"The poet addresses his reader"
"Audaz mi pensamiento
el cenit escaló, plumas vestido,
cuyo vuelo atrevido,
si no ha dado su nombre a tus espumas,(1)
de sus vestidas plumas(2)
conservarán el desvanecimiento
los anales diáfanos del viento."
CLAVE
The
pilgrim poet addresses the reader personally in the second Solitude
while traveling on a boat. In an overconfident mood he intended to
ascend a mountain, covered in feathers (like Icarus), destined to crash.
If the name of the Greek protagonist had not been adopted by the Sea of Crete, only his spread out feathers would have been swallowed up by empty gusts of wind.
NOTES
(1) He also addresses the person (tu) who moves the boat.
(2) It is remarkable that Góngora reiterates the image "vestidas plumas" (the King and his relatives). The expression "anales diáfanos" would have been considered contentious.
This clave was written in November / December 2021 in Granada, Andalucía. It is an interpretation, not a translation.
N.B. The claves written by Salcedo Coronel(*) and Pellicer are very helpful because they were Góngora's contemporaries. Dámaso Alonso knew that the (unfinished) Soledades would never be completely understood, and that his own, conservative interpretations would be succeeded by other ones. Carreira and Jammes also kept the interpretative text sober, but moved on from what Alonso wrote more than half a century earlier. Beverley went even further, and may have interpreted the Soledades as if written by Nostradamus.
Alonso was right: do not read what is not there.
(*) Two copies of Salcedo's comments are
in the Biblioteca Nacional. (One needs special permission to inspect
the book published in 1636.) Pellicer's text was reprinted in Germany in
1971.