Luận án so sánh Cántico espiritual và Rāsa Līlā của Gloria M. Hernández

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Signature: _____________________________ ______________ [Student’s name typed] Date Presence, Absence and Divine Vision. A Comparative Study of the Cántico espiritual and Rāsa Līlā By Gloria M. Hernández Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program of Spanish and Portuguese _______________________________ María M. Carrión, PhD Advisor ______________________________ Laurie L.

Patton, PhD Committee Member _______________________________ José Quiroga, PhD Committee Member _______________________________ Luce López-Baralt, PhD Committee Member Accepted: _______________________________ Lisa A. Dean of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies ___________________________ Date Presence, Absence and Divine Vision A Comparative Study of the Cántico espiritual and Rāsa Līlā By Gloria Maité Hernández BFA Instituto Superior de Arte. Habana, Cuba Adviser: María M.

Carrión, PhD An abstract of A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies of Emory University in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Spanish and Portuguese 2011 Abstract Presence, Absence and Divine Vision A Comparative Study of the Cántico espiritual and Rāsa Līlā By Gloria Maité Hernández This dissertation is a comparison of the Spanish sixteenth-century text and commentary of the Cántico espiritual by Juan de la Cruz with the Sanskrit text Rāsa Līlā (The dance of divine love), a poetical work derived from the Indian oral tradition between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries, along with Srīdhara Svāmi‘s commentary. The central argument of this dissertation is that it is possible to read the Cántico espiritual and Rāsa Līlā along each other, even when they are not historically or otherwise related, and that this comparison illumines aspects of the texts that are not so obvious outside the comparative frame. Through a strong interdisciplinary dialogue, I reexamine traditional assumptions about contextual circumstances for Spanish Early Modern mystical literature.

The notions of absence and presence of the divine introduce the dissertation in order to remind the reader that it is in the transitional space between one and the other where both texts indwell, and the impulse that moves from absent to presence and from presence to absence is precisely the desire to attain the divine vision. Presence, Absence and Divine Vision A Comparative Study of the Cántico espiritual and Rāsa Līlā By Gloria Maité Hernández BFA Instituto Superior de Arte. Habana, Cuba Adviser: María M. Carrión, PhD A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the James T.

Laney School of Graduate Studies of Emory University in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Spanish and Portuguese 2011 Acknowledgments My adviser María Mercedes Carrión has stubbornly believed in this project even, and especially, when I doubted. She read every word of this dissertation, reminding me of the pleasure of the text. Laurie Patton put aside time from her many Vedic disciplines to read Rāsa Līlā with me and to re-read my writings. She knows how to ask questions that become paths.

Luce López-Baralt‘s work and mentorship have been a source of inspiration. She always reminds me of José Martí‘s words to his son: estos riachuelos han pasado por mi corazón, lleguen al tuyo. José Quiroga has shared his joy of life and knowledge, as well as his love for the India he has not yet seen. I am especially indebted to him for the help writing the grant that allowed me to devote exclusive time to this dissertation.

I look up to Francis Clooney‘s work in the comparison of Christian and Vaiśṇava texts, and I am thankful for his advice and kindness. Tatjana Gajic supported this project since its beginnings, and I am grateful for her suggestion to read the work of José Ángel Valente. Meenal Kulkarni and Madhura Godbole, my Sanskrit teachers in Pune, have been an example of how to combine the love for Sanskrit and for teaching in its utmost form. Denise Hanusek devoted many hours to reading the commentaries of Juan de la Cruz with me.

Her life and work demonstrate that the language of mysticism is not limited to the language of men. My playwriting teacher in Cuba and good friend Silvia Ramos was the first one to tell me about the difference between saying and suggesting. She knows the hidden language of poetry. My friend and mentor Roberto Arellano helped me to leave the island that we both love, and has always being available for so many years.

Christopher Brooks has carefully read and revised these pages even in dreams. I am grateful to the students of the undergraduate seminar on Iberian Mysticism that I taught at Emory in the spring of 2010. Shirley, Rainey, Beth, Aparna, Jennifer, Ted and John, thanks for reading and sharing. Manuela Ceballos has read this dissertation and given me advice as only a good friend and scholar can do.

Omar Granados has been a brother in exile. Anastasia Valecce and Andrea Maizze have been best friends in times of need. René has filled these pages with silent music. My cousin Olga has always shared my love for poetry and writing.

My sister Isabel has also been my best friend. The faces of my niece Dania and my nephew Daniel have sparked an impulse to continue writing and dreaming. Triveni Popat and Donna Maurer have nourished me with motherly warmth in beautiful afternoons. My godmother Blanca Aurora has shared with me her life of prayer and love as an authentic Carmelite.

