Borges on Quevedo (Other inquisitions), own translation
Like the other, the history of literature abounds in enigmas. None of them has troubled me, and still troubles me, as much as the strange, partial glory that has befallen Quevedo. His name does not appear in the censuses of universal figures. I have tried many times to inquire into the reasons for this extravagant omission; once, in a forgotten lecture, I thought I had found them in the fact that his austere pages do not encourage, nor even tolerate, the slightest sentimental outpouring. (‘To be sentimental is to be successful’, George Moore observed.) For glory, I said, it is not essential that a writer show sentimentality, but it is essential that his work, or some biographical circumstance, stimulate pathos. Neither Quevedo’s life nor his art, I reflected, lend themselves to those tender hyperboles whose repetition is glory.
I do not know whether that explanation is correct; I would now complement it with this: Quevedo is virtually inferior to no one, but he has not found a symbol that seizes the imagination of men. Homer has Priam, who kisses the murderous hands of Achilles; Sophocles has a king who deciphers riddles and whom fate will force to decipher the horror of his own destiny; Dante, the nine circles of Hell and the paradisiacal rose; Shakespeare, his orbs of violence and music; Swift, his republic of virtuous horses and bestial ‘yahoos’; Melville, the abomination and love of the white whale; Franz Kafka, his ever-expanding and sordid labyrinths. There is no writer of universal fame who hasn’t coined a symbol; this, it is worth remembering, is not always objective and external. Góngora or Mallarmé, for instance, endure as the writer who laboriously forges a secret work; Whitman, as the semi-divine protagonist of Leaves of Grass.
Of Quevedo, in contrast, only a caricatured image remains. ‘The noblest Spanish stylist has been transformed into the prototype of a chascarrillero’, observes Leopoldo Lugones.
Lamb said that Edmund Spenser was ‘the poet’s poet’. Of Quevedo, one would have to resign oneself to saying that he is the writer’s writer. To appreciate Quevedo, one must be (actually or potentially) a man of letters; conversely, no one with a literary vocation can fail to appreciate Quevedo.
Quevedo’s greatness is verbal. To judge him a philosopher, a theologian, or (as Aureliano Fernández Guerra would have it) a statesman, is an error that the titles of his works may allow, but not their content. His treatise Providence of God, Suffered by Those Who Deny It and Enjoyed by Those Who Confess It; Doctrine Studied in the Worms and Persecutions of Job prefers intimidation to reasoning. Like Cicero (De natura deorum, II, 40-44), he proves a divine order through the order observed in the stars, ‘a vast republic of lights’, and, having dealt with that stellar variation of the cosmological argument, he adds: ‘Few were those who absolutely denied that there was God; I will bring to shame those who had less, and they are: Diagoras Milesian, Protagoras Abderites, disciples of Democritus and Theodorus (commonly called Atheus), and Bion Borysthenites, disciple of the filthy and misguided Theodorus’, which is mere terrorism.
There are doctrines in the history of philosophy that are probably false, yet they exert a dark charm on the imagination of men: the Platonic and Pythagorean doctrine of the soul’s passage through many bodies, the Gnostic doctrine that the world is the work of a hostile and rudimentary god. Quevedo, a student only of truth, is invulnerable to this charm.
He writes that the transmigration of souls is ‘bestial foolishness’ and ‘brutal madness’. Empedocles of Agrigento claimed: ‘I have been a child, a girl, a plant, a bird, and a mute fish that rises from the sea’; Quevedo notes (Providence of God): ‘Empedocles, a man so misguided that, claiming he had been a fish, he changed into a nature so contrary and opposite that he died a butterfly of Etna; and in sight of the sea, of which he had been a people, he plunged into the fire’. Quevedo calls the Gnostics infamous, cursed, crazy and inventors of nonsense (‘Zahurdas de Pluton’, in fine).
His Politics of God and Government of Christ Our Lord should be considered, according to Aureliano Fernández Guerra, ‘as a complete system of government, the most accurate, noble and convenient’. To appreciate this opinion for what it is worth, it suffices to recall that the forty-seven chapters of this book disregard any other foundation than the curious hypothesis that the acts and words of Christ (who was, as is well known, King of the Jews) are secret symbols by whose light the politician must resolve his problem. Faithful to this cabala, Quevedo draws from the episode of the Samaritan woman that the taxes kings demand should be light; from the episode of the loaves and fishes, that kings must alleviate needs; from the repetition of the formula sequebantur, that ‘the king must lead the ministers after him, not the ministers the king’... One’s astonishment wavers between the arbitrariness of the method and the triviality of the conclusions. However, Quevedo saves everything, or almost everything, with the dignity of his language. The inattentive reader might consider himself edified by this work.
A similar discord is evident in Marco Bruto, where the thought is not memorable, though the clauses are. In this treatise, the most imposing of the styles Quevedo employed achieves its perfection. The Spanish language, in these lapidary pages by Quevedo, seems to return to the arduous Latin of Seneca, Tacitus, and Lucan, to the tormented and harsh Latin of the Silver Age. The ostentatious laconicism, the hyperbaton, the almost algebraic rigour, the opposition of terms, the aridity, the repetition of words, give this text an illusory precision. Many periods deserve, or demand, the judgment of perfection. This one, for example, which I quote:
Honraron con unas hojas de laurel una frente; dieron satisfacción con una insignia en el escudo a un linaje; pagaron grandes y soberanas vitorias con las aclamaciones de un triunfo; recompensaron vidas casi divinas con una estatua; y para que no descaeciesen de prerrogativas de tesoro los ramos y las yerbas y el mármol y las voces, no las permitieron a la pretensión, sino al mérito.
