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This essay seeks to situate Eugenio Aguirre's novel, Isabel Moctezuma, in the ongoing intertextual debate over the place of la Malinche in Mexican history and consciousness. As the title of the novel suggests, the protagonist is not Malinche, but rather another indigenous woman, the first-born daughter of the Aztec emperor, Moctezuma II. While Isabel is a lesser-known figure and little has been hypothesized about her in literary texts, the same cannot be said of her antithesis in the novel, Malinche, the indigenous adolescent who served as Cortes's interpreter and concubine during the Conquest of the Aztec Empire. In a broad range of literary works, Malinche has been cast as everything from traitor to victim to powerful mother-figure of mestizo Mexico. In his (in)famous mid-twentieth century essay, Octavio Paz declares her la Chingada, a willing (thus treasonous) victim who betrays her children, the Mexican people. While many writers have sought to vindicate Malinche from such accusations, I argue that Aguirre's novel marks a return to Paz's vision of Malinche by casting her as the monstrous double of the novel's protagonist and, in so doing, proposing the adoption of a new symbolic mother: Isabel Moctezuma.

Jose Santos Chocano and C6sar Vallejo are Peruvian poets of striking contrast. In Perui the strong impact of the environment creates the outline of a man of the coast and a man of the sierra, each clearly and sharply delineated. Chocano and Vallejo are both Peruvians, yet their poetic personalities evolved from opposing Peruvian leavening forces, from their individual reactions to the molding and shaping by two diametrically opposite areas within the same country. Their poetry is as contrasting as the mild sands of the coastline and the abrupt cordillera of the Andes. Chocano was born in Lima, and was a true limeiio to the heart. Lima, a beautiful, glittering jewel, set on the Pacific coastline and rising from desert-like surroundings; Lima, the Daughter of the Conquest, the City of Kings; Lima, proud, frivolous, conservative, romantic, sensual, the capital of Perricholism-Chocano captured her spirit and always saw life through her eyes. Lima had no roots in an indigenous past because it was Spanish sap which nourished this decorative Iberian transplant. The coming of the Republic did not mean a new governing class and its writers never felt themselves linked to the populace of Perui, for whom they felt only scorn. Thus the literature, lacking in native roots, was usually mere imitation. Indeed subordination to the spiritual residues of the Colony has continued into the 20th century. Chocano inherited all this nostalgia for the times of the viceroys. Of Spanish family, his spiritual and intellectual formation belong to Lima. Cisar Vallejo was born into an environment the complete antithesis of everything that surrounded Chocano. Santiago de Chuco, Vallejo's birthplace, is an Andean village in the northern sierra of Perii, situated 10,500 feet high in the midst of bleak crags and peaks and sultry valleys. This is a land of mountain solitude and cosmic sadness, with poverty and isolation as its very essence. Vallejo spent his childhood and early youth in a primitive world of towering mountains and scanty population withdrawn from the mainstream of national life, softened only by family love. Born of humble stock, his ancestry makes him the complete mestizo: his two grandfathers were Spanish, his two grandmothers, Indian. The poverty he knew as a child accompanied him to his death. Indeed his life as a serrano, in contact with an imposing and unyielding Nature and with men of the earth, flows through all his work. Chocano pours out his verses of torrential pomp with the soul of a limeio; Vallejo, in bare and often grotesque manner, utters the protest and grief of the serrano. These opposing views are clearly evident in those poems which express a mood of nostaliga. Contrast the nostalgic emotions of the following excerpts. Chocano writes

Pito Perez is the most outstanding character in the novels of Jose Ruben Romero and probably the most popular fictional character in Mexican literature, in spite of being relatively a new-comer to the field.* Few characters have ever captured the attention of the literary public in so little time. His rapid rise in popularity could easily be explained if he were a military hero or a romantic figure, but he is the antithesis of both. He is not the kind of character with whom the reader associates himself, for he demands sympathy instead of empathy. He is, nevertheless, so commanding a character that he cannot be contained by the covers of a single book, but projects himself into six of Romero's nine novels. In addition to

In connection with the recent revival of interest in gongorism it seems worth while to call attention to a translation by Robert Southey of a sonnet by Juan de Jauregui, a contemporary of Gongora, and at first a strong opponent of his style but later yielding somewhat to the influences he had opposed. The poem in English, of which the original manuscript is now in my possession, is not contained in Southey's collected poems and I have not been able to find it in print. It seems, therefore, desirable to make it accessible to students of Spanish as well as of English literature. The rendering of the sonnet into English preserves admirably the love for balanced antithesis and the other stylistic tricks characteristic of the age, when, under such names as euphuism and gongorism, an epidemic of preciosity was sweeping the literatures of many countries of Europe. This poem has none of the obscurity that so often went with the compositions of the time. The sonnet form gives excellent opportunity for verbal gymnastics, at the same time inviting them and yet by its brevity and exactness of form holding them back from too great profusion.

