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By Root 1009 0

for I was her mother’s oldest and most distinguished duenna. And so the days came and went, and the girl Antonomasia reached the age of fourteen, with a beauty so perfect that nature could do nothing to improve it. And her intelligence was in no way insignificant. She was as intelligent as she was beautiful, and she was the most beautiful girl in the world, and still is if an envious destiny and a hardhearted fate have not already cut the thread of her life. But they can’t have, for heaven would not permit so much evil to be done on earth: to pick prematurely a cluster of grapes from the most beautiful vine on the land. Her beauty, which can never be adequately praised by my clumsy tongue, caused an infinite number of princes, both native and foreign, to fall in love with her, and among them an impoverished knight at court dared to lift his thoughts to the heaven of so much beauty, confident of his youth and gallantry, his many talents and abilities, and the ease and liveliness of his wits; because your highnesses should know, if you don’t find it too tiresome, that he played the guitar so well he could make it speak, and was a poet besides, and a fine dancer, and could fashion birdcages so beautiful that in case of necessity he could have earned his living making them; all of these talents and graces are enough to conquer a mountain, not to mention a delicate maiden. But all his gallantry and charm, and all his talents and gifts, would have done little or nothing to defeat my girl’s fortress if the brazen thief had not resorted to defeating me first. First the wicked and heartless scoundrel tried to win me over and influence my mind so that I, a poor warden, would hand him the keys to the fortress I was guarding. In short, he flattered my understanding and overcame my will with all kinds of trinkets and pendants, but what overpowered me and threw me to the ground were some verses I heard him sing one night at one of the latticed windows that faced a lane where he was standing, and if I remember correctly, they said:

From my enemy sweet and dear

comes the ill that wounds my soul,

a greater torment is her hope

that I suffer with silent tears.5

The song seemed like pearls to me, and his voice like honey, and after that, I mean from that time on, seeing the harm that came to me because of these and other verses like them, I have believed that from virtuous and harmonious republics poets must be banished, as Plato advised, at least the lascivious ones, because they write verses that are not like those of the Marquis of Mantua, which entertain children and women and make them weep, but are sharp, like tender thorns that pierce your soul and, like bolts of lightning, wound you there without tearing your clothes. And another time he sang:

Come, death, so secret, so still

I do not hear your approach,

so that the pleasure of dying

does not bring me back to life.6

And other little verses and couplets of this kind that charm when they are sung and enthrall when they are read. And when they humbled themselves to compose a kind of verse that was popular in Candaya at the time, which is called seguidillas? It meant that souls were leaping, laughter bubbling, bodies restless, and finally, all the senses turned to quicksilver. And so I say, my lords and ladies, that these versifiers very rightly ought to be banished to lizard-infested islands. They, however, are not to blame, but the simpletons who praise them and the foolish women who believe them; and if I were the virtuous duenna I should have been, his hackneyed concepts would not have moved me, nor would I have believed it to be true when he said: ‘I live in my dying, I burn in ice, I tremble in fire, I hope without hope, I depart and I stay,’ and other impossibilities of this sort that fill their writings. And when they promise the phoenix of Arabia, the crown of Aridiana,7 the horses of the Sun, the pearls of the South, the gold of Tibar, and the balm of Pancaya?8Here is where they most exaggerate with their pens, since it costs them little to promise what they never