Gongora and the Footprints of the Voice

Abstract

Few readers of the Soledades fail to note Gongora's linking, in the poem's striking first lines, of his pilgrim's physical footsteps with the movement of verse itself: Pasos de un peregrino son errante/ cuantos me dict6 versos dulce Musa/ en soledad confusa,/ perdidos unos, otros inspirados. Maurice Molho's extraordinary reading has illuminated the semantic density of this passage's (con)fusion of the peregrino's steps with the wandering ways of his verses (classically endowed with metricfeet) and with the labyrinthian space-time of his Soledad (Molho 1977). Now lost, now inspired-but most important of all fused together-, the physical figure of the protagonist, the physical shape of verse form and the dictates of poetic inspiration march and meander their way through the poem. For the French critic, Gongora's formal achievement is epic: El genio de Gongora supo llevar a cabo la peligrosa empresa que consiste-aventura sin precedentes ... . -en conferir una estructura a la misma libertad, un orden al desorden, una coherencia a la incoherencia (81, italics mine). Out of the treasure troves of his literary predecessors, that is to say, he creates a poem without precedent and without equal: the monumental silvalSoledad. 1