To the most casual student of Spanish literature, Don Quixote is the epitome of idealism, and Sancho Panza, his realistic antithesis. A student who is slightly more careful can see that Cervantes does far more than personify these two opposites in his great novel. It has become almost standard procedure for literary historians to picture the two, journeying through life together, with the idealism of the one and the realism of the other interacting to such a degree that they exchange places and Don Quixote becomes completely realistic at the end, while Sancho has become hopelessly infected with the virus of chivalric adventure. Such an interchange of character traits would not have been possible had not the seeds of realism been deeply rooted in Don Quixote and those of idealism firmly centered in Sancho's basic nature. An examination of Sancho's idealism can be made from two sources since Sancho is a product of two natures: the Spanish peasantry and the mind of Cervantes. Let us begin with the former in our quest for the well-springs of Sancho's nature. The land of Spain was an excellent place to look for a Sancho. It was a timeless place where neither the land nor its inhabitants was changed greatly by the passing of the centuries. The lack of travel and of books kept a restraining hand upon imagination, not stifling it certainly, but withholding the raw materials which imagination transforms into progress. The dependence upon providential Nature made the Castilian somewhat fatalistic in his religion and philosophy. He accepted adversity with stoic resignation but held hope and faith in a God who could and did set aside natural laws for the special benefit of his children. The idea of changing one's lot by his own effort and daring did not occur to the peasant when he was left largely to his own thoughts. The vision of stepping rapidly over class boundaries seemed unreal and even filled with danger. Teresa Panza argued with Sancho in that manner (Part ii ch. 4) though she was quickly moved to almost childish delight when the duchess's page brought word that Sancho's governorship was a fait accompli (ch. 50). From this ageless peasantry, then, came Sancho, a man who worked long hours with little active use for his mind. His daydreams, which must have been frequent, were likely to be of some earthly paradise where drudgery was unknown and the stomach was always full. Sancho shared with Lazarillo a constant preoccupation with hunger. Probably he had known hunger often and had, as one of his greatest joys in life, the occasional saturation of his stomach. A little wine helped also. Not the strong drink with which the unhappy man tried to forget the cause of his misery. It was rather the gentle action that made one accustomed to monotony find his existence pleasantly satisfying, the mild stimulant that encouraged dreams and vicarious living in a world of the imagination. Sancho and the members of his class were intelligent. When they used their imagination and their intelligence together, the result was the multitude of proverbs that have made them seem so practical to us. Often the imagination took precedence over the intellect and so, the Spaniard seldom put these proverbs together to form a systematic philosophy of life. Sometimes, Sancho used proverbs quite cunningly; at other times, they were utter nonsense. Left

reader, thanks largely to its balanced blend of literacy and theatricality. In this pastiche of an Elizabethan revenge tragedy, Tamayo imaginatively places Shakespeare himself, and a Shakespearean character (one who never appears in any play--unless his skull be termed an appearance), in the center of a drama of love and jealousy. Yorick is appropriated as the symbolic jester, metamorphosed into a comic actor. He is used, not to betoken the transitoriness and ultimate uselessness of action, as in Hamlet, but to reflect the tragic quality of certain human interrelationships. This quality inheres in the ambivalent nature, or at least, the ambivalent possibilities, of our emotional attachments. Given the proper circumstances, love and hate consort despairingly in our hearts; ingratitude feeds upon the absorbing claim for gratitude; ambition becomes the road to downfall; and the game we play may turn out as deadly as death. The risk of the stereotype and of the romantic Pagliaccio antithesis had to be accepted. Tamayo has to some degree exorcised the curse, inherent to his theme and situation, by unmatched skill in dramatic technique, deft character delineation, and a lyrical plumbing of the depths of human agony. Clearly a basic part of this skill lies in stagecraft: the handling of exists and entrances, the remarkable power to hold the characters -and with them, the audience-poised between two possibilities, now inclined to despair, now to hope, but ever filled with terror. These are traditional weapons of the dramatist. Our present interest lies beyond them, in a more literary and less usual technique, the persistent play of ambiguities. In truth, Tamayo makes deliberate use of two types of structural artifice. We shall refer only briefly to a device of repetition, which is lyrical, rather than dramatic. A particular kind of repetition, a sequence of parallel phrasings of parallel emotional states, it is employed twice in the first act, and both times by the illicit lovers, Edmundo and Alicia. We first experience its impact in the fifth scene, in the wider reverberations of the long speeches in which they confess to each other the feelings of guilt, remorse, and frustration that have been the fruits of their weakness. Immediately following, the second instance is antithetical in its emotion, and in the brief, clipped phrases that carry it to us. This second time, repetition is designed to convey the ecstasy of Liebesgeburt to their auditor, Shakespeare. The echo of the Paolo and Francesca episode (Inferno, v) is caught and emotionally heightened, though the loss of simplicity and directness must be weighed heavily against the artifice of the lyrical tremolo.

IN HIS ANALYSIS of Ruben Dario's poem "Sinfonia en gris mayor," Allen W. Phillips finds that the setting of the poem suggests the idea of mist, an assertion which necessarily leads him to associate this environment with the mariner's vision of a distant and misty country: "El ambiente tranquilo se Ilena de sombra y se sugiere la idea de bruma. .... Un poco despu's, relacionada con el color gris es la vaguedad del pais lejano y brumoso entrevisto en el ensuefio del marinero."' A structural analysis of the poem will show, I believe, that the mariner's vision constitutes an inaccessible ideal which is to be equated with neither the present nor the past environment of the poem. Rather, the structure of the poem appears to reside in the antithetical relationships of these two environments to the mariner's vision. The