NASTY LITERARY RIVALS

ALL ABOUT THE ARTS

Francisco De Quevedo y Villegas (Spain, 1580-1645) – His style was straightforward, even blunt. The preferred objects of his fury and ridicule were pretentiousness and greed, but he was also, like many Spaniards of his time fiercely anti-Semitic.

It was the great poet Luis de Góngora who was suspected of having Jewish ancestry at a time when this was dangerous in extreme, who became the victim of Quevedo’s sonnet “A una nariz.” (To a Nose).

To a Nose

To a very large nose a man once was patched

An elephant’s trunk, a superlative snout

Elongated and shaped resembling a trout

‘Twist his ears the nose was oddly attached.

It was a sundial ill placed and inactive

It was an alembic, a still at its worst

It was nosier than Ovid’s, noisy at its best

That huge nose was both bailiff and captive.

The iron ram of a man-of-war galley

Of Israel’s twelve tribes more than worthy

Exotic and pyramid-shaped: extraordinary.

It was a nose of nasal infinitude

An over-extended nose, a fierce, proud nose

Defiantly Jewish in its attitude.

Góngora reciprocated with equal virulence, mocking Quevedo’s limp, due to very deformed feet and his victim’s dark eyeglasses.

Spanish Anacreon: you’ve earned an effigy!

But I shall quite rudely dare to remark

That your sweet platitudes do not make the mark

Although those bad feet of yours deserve an elegy

Do you imitate our great Lope once more?

You gallop away still donning your rough spurs

And wearing them over the clogs of poor verse

Rather like a failed ancient Greek hero of yore

Wearing at all times your darkened spectacles

You announce that you wish to translate into Greek

A tongue you never read with or without glasses

For a while your spectacles to my naked eye please lend

So that I can shed light on your limp rhyming

And then all that’s Greek to you you’ll understand

Neither rival had the last word in this nasty tug of war that only ended when Quevedo bought the house that Góngora lived in for the sole purpose of evicting him.

Were there similar rivalries in our time? Yes!

  1. Tom Wolfe vs. Norman Mailer
  2. Norman Mailer vs. Gore Vidal
  3. V.S. Naipaul vs. Paul Theroux
  4. Mary McCarthy vs. Lillian Hellman

Rafael de Acha ALL ABOUT THE ARTS

Published by ALL ABOUT THE ARTS

Rafael de Acha has enjoyed a distinguished career in the arts as a performer, stage director, producer, and educator. He was born and grew up in Cuba. At the age of 17 he moved to the United States to study Drama at the University of Minnesota, and later Languages at L.A. City College, Music at the Juilliard School of Music, at the University of Cincinnati’s College Conservatory of Music, and at the New England Conservatory of Music, from which he received the Master's degree. He has taught courses on the History of Music at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music and at Florida International University, and contributed writings and reviews to Seen and Heard International (www.seenandheard-international.com ) and to this blog. He co-founded the award-winning New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida, where he produced and staged twenty seasons of classical and contemporary theater, including fifty world premieres of plays that went on to have international and national productions on and off Broadway, including Ana in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz (Pulitzer Prize for Drama 2002 and Tony Nomination 2003.) In 2006 he was presented with a citation from The Dade County Cultural Affairs Council for “trailblazing contributions to the arts in South Florida.”