70 and his extended stay in Rome. This development placed the young Cervantes in the spectacular environment of the Eternal City, where Mannerism had already enjoyed a prolonged and healthy period of development. It was a very different Italy from the one Garcilaso had enjoyed in the 1520sand 1530s,an Italy much more firmly under Spanish control and an Italy struggling to maintain its artistic hegemony against the agressive political, economic and cultural energy of the increasingly unpopular Spanish denizens of Rome and Naples. It was a common Roman belief that Spaniards were mostly Jewish or Moorish, and the insistence that Cervantes provide documentation o( his Old Christian blood was a standard procedure for se]Vicein noble Italian households (Astrana Marin II, 227). Cervantes's personal and social insecurites would have made him more sensitive _tothis negative attitude than had been the case with the aristocratic and powerful Garcilaso, striding across Italy in the entourage of the newly crowned Holy Roman Emperor. But whatever the reason, it is apparent, particularly in the "Canto de Caliope" episode of the Galatea,that Cervantes was mqunting an organized assault on Italian chauvinistic sensitivities concerning the worth of contemporary Spanish poets. The awareness of the Spanish themselves of their weaknesses in this area has recently been carefully studied in Ignacio Navarrete's new book OrphansofPetrarch :PoetryandTheoryin theSpanishRenaissance. As Navarrete shows, the problem of both the translatioimperiiand translatiostudii are fully articulated as early as Nebrija's prologue to his Gramatica in 1492 (15-31).In addressing the topic of the various translatii...