Swami Yogatmananda has been a fatherly teacher, an interlocutor, and a lover of Juan de la Cruz in translation. John Gianfrancesco has given me unconditional love and support. The writing of this dissertation was marked by the physical loss of my loving friend and first Sanskrit teacher, Pran Popat, and to his memory I write. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: From Salamanca to Vrindāvan…………………………………….1 Chapter 1 Mysticism, Orientalism, and Comparison in the Field of Spanish Literature: A Critical Review…………………………………………………………….15 Chapter 2 Post Orientalist Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Dialogue and Methodology: The Texts and Their Contexts……………………………………………….62 Chapter 3 Presence, Absence, and Secret Meaning…………………………………….257 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………279 Author’s Note This project rests strongly upon translation in order to bring texts from Spanish and Sanskrit to English speaking readers.

For the poem of the Cántico I have consulted the translation by Colin Thompson that appears in the Apendix to The Poet and the Mystic. For the commentaries by Juan de la Cruz to the Cántico I have consulted the translation by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodríguez. For the text of Rāsa Līlā I have consulted the translation of Edwin Bryant in Krishna: The Beautiful Legend of God. For the commentaries by Srīdhara Svāmi on Rāsa Līlā I have not consulted any translation.

I have greatly relied upon the guidance of Meenal Kulkarni to read the Rāsa Līlā and the commentaries of Srīdhara Svāmi, as well as any other Sanskrit text cited here. I have ultimately decided to render the translations for what they are, exercises in interpretation. Unless otherwise noted, all quoted translations from Spanish and Sanskrit into English are mine. 1 Introduction: From Salamanca to Vrindāvan Words stand in the way, words are a window, we see by seeing through words, and by seeing through our efforts to treat them as words.

Francis Clooney, Seeing Through Texts The French philosopher Jacques Derrida says that an archive is a commencement where signs gather together. Although the story of this project did not begin in an archive, it is definitely marked by archival moments and a gathering of signs that inflected further desire and, inevitably, some fever. In the summer of 2006, I attended classes at the Old Library of the University of Salamanca to learn how to read medieval manuscripts. Two blocks away from the library is the Monasterio de San Andrés, where today‘s San Juan de la Cruz, then Juan de Santo Matía, lived as a novice from 1564 to 1568.

I was immersed in the feeling of walking in the same streets and seeing the same walls that Juan de Santo Matía had seen, and I had a last drop of naïve hope to find at least some anecdote from which I could construct the fiction of a relation between Juan de la Cruz and the Sanskrit Rāsa Līlā. One afternoon, I asked Don José Rincón, the archivero mayor of the library, if there were in those archives any document referring to India. Don José, whose kindness I had won in advance, showed me his big treasure: a facsimile edition of a sixteenth-century enameled Bible that the Jesuit missionaries had prepared with Aztec drawings in order to evangelize the inhabitants of today‘s Mexico. For Don José, the only possible ―India‖ that could inhabit the shelves of the archives in Salamanca was that of the Western ―Indians,‖ the Americas.

This event contains multiple levels of interpretation and a 2 proliferation of signs that are at work in the present research project. Derrida also says that ―archive‖ means commanding or ruling. And thus, the archive of Salamanca guards the traces of a rule that was erected in a great degree thanks to an exercise of comparison. One could argue that the Jesuit missionaries would never have been able to put together an Aztec Christian Bible without engaging the power of resemblances.

Their acts of comparison allowed them to come closer to their compared subjects and to create a bridge of communication in the first years of the Conquista. Furthermore, comparison also allowed them later on to disarticulate power and create dialogue. Since its archival beginnings, comparison renders itself comprehensible in actions of colonization and decolonization. The academic atmosphere of Salamanca during the second half of the sixteenth century was particularly marked by comparative enterprises.

First, the professor Martín Martínez de Cantalapiedra was, since 1561, in charge of the Colegio Trilingüe—founded in 1554—which taught Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic.1 The documents regarding the Colegio Trilingüe are still in the archives and have been scrutinized by scholars like Luce López-Baralt, trying to shed light upon the Oriental mysteries of the poetry of Juan de la Cruz by arguing for a possible encounter of Juan de Santo Matía with the Arabic language. Cantalapiedra‘s objective was to create a bridge of comparison between the Latin translation of the Bible to which they had to adhere by command of the Holy Inquisition, and the texts as they had been originally written, including also the Arabic because, as López-Baralt observes, it had been used for the sake of comparison with its 1 For all these details I am relying on the detailed 2006 study by Luce López-Baralt, “A zaga de tu huella”: La enseñanza de las lenguas semíticas en Salamanca en tiempos de san Juan de la Cruz. 3 related Semitic languages (A zaga 21). Not surprisingly, Cantalapiedra‘s comparative project would lead to his juridical processing and incarceration in 1572 (A zaga 44).

Closely related to Cantalapiedra‘s project is the most famous ecclesiastic scandal of the sixteenth century, that of Professor Fray Luis de León, the Augustinian monk and theology professor who occupied the Cátedra de Santo Tomás at the Universidad de Salamanca, and who was put into prison for six years and processed in 1572 under the accusation of judaizante for having translated the Song of Songs from the Hebrew to the Spanish and given it to his cousin, the nun Isabel Osorio.