Fragmentos de Soto de Rojas: a ‘new’ mythological fable of the Spanish Baroque

The twentieth-century poet Gerardo Diego’s commitment to the recovery of a ‘sub-genre’, the mythological fable, evident in his Fábula de Equis y Zeda (1930) has been acknowledged by Peinado Elliot (2006), among others. However a recent discovery in his archive has revealed a hitherto unknown aspect of the poet’s scholarly commitment to this endeavour. A transcription of a previously unpublished, and until recently, unknown Baroque mythological fable with the title ‘Fábula de Alfeo y Aretusa’ was recently found by his daughter Elena, alongside an unpublished study by the young poet of said fable entitled ‘Un poema manuscrito del siglo XVII de la biblioteca Menéndez Pelayo’. Rosa Navarro Durán (2012) is convinced that the correspondences with Soto de Rojas’ 'Los fragmentos de Adonis' and the clear imprint of Góngora’s 'Soledades' and his 'Fábula de Píramo y Tisbe' permit us to attribute it, with some confidence, to Pedro Soto de Rojas. This essay will consider the significance of this exciting discovery for our reading of Soto de Rojas’ existing corpus, exploring in particular the poem’s links with the dark eroticism of the Fragmentos de Adonis, (1652) and the early Fábula de la Naya.(1623)

The Potency of Pastoral in Hispanic Baroque poetry

This monograph demonstrates that aesthetic and ontological anxieties continue to find diverse expression within the contrived textual artifice of the bucolic space. Drawing upon expansive definitions of the Hispanic literary Baroque, (Beverley, 1980, 2008, Echevarría 1993, Ross 1993, Chemris 2008 , Egido 2009 ) the study analyses the pastoral verse of representative poets of the period to demonstrate that they re-enter an Arcadia that has been defamiliarized but is nonetheless inexorably connected to the classical origins of the mode. Pastoral, in common with other literary forms, is subject to a process of re-evaluation which was latent in its classical legacy. Within the intricacies of this literary construct, surface artistry sustains an effect of artless innocence that is vibrantly contested across the secular, sacred, parodic and colonial text.

AfterImage:for baroque flute and fixed media

Commissioned by Sonic Arts Network and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival with funds from ACGB for Eleanor Dawson (flute)