Aged War

Abstract

Here we have an endearingly strange text. It is one that is name-less—untitled and unsigned—and, what’s more, unfinished. The story line breaks off abruptly, and its unraveling is left hanging, pending. It is a work with neither head nor tail; neither beginning nor end; an epic poem in twelve cantos, in cold, hard hendecasyllables, written pre-sumably in the early seventeenth century, presumably in what was the kingdom and/or governance of Chile. José Toribio Medina—who, in the middle of the nineteenth century, arranged for its transcription in the National Library in Madrid, where the original or, more accurately, a draft not terribly faithful to an earlier draft is still kept—published it with Imprenta Ercilla in Santiago, Chile, in 1888 under the title, or nombre de fantasia (as much “fantasy” as “phantasm,” “specter,” or “apparition”): Las Guerras de Chile [The Chilean Wars].¹ Even more fantastically, Medina would attribute its authorship to the Sergeant Major don Juan de Mendoza Monteagudo. More recently, we have the admirable critical edition of the Chilean scholars Mario Ferreccio Podestá and Raïssa Kordic, published by Biblioteca Antigua Chilena (Santiago, 1996), which, while admitting the indiscernibility of authorship (attributing it to “Anonymous”), persists in fantasmatizing the name of the poem. In this case, there is a shift from plural to singular, resulting in an even more perilous equivocation: La Guerra de Chile [The Chilean War].²