Hi, Glenn! Thanks for your careful read, and I'm glad the poem engaged your curiosity.
The Collins dictionary entry for "peregrino" has quite a range of connotations, from very positive to very negative:
Quote:
A
ADJ
1(=que viaja) wandering, travelling, traveling EEUU ; (Orn) migratory
2(=exótico) exotic; (=extraño) strange, odd; (=singular) rare, extraordinary
ideas peregrinas harebrained ideas
3[costumbre, planta] alien, newly-introduced
B
SM/F pilgrim
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Your scenario of veiled women on pilgrimage had quite a bit of charm of its own. However, I thought going with the more straightforwardly positive "astounding" (to convey "rare, extraordinary") would be the best fit. First, considering how ubiquitous these plants have been in southern Spain and across the whole Mediterranean for centuries, I don't think Rueda would have considered prickly pears very exotic — just as oranges are not considered very exotic by Californians and Floridians, although they originated in Asia. Second, since the poem uses the word "peregrinas" to describe the charms of a metaphorical woman, "exotic" might suggest to some the kinds of ethnic stereotypes that my half-Chinese daughters loathe.
When I hear the adjective "peregrino" used here in San Diego, it's almost always strongly negative — stupid, ridiculous, bizarre, outlandish. Since Spain was part of the early tourist industry associated with pilgrimages to Compostela and Tours, I wonder if those negative connotations developed from resentments to "outlandish" outsiders, similar to the resentments of some of my neighbors in my touristy city.
I'm not sure, but I don't think
nopales (the pads of the cactus) are used much in Spanish or other Mediterranean cooking. I only found references to jams and alcoholic distillations involving the prickly pear fruit, which is usually called "el chumbo" or "el higo chumbo" (chumbo fig) in Spain, but "la tuna" in the Americas. Nothing to do with the fish — it's an indigenous word for the prickly pear. France and Italy tend to call it "the fig from the Indies." (I think the fig reference is because prickly pears are full of edible seeds.)
Glad you enjoyed! I learned a lot, too — the main lesson being that if you wait for the prickly pears to turn red, as my family always did in my small Mojave Desert hometown, they are overripe. We found the mushy, rotten-tasting red pulp not worth the trouble of the spines, so we let our goats eradicate the plants from our hillside. Had we only known!