A thousand-year-old poetic source.

Abstract

This article analyzes the use of rhetorical tropes as poetic strategies for naming and representing the female sexual body across different literary traditions, from pre-Hispanic poetry to modern and contemporary lyric forms. Inspired by the aesthetic impact of a verse by Haroldo de Campos, the authors undertake a critical survey of metaphors, difrasismos, and figurative substitutions that have enabled poets to address a historically censored subject through veiling, suggestion, and transgression. The study examines key examples such as the Song of the Women of Chalco, erotic poetry of the Spanish Golden Age, works by Alfonsina Storni and Ramón López Velarde, and popular Mexican verse, demonstrating how tropes fulfill poetic, social, and hermeneutic functions: they condense meaning, evade moral censorship, and defamiliarize language. The analysis culminates in an intertextual reading of “Polifemo contempla a Galatea” by Haroldo de Campos, interpreted as a Neo-Baroque rewriting that clarifies erotic ambiguities in Góngora’s Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea through highly condensed neologisms. The article concludes that figurations of the female sexual body, though less frequent than other corporeal representations, stand out for their creative audacity and their capacity to generate a metapoetic discourse that expands literary tradition and reader interpretation.