‘Los Parnasos Antárticos de Diego Mexía: Transatlantic Ovid and Beyond’
Global Humanities Initiative of the School of Arts & Humanities conference
‘Los Parnasos Antárticos de Diego Mexía: Transatlantic Ovid and Beyond’
Saturday 15th October 2022
On a sunny Saturday in Autumn 2022, a group of scholars from across the Ibero-American world emerged from their respective national lockdowns and descended eagerly on Cambridge to gather in Room G.21 of the Classics Faculty and discuss… Peruvian poetry. This change in fortunes for good old G.21 was thanks to the pioneering ‘Global Humanities’ initiative by the School of Arts & Humanities Conference to promote work at the interface of classical studies in/and the Latin American context, resulting in the first conference (organised by Maya Feile Tomes) dedicated exclusively to an Ibero-American classical theme to be hosted here in Cambridge.
Conference delegates in action in G. 21, Saturday 15th October 2022
The day-long programme of talks, which was held bilingually in Spanish and English and was also livestreamed, brought together scholars from Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ireland, Peru, Spain, the UK, the USA and beyond. Although many were meeting for the first time, all were united by a long-standing interest in what is widely recognised as one of the most significant works of classicising literature to have emerged from the colonial-era Iberian transatlantic context: the Parnaso Antártico [‘Antarctic Parnassus’].
The Primera and Segunda parte of Diego Mexía's Parnaso Antártico
The Parnaso Antártico was produced at the turn of the seventeenth century by Diego Mexía, a Spanish-born writer who hailed from Seville but took up residence in Peru and travelled extensively across the Americas. (The term ‘Antarctic’ was used at the time to denote not the eponymous continent but the whole of the southern hemisphere – the very space around which Mexía moved – and was often associated with Peru in particular.) It was on one such journey, while travelling across Central America after being shipwrecked off the coast of Costa Rica in 1596, that Mexía decided to put the long, lonely hours of travel – or so he claimed – to good use by translating none other than Ovid’s Heroides, together with the Ibis. Indeed, he claimed to have purchased his copy of Ovid’s oeuvre while passing through a small town in El Salvador, attesting to (or figuring) the far-reaching transatlantic circulation of such texts. Mexía’s translations – from Latin into Spanish – were published, along with a series of fascinating yet much maligned paratexts, in the so-called Primera parte del Parnaso Antártico back in his hometown of Seville in 1608. A Segunda parte of further poetry followed a few years later, but remained in manuscript and is now held in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. While the first part is well known to Latin Americanists, the second part has been significantly less well studied, and neither is known to classicists in the Anglophone world.
(From left to right) María José Brañes, Tatiana Alvarado Teodorika, Anne Holloway, Rene Russell, Sarissa Carneiro, Stephanie Rohner, Connie Bloomfield-Gadêlha, Carlos Iglesias-Crespo, Maya Feile Tomes, José Antonio Mazzotti, Miguel Herrero
The conference brought together scholars working on both parts – including several world authorities in their fields – for the first time for a day of talks, round tables and collaborative plan-making. The plotting continued that evening at a convivial conference dinner hosted at King’s College. Thanks for the opportunity to host this pilot project are due first and foremost to the Global Humanities Network and its coordinator Greta Mijares, to Tony Brinkman, Stephen Howe, Nigel Thomson and Lina Undicino at the Faculty of Classics, to Amy Pass and the team at King’s College, Cambridge, and to all the conference delegates: Tatiana Alvarado Teodorika, Connie Bloomfield-Gadêlha, María José Brañes, Germán Campos Muñoz, Sarissa Carneiro, Philip Hardie, Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui, Anne Holloway, Carlos Iglesias-Crespo, Esperanza López Parada, José Antonio Mazzotti, Stephanie Rohner and Rene Russell. We look forward to the next steps.
Conference organiser Dr Maya Feile Tomes did her undergraduate and graduate studies in the Faculty of Classics, culminating in a PhD on epic poetry in the Ibero-American colonial world. She is now Lorna Close Lecturer in Spanish at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, and Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Classics. Her article on the curious case of Diego Mexía and the anonymous Peruvian poetess known only as ‘Clarinda’ will be published in Colonial Latin American Review later this year.