Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga

Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga (born Aug. 7, 1533, Madrid, Spain—died Nov. 29, 1594, Madrid) was a Spanish poet, known as the author of La Araucana (1569–89), the most celebrated Renaissance epic poem written in Castilian.

Ercilla received a rigorous literary education before going to the New World in 1555. He distinguished himself as a soldier in Chile during the wars against the Araucanian Indians, and he based La Araucana on his experiences. He composed the whole of the poem’s first part and sections of the second and third while on the field of battle; a number of stanzas were written during breaks in the action on whatever he had at hand, including pieces of leather, some too small to contain more than six lines of poetry. He finished the poem after he returned to Spain in 1563.

La Araucana consists of 37 cantos that are distributed across the poem’s three parts. The first part was published in 1569; the second part appeared in 1578, when it was published with the first part; the third part was published with the first and second parts in 1589. The poem shows Ercilla to be a master of the octava real, the complicated stanza in which many other Renaissance epics in Castilian were written. A difficult eight-line unit of 11-syllable verses that are linked by a tight rhyme scheme, the octava real was a challenge few poets met. It had been adapted from Italian only in the 16th century, and it produces resonant, serious-sounding verse that is appropriate to epic themes.

La Araucana describes Spanish conquests that were not comparable in importance to those of Hernán Cortés, who conquered the Aztec empire, and Francisco Pizarro, who overthrew the Inca empire. Contrary to the epic conventions of the time, however, Ercilla placed the lesser conquests of the Spanish in Chile at the core of his poem. La Araucana’s successes—and weaknesses—as a poem stem from the uneasy coexistence of characters and situations drawn from Classical sources (primarily Virgil) and Renaissance poets (Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso) with material derived from the actions of contemporary Spaniards and Araucanians.

The mixture of Classical and Araucanian motifs in La Araucana often strikes the modern reader as unusual, but Ercilla’s turning native peoples into ancient Greeks, Romans, or Carthaginians was a common practice of his time. For Ercilla, the Araucanians were noble and brave—only lacking, as their Classical counterparts did, the Christian faith. Caupolicán, the Indian warrior and chieftain who is the protagonist of Ercilla’s poem, has a panoply of Classical heroes behind him. His valour and nobility give La Araucana grandeur, as does the poem’s exaltation of the vanquished: the defeated Araucanians are the champions in this poem, which was written by one of the victors, a Spaniard. Ercilla’s depiction of Caupolicán elevates La Araucana above the poem’s structural defects and prosaic moments, which occur toward the end when Ercilla follows Tasso too closely and the narrative strays from the author’s lived experience. Ercilla, the poet-soldier, eventually emerges as the true hero of his own poem, and he is the figure that gives the poem unity and strength.

Ercilla embodied the Renaissance ideal of being at once a man of action and a man of letters as no other in his time was. He was adept at blending personal, lived experience with literary tradition. He was widely acclaimed in Spain. In Miguel de Cervantes’s 17th-century novel Don Quixote, Ercilla’s La Araucana is proclaimed to be among the best poems in the heroic style ever written, good enough to compete with those of Ariosto and Tasso. La Araucana’s more dramatic moments also became a source of plays. But the Renaissance epic is not a genre that has, as a whole, endured well, and today Ercilla is little known and La Araucana is rarely read except by specialists and students of Spanish and Latin American literatures.