BLUE LILY

The Gumilev miniseries continues in a different, Sonnets, section now (the present entry originally followed Gumilev’s Tragic Giraffe, currently retained in the Russian section), with my translation of another one of his poems (this time in full), but it is now making a different point.

Conquistador.

A conquistador clad in iron armor,

I’m on my way, and happy are my steps,

Sometimes I rest in an enchanted garden,

Sometimes I bow to yawning chasms and depths.

At times the starless sky breathes mist and murmur,

I laugh and wait for dangers from afar,

I’m a believer in my lucky star,

I, conquistador clad in iron armor.

And if this soulless world allows me not

To triumph in life, and certain death’s my lot,

I call for death, it’s coming willy-nilly.

I promise that I’ll fight it to the end,

And then perhaps with my dead, stiffened hand

I’ll clutch at last that heavenly blue lily.

...This is not another Gumilev entry, entered here by mistake… To be sure, this is an offshoot of Gumilev’s poem The Conquistador, but it is an independently functioning offshoot. It is all about the… Blue Lily.

(Now, before we get to the lily, what do Gumilev, Cortez, and Pizarro have in common?-- Easy: this entry!) Francisco Pizarro’s adventurous life would have made an exciting action-adventure story and a megamovie to boot, but, unfortunately, depicting him as any kind of hero would be considered politically incorrect. On the contrary, he is usually painted as a villain, the destroyer of the Incan civilization, and there is no chance, really, that either Hollywood or the even more multiculturalism-sensitive Europeans may ever reverse this neo-historical verdict.

But fortunately these pages have not been blanched by the acid of political correctness. I can certainly write pretty much whatever I please on them and, in fact, I do. Pizarro to me can be many things, the destroyer of the Incas being one of them. But on the other hand, he was also a hero of those very cruel times responsible for far greater cruelties than he himself had ever perpetrated. And seeing him as a hero, a conquistador clad in iron armor, in the words of Gumilev’s poem, creates a different mindset, and a different take on his life and death. The conqueror of the Peruvian Incas may indeed have found Gumilev’s blue lily, as suggested by the iconic story of Pizarro’s violent death, making a pointed case for his Catholic faith. We are told that, having been under attack by the rebellious followers of his recently executed former partner, and later rival, Almagro, mortally wounded, he drew a cross of his own blood on the floor of his palace, kissed it, and died, crying out “Jesus!” with his last breath… “And then perhaps with my dead, stiffened hand I’ll clutch at last that heavenly blue lily.”

What a perfect sonnet! What a perfectly iconic painting (and how delightfully politically incorrect!) of our fallen hero Pizarro!

Not every conquistador clad in iron armor is of course entitled to his blue lily. Hernando Cortez conquered Mexico for Spain, but he failed to end his life as a hero, which kind of death Gumilev’s poem implies. He died, instead, a vilified, broken, and embittered man. Like Pizarro, he was a conquistador in the most literal sense of the word, but, unlike Pizarro, he fell short of the Gumilevian quest for the Blue Lily. He is however welcome in this Blue Lily entry, just because sometimes failure is even more telling than success… What if, with Cortez, such has indeed been the case?…