Caviedes
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[edit] Juan del Valle y Caviedes
[edit] The person
Caviedes (1645?-1697, also: Juan del Valle Caviedes) belongs chronologically to the Spanish American Baroque Colonial period, but he shares little with Baroque writers such as Sor Juana and Bernardo de Balbuena. He is instead a sharp social and political critic, pointing out to the traditional and smug Spanish American colonial administrators their shortcomings and hypocrisies.
He was born in Porcuna, Andalucía, Spain around 1645 but came to Peru at an early age and settled in the mining area of Huancavelica, where life was hard even for a Spaniard at the top of the social pyramid. It appears he quickly dissipated his fortune on gambling, drink, and the women of dubious morals who were drawn to the money and debauchery of the mining fields. Apparently he contracted a venereal disease, and was badly treated by the primitive doctors in the town, many of whom had minimal training and were basically charlatans. This illness gave rise to one of Caviedes' major themes: the damage done by physicians and their indifferent and rapacious attitude toward their patients.
[edit] His work
As a writer he does share some characteristics with several of the writers of Spanish Golden Age, such as Francisco de Quevedo and Luis de Góngora, because of his satirical, biting, vulgar, popular, and picaresque wit. But behind this criticism is a sharp social and moral attack on the abuses, injustices, and double standards of the Colonial period.
When he moved to Lima the targets of his biting satire included not only doctors, but also the Lima aristocrats and even the Vice-regal court. He attacked the clergy, lawyers, tailors, and street women, with an emphasis on the grotesque, the scatological, the ugly, the pornographic and the immoral. The scandalous aspects of his work made publication difficult during his lifetime, and it was not until years after his death that they were collected in a book titled "Diente del Parnasso" ("Tooth of Parnassus"), a reference to the biting and harsh nature of his satirical criticism and protests against the injustices of his era.
[edit] A sampler of his work (extract)
[edit] "Colloquium that a seriously ill doctor had with Death"
[edit] From: Diente del Parnaso/ Tooth of Parnassus
(Translated by Jack Child)
Take care that in your eagerness
if you treat doctors this way
you'll force the priests and sacristans
to go on all fours.
Because neither sunstroke nor excess
or the worst parents-in-law
fruit or snow without liquor,
bullet, stockade or song
kill in one year as many
as the best doctor.
[edit] References:
Chang-Rodríguez, Raquel. Voces de Hispanoamérica. Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 2004, pp. 70-74.
Child, Jack. Introduction to Latin American Literature: a Bilingual Anthology. Lanham: University Press of America,1994, pp. 97-101.
Englekirk, John E. An Outline History of Spanish American Literature. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1965, p. 29.
Solé, Carlos A., (ed.) Latin American Writers. New York: Scribner’s, 1989. (3 volumes), pp. 79-83.
