La Araucana by Alonso de Ercilla: read free online & download PDF or EPUB

The poem opens with a declaration: “No las damas, amor, no gentilezas / de caballeros canto enamorados” (“Not ladies, love, nor the graces of knights in love do I sing”), but war. It describes Chile and the State of Arauco, whose people, it says, “no ha sido por rey jamás regida / ni a estranjero dominio sometida” (“has never been ruled by a king nor bowed to foreign rule”), and tells how they rise against Pedro de Valdivia. The assembled chiefs argue over who should lead them, and old Colocolo proposes that the leader be whoever can hold a great log on his shoulders longest: Caupolicán carries it for two days and two nights.

At the battle of Tucapel, when the Araucanians are already fleeing, a young chief’s son who served Valdivia as a page goes over to his own people and turns them back: he is Lautaro. Valdivia dies, and Lautaro, made Caupolicán’s lieutenant, defeats the Spaniards again and again, until reinforcements arrive from Peru by sea and land with Don García Hurtado de Mendoza. Ercilla himself comes with them.

From then on the narrator is a witness. He tells of the assaults on the fort at Penco, the battles of Millarapué and Purén, the duel between the warriors Tucapel and Rengo and the punishment of Galbarino, whose hands are cut off and who returns before the Araucanian senate to demand that the war go on. Between battles he hears love stories from native women, like Tegualda, who searches among the dead for her husband’s body. And the poem opens onto other worlds: in a dream he sees the capture of Saint-Quentin, and in the cave of the wizard Fitón he watches the battle of Lepanto.

Ercilla wrote at the height of the Spanish Golden Age and brought the epic of the Italian Renaissance, that of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, to the history of his own time, in octavas reales: stanzas of eight eleven-syllable lines. What was new is that he sings not of legendary heroes but of events he lived through; Menéndez Pelayo called it the first work of modern literature in which contemporary history was raised to the dignity of epic. In the prologue he says he wrote it during the war itself, “muchas veces en cuero por falta de papel” (“often on leather for lack of paper”).

It is still read, above all in Chile, for the greatness it gives the Araucanians, the Mapuche, though written by one of the victors: Caupolicán, Lautaro, Colocolo and Galbarino are heroes on the scale of the Greeks and Romans, and Ercilla himself defends, in the prologue, seeming “algo inclinado a la parte de los araucanos” (“somewhat inclined to the Araucanians’ side”). It was a success in its day, with seventeen editions in the sixteenth century alone, and came to be considered Chile’s national epic.

Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga was born in Madrid on 7 August 1533 and died in November 1594 (some sources say 1595), in Madrid or, according to others, in Ocaña. He was a page to Prince Philip, the future Philip II, and went with him on his travels through Europe, as far as his wedding in England.

In 1556 he went on to Peru and Chile with Don García Hurtado de Mendoza, fought against the Araucanians and began his poem there. Back in Spain he published La Araucana, dedicated to Philip II, and was made a knight of the Order of Santiago.