32 La Poetisa
Juana Inés de la Cruz.(1651-1695) Irreducible to labels -saint, iconoclast, feminist, there was nothing ordinary about her person or her life. She argued passionately for sexual equality and intellectual freedom, yet championed the same orthodoxy’s with which she struggled. Sor Juana was born on Nov.12, 1651 to a Spanish father and a Creole mother in San Miguel Nepantla, Mexico.
She never knew her father, and was raised by her grandfather for her first eight years until he died. He was a man with a considerable library. She learned to read and write by the age of three, she learned Latin in 20 lessons, her fire for learning was unquenchable. Her birth date is uncertain, unclear probably influenced by Sor Juana’s desire to confirm her legitimacy by obscuring her true date of birth. The church registry entry for a girl child “Inés, daughter of the Church,” is a term used when recording an illegitimate birth. That legitimacy would not have been of supreme importance in sor Juana’s time except for the accident of her genius, which led her to the highest social circles of New Spain, where the question of birth may have borne on her eligibility for a good marriage or her entry into the convent
of San Jeronimo.
Around the age of 16, Sor Juanas intelligence spread rapidly. Records show that the Viceroy of New Spain had called together the most learned men in the land -forty theologians,philosophers, mathematicians, historians, poets, and humanists -to examine the young woman of whom everyone was talking. The Viceroy reported that Sor Juana gallantly and impressively extricated herself from the questions, arguments, and objections these many men, each of his specialty, directed to her. Sor Juana quickly won the affection of the Vicerine, and spent two years in the Viceregal Palace as her protégé. She lived at court, courted by many; she was loved by many and she too possibly loved.
In 1667 for reasons unknown, Sor Juana abruptly gave up her courtly life and enters a convent -yet far from renouncing the world entirely, she converts her cell into a study filled with books, works of art, and scientific instruments and transforms her coventry into a literary and intellectual salon. She writes love poems, verses for songs and dance, profane comedies, sacred poems, an essay in in theology, and an autobiographical defense of the right of women to study and to cultivate their minds. She becomes famous, sees her plays performed, her poems published, and her genius applauded in all the Spanish dominions, half the Western world. Then suddenly, some say as instructed by the Church for their disapproval of her scandalous writings, she gives up everything, surrenders everything -her library and collections, renounces literature, and finally during an epidemic, after ministering to stricken sisters in the convent, dies at the age of forty-six.
-Octavio Paz, “Sor Juana”
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“Recounts How Fantacy Contents Itself With Honorable Love”
Stay, shadow of contentment
too short-lived,
illusion of enchantment I most prize,
fair imagine for whom happily I die,
sweet fiction for whom painfully I live.
If to your charms attracted I submit,
obedient, like steel to magnet I fly,
by what logic do you flatter and entice,
only to flee, a taunting fugitive?
‘Tis no triumph that you so
smugly boast that I fell victim to
your tyranny;
though from encircling bonds that
held you fast
your elusive form too readily
slipped free,
and though to my arms you
are forever lost,
you are a prisoner in my fantacy.
Sonnet 165
-Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz
translated by Octavio Paz