The Fluid Frontiers of Epic

In the latter third of the sixteenth century and first decade of the seventeenth, three authors writing in Spanish penned epic poems on the recent history of conflict in their own times. Alonso de Ercilla (1533–94) published in Madrid a trilogy looking back to the Chilean frontier war between Spanish squadrons and Mapuche people groups (whom he calls araucanos, Araucanians) in which he had fought during his youth. The three parts of his testimonial epic La Araucana [The Araucaniad], painstakingly expanded and reworked over more than twenty years until almost the end of his life (1569, 1578, 1589–90), were among the bestselling works of the Spanish Golden Age. One of a number of authors to capitalise on Ercilla's success, the young Pedro de Oña (b. 1570, d. after 1635), the son of an officer who had perished in the ongoing conflict in Arauco, wrote the first poem to be printed in Lima, Arauco domado [Arauco Tamed] in 1596. Even before the third part of La Araucana was printed, another military veteran, Juan de Miramontes Zuázola (1567–1610) may have begun work on his monumental Armas antárticas [Antarctic Arms] (c. 1608–09), a sweeping panorama of what he poetically termed the ‘Antarctic’ region, comprising the Viceroyalty of Peru and its Pacific waters, from the Inca Empire, to the wars of conquest and rebellion, to the defence of the coastline and the Isthmus of Panama against piracy and the threat from African maroon settlements. La Araucana soon formed part of the canon of Spanish Golden Age literature, and was emulated by Cervantes, Góngora and Lope de Vega among others, but these three epics are also integral to the formation of Latin American colonial literature. In these authors, writing in the most highly regarded poetic form of their day about conflicts that were bitterly fought but little known, the confines of the Spanish Empire take centre stage.