Será escuchado yo lo fío: in Garcilaso’s third eclogue, Elisa’s epitaph memorably declares the nymph’s certainty that the pastoral song which mourns her death will find a reception beyond peninsular Spain. While a post-Garcilasian pastoral gained purchase in sixteenth-century Spain, in the Americas the ‘discovery’ of ‘otros montes, otros ríos’ saw an Elysian imaginary begin to intrude upon a writerly consciousness in ‘real’ terms. Certainly the infatuated gaze of the early chroniclers upon an uncharted and undocumented landscape is characterised by varied attempts to render the unfamiliar comprehensible, with the literary apparatus they reach for both classical and biblical. Ecocritical analyses of the foundational literature of the Americas have explored the colonisers’ belief in an Edenic vision of the world, which could be either discovered intact or imposed upon the terrain. North American settlers reconceived the wild landscape they confronted as belated, having fallen away from a previous Edenic existence, a strategy which legitimised the imposition or ‘restoration’ of a utopian ideal. Analysing a North American pastoral, Annete Kolodny reminds us that writings about the New World are often impelled by the belief that ‘the ideally bountiful terrain might be lifted forever out of the canon of pastoral convention and invested with the reality of daily experience […] American pastoral, unlike European, holds at its very core the promise of fantasy as daily reality.’

In what follows, examples of pastoral composition will be considered as expressions of a European literary system which sought to apprehend and ultimately to contain otherness, to distil the enormity of the challenge to received knowledge of early modern intercultural encounter. The viceregal Peruvian context is the locus of the present chapter, which will consider an example of sacred pastoral as a staging ground for conversion, the site wherein the indigenous protagonist’s understanding of his own origins are ‘rewritten’. The primary focus will be the curious narrative poem Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Copacabana en el Perú, written by the Peruvian Augustinian friar Fernando de Valverde in Copacabana in 1641, in which a defamiliarised Arcadia becomes a framework for the preservation of creole representations of indigenous beliefs.