Góngora’s Version of Arcadia in the Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea

Abstract

The German classical philologist Bruno Snell argued that the Arcadia of ancient poetry is a spiritual landscape with a metapoetical dimension. The shepherdesses and herdsmen in love as well as their feelings, which Snell called the "reality of the soul", are the inhabitants of this landscape of the soul. The fancies that arise from the feelings are being transformed in figures of poetry. Góngora takes up the elementary structures of bucolic poetry and condenses their extended plots to a poem of conceits. While the idylls e.g. of Theocritus or Vergil are about the twists of emotions arising from desire, about the resistances and conflicts, the violence of passion and the conflict between love and hate, Góngora condenses this erotic phenomenology to the archetypal configuration of the loving couple and the third person as intruder. That is why the reading of the poem is not primary concerned with the epic plot; and not even with the eclogic plot, as strange as it may seem, but with the dimension of the meaning of the plot which turns out to be an elementary reflection about the essence of poetry.