La Araucana

La Araucana (also known in English as The Araucaniad) is a 16th-century epic poem in Spanish about the Spanish Conquest of Chile by Alonso de Ercilla. It was considered the national epic of the Kingdom of Chile and one of the most important works of the Spanish Golden Age (Siglo de Oro).

La Araucana consists of 37 cantos that are distributed across the poem’s three parts. The first part was published in 1569; the second part appeared in 1578, and it was published along with the first part; the third part was published with the first and second parts in 1589. The poem shows Ercilla to be a master of the octava real (that is Italian ottava rima), the complicated stanza in which many other Renaissance epics in Castilian were written. A difficult eight-line unit of 11-syllable verses that are linked by a tight rhyme scheme abababcc, the octava real was a challenge few poets met. It had been adapted from Italian only in the 16th century, and it produces resonant, serious-sounding verse that is appropriate to epic themes.

The work describes the initial phase of the Arauco War which evolved from the Spanish conquest attempt of southern Chile. The war would come to shape the economics, politics and social life of Chile for centuries. Ercilla placed the lesser conquests of the Spanish in Chile at the core of his poem, because the author was a participant in the conquest and the story is based on his experiences there.

On scraps of paper in the lulls of fighting, Ercilla jotted down versified octaves about the events of the war and his own part in it. These stanzas he later gathered together and augmented in number to form his epic. In the minds of the Chilean people La Araucana is a kind of Iliad that exalts the heroism, pride, and contempt of pain and death of the legendary Araucanian leaders and makes them national heroes today. Thus we see Ercilla appealing to the concept of the "noble savage," which has its origins in classical authors and took on a new lease of life in the renaissance - c.f. Montaigne's essay "Des Canibales", and was destined to have wide literary currency in European literature two centuries later. He had, in fact, created a historical poem of the war in Chile which immediately inspired many imitations.

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