Modern readers might tend to recoil from epic poetry because they consider the form archaic. Similarly, they favor those chronicles of the New World conquests whose manner of relating events more closely approximates modern prose (with Bernal Díaz, for instance, reading rather like Ulysses S. Grant). This preference for a “natural” flow of prose was not, however, shared by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers. They took pleasure in the ornate, in the clever turn of phrase, the well-formed rhyming scheme, and the golden varnish that coated every account of combat and discovery. For them, the beauty of language and of meter was coequal in importance to the narrative.
In considering this difference between our times and theirs, we can count ourselves lucky that Celia López-Chávez understands the earlier taste. In this interesting examination of two epic poems of the Spanish conquest, she throws a concentrated light on the early period of...