Quevedo frequented other styles with no less success: the apparently oral style of the Buscón, the unrestrained and orgiastic (but not illogical) style of La hora de todos.
‘Language’, Chesterton observed, ‘is not a scientific fact, but an artistic one; it was invented by warriors and hunters and is much older than science’. Quevedo never understood it this way; for him, language was essentially a logical instrument. The trivialities or eternities of poetry—waters likened to crystals, eyes that shine like stars and stars that gaze like eyes—disturbed him not only because they were simplistic, but even more so because they were false. In censuring them, he forgot that metaphor is the momentary contact of two images, not the methodical assimilation of two things...
He also abhorred idiomatic expressions. With the purpose of ‘shaming them’, he wove the rhapsody entitled Tale of Tales out of them. Many generations, enraptured, have preferred to see in that reduction to absurdity a museum of delicacies, divinely destined to save from oblivion the expressions zurriburi, abarrisco, cochite hervite, quítame allá esas pajas and a trochimoche.
Quevedo has been compared, more than once, to Lucian of Samosata. There is a fundamental difference: Lucian, in combating the Olympian deities in the second century, engaged in religious polemics; Quevedo, in repeating this attack in the seventeenth century, merely observed a literary tradition.
Having examined, even briefly, his prose, I will now discuss his poetry, which is no less multifaceted.
Considered as documents of passion, Quevedo’s erotic poems are unsatisfactory; considered as games of hyperbole, as deliberate exercises in Petrarchism, they are usually admirable. Quevedo, a man of vehement appetites, never ceased to aspire to Stoic asceticism; he must also have found it foolish to depend on women (‘he is wise, who uses their caresses and does not trust them’); these reasons suffice to explain the deliberate artificiality of that Muse IV of his Parnassus, which ‘sings of feats of love and beauty’. Quevedo’s personal accent is found in other pieces; in those that allow him to publish his melancholy, his courage, or his disillusionment. For example, in this sonnet that he sent, from his Torre de Juan Abad, to Don José de Salas (Muse, II, 109):
Retirado en la paz de estos desiertos
con pocos, pero doctos libros juntos,
vivo en conversación con los difuntos
y escucho con mis ojos a los muertos.
Si no siempre entendidos, siempre abiertos,
o enmiendan o secundan mis asuntos,
y en músicos, callados contrapuntos
al sueño de la vida hablan despiertos.
Las grandes almas que la muerte ausenta,
de injurias de los años vengadora,
libra, oh gran don Joseph, docta la Imprenta.
En fuga irrevocable huye la hora;
pero aquella el mejor cálculo cuenta,
que en la lección y estudio nos mejora.
The preceding sonnet does contain conceptualist features (listening with the eyes, speaking while awake to the dream of life), but the sonnet is effective despite them, not because of them. I won’t say it is a transcription of reality, because reality is not verbal, but its words matter less than the scene they evoke or the virile accent that seems to inform them. This isn’t always the case; in the most illustrious sonnet of this volume (‘Immortal Memory of Don Pedro Girón de Osuna, who died in prison’), the splendid effectiveness of the couplet
Su Tumba son de Flandes las Campañas
y su Epitaphio la sangrienta Luna
precedes all interpretation and does not depend on it. I will say the same of the subsequent expression: ‘the military weeping’, whose meaning is not enigmatic, but rather trivial: the weeping of the soldiers. As for the ‘bloody moon’, it is best to ignore that it is the symbol of the Turks, eclipsed by Heaven knows what acts of piracy by Don Pedro Téllez Girón.
Quite often, Quevedo’s starting point is a classical text. Thus, the memorable line (Musa, IV, 31):
Polvo serán, mas polvo enamorado
is a recreation, or exaltation, of one by Propertius (Elegies, I, 19):
Ut meus oblito pulvis amore vacet.
The scope of Quevedo’s poetic work is vast. It includes thoughtful sonnets, which in some ways foreshadow Wordsworth; opaque and crackling severity, abrupt theological magic (Con los doce cené: yo fui la cena); Gongorisms interspersed to prove that he too was capable of playing that game; Italian urbanity and sweetness (humilde soledad verde y sonora); variations on Persius, Seneca, Juvenal, the Scriptures, and Joachim de Bellay; Latin brevities; bawdy jests; jests of curious artifice and somber visions of annihilation and chaos.
Harta la toga del veneno tirio,
o ya en el oro pálido y rigente
cubres con los tesoros del Oriente,
mas no ceja, ¡oh Licas!, tu martirio.
Padeces un magnífico delirio,
cuando felicidad tan delincuente
tu horror oscuro en esplendor te miente
víbora en rosicler, áspìd en lirio.
Competir su palacio a Jove quieres,
pues miente el oro Estrellas a su modo,
en el que vives, sin saber que mueres,
Y en tantas glorias tú, señor de todo,
para quien sabe examinarte, eres
lo solamente vil, el asco, el lodo.
Quevedo’s best pieces exist beyond the impulse that gave rise to them and the common ideas that inform them. They are not obscure; they avoid the error of disturbing or distracting with enigmas, unlike some of those by Mallarmé, Yeats and George. They are (to put it simply) verbal objects, pure and independent like a sword or a silver ring. This one, for example:
Hasta la Toga del veneno tirio.
Three hundred years have passed since Quevedo’s bodily death, yet he remains the foremost craftsman of Hispanic letters. Like Joyce, like Goethe, like Shakespeare, like Dante, like no other writer, Francisco de Quevedo is less a man than a vast and complex literature.