Abstract
The library of " étoiles nouvelles ", built around Heredia's poem, is taking on surprising dimensions and leading into unexpected territory. Up to now, we've seen that the new stars take on different values depending on their context : texts from classical antiquity, treatises on astronomy, accounts of maritime exploration, and so on. Nevertheless, the complex library they build is not self-sufficient and refers to external libraries, such as that of the lost stars (cf. Marco Polo, Le Devisement du monde, 1298, in the chapter on the island of Sumatra and the disappearance of the North Star). It is tempting to make the mention of the new star a test of veracity in the context of maritime exploration narratives, postulating that the disappearance of the old stars is such an unheard-of fact that the explorer can hardly do without this description, especially as this fact does not belong to the classic repertoire of legendary navigations (monsters, whales, sea serpents, etc.). If the test is negative (no mention of a new star) in a north-south voyage narrative, then the voyage would be fictitious ; if the test is positive (mention of a new star), then the voyage is likely to be based on real memories ; the false positive is also conceivable, with a mention of a new star borrowed from a pre-existing repertoire. However, this apparently promising test proved inoperative when applied to the text of Saint Brendan's Journey, as the absence of a new star in no way argues for the fictionality of the story. If this test is ineffective, however, we can take note of the fact that the various uses of new stars in the texts denote different regimes of poeticity.
There was another poet who, in a different way from Heredia, attempted to restore to the discovery of the New World by Europeans all the magic that belongs to it : John Keats. In October 1816, a friend, Charles Cowden Clarke, introduced him to George Chapman's translation of theOdyssey (1616). This reading was a real event for the young poet, who based his sonnet on his reading notes, " On First Looking into Chapman's Homer ". Comparing Chapman's translation with other translations of Homer helps us to understand the reasons for Keats's infatuation.
