The Classical Outlook / Spring 2000 Volume 77, Number 3
Góngora and the "Pyramus and Thisbe" Myth from Ovid to Shakespeare. By DAVID GARRISON. Juan de la Cuesta- Hispanic Monographs. Newark, DE, 1994. Pp. x and 228. Paper. NP.
This book affords an introduction to Don Luis de Góngora y Argote's 1618 ballad La fábula de Píramo y Tisbe, extending to 127 four-line stanzas and printed here complete in Spanish and English. The dense, allusion-filled, enigmatic style of Góngora, whose best known myth adaptation is El Polifemo on Polyphemus and Galataea, recalls the learned poetry of the Hellenistic Age.
Góngora's Fábula is "much more than a parody. It is a reading of the 'Pyramus and Thisbe' tradition," (6) whose outrageously complex poetic language is meant to compete with, if not destroy, earlier versions, while vindicating Góngora's own esoteric style against his critics. "To a large extent, the subject of the poem," with its "mixture of comic and serious elements, of different styles and levels of language," is "its own artifice" (7,9).
You can approach Garrison's book two ways. For a detailed survey of Góngora's place in the history of the myth, follow the author cover to cover as he opens with Ovid Met. 4.31-166, analyzes a series of intervening variations (the early fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé; five sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spanish versions), and emerges with Góngora and Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. For the nonspecialist this procedure can be by turns enlightening and tedious.
But there is a more entertaining alternative, especially if you are seeking added resources for teaching mythology. 1) Peruse the "Introduction" and "Ovid and Góngora" (5-32). 2) Reread your own favorite version of Ovid's narrative. Forego Garrison's (176-85)—the Latin text is marred by typos and the English is the Loeb. 3) Go directly to the annotated, bilingual text of Góngora's Fábula (191-223). This poetry is what you would get if you combined the wit of Ovid the erotic mythographer at his most mischievous, the playfulness of Callimachus's Hymns, and the sustained imaginative intensity of a Pindaric ode. For example, here is Pyramus at the sight of Thisbe's bloody scarf, or rather "the indecorously stained, badly scattered fragments of the veil of his retable [=altar, i.e., Thisbe]": "When he saw and recognized these things, / marble obedient to the hard / chisel of Lysippus didn't / belie being a sculpture / as much as Pyramus belied being alive, / standing immobile on one foot like a crane, / turned into a shadow of himself, / to all appearances a statue." ("Viólos, y al reconocerlos, / mármol obediente al duro / cincel de Lisipo, tanto / no ya desmintió to esculto / como Píramo to vivo, / pendiente en un pie a to grullo, / sombra hecho de sí mismo, /con facultades de bulto," 205.) The lovers are "those two scatterbrains" (192). The surpassing beauty of Thisbe "would have made naked divinities/ look like morbid monstrosities . . . when Pallas lost the contest [before Paris] for being hairy,/ and Juno for being knock-kneed" (194). Unlike Mucius Scaevola who roasted his hand, Pyramus runs himself through with the spit, i.e., his sword (206). The lovers' distraught parents attend the funeral "dragging long mourning clothes/ with more tails than comets,/ with more pendants than octopuses" (208). In a word, Góngora, like Shakespeare, does not "allow us to be sad about what happens to Pyramus and Thisbe" (171). Garrison's notes lead the reader reliably through the thickets of allusion, and answer the questions the reader is likely to ask.
The comparison between Góngora's Fábula and the myth as dealt with in Shakespeare (Chs. 10, 11) might be of some use, although on the Shakespearean side Garrison's method leads often to commentary where none is needed. There is, regrettably, no index. In sum, if used with discrimination, this introduction to Góngora can add spice to one's acquaintance with the possibilities encountered in the Pyramus-Thisbe tradition.