Three Sonnets

148

 —translated from the Spanish by Enriqueta Carrington

158

—translated from the Spanish by Enriqueta Carrington

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was born around 1648, in a hamlet high on the skirts of the Popocatépetl volcano, in what was then New Spain, one of the kingdoms of the Spanish Empire, and is now Mexico. The third of six illegitimate children born to Isabel Ramírez de Santillana, Juana Inés grew up in the small hacienda of Panoayan, on the mountain slopes close to the place of her birth, where she learnt to speak Spanish from her family and Nahuatl from the slaves. Isabel never learned to read and write, since many thought such accomplishments redundant in a woman, but she arranged for all her children to receive instruction. Tagging along to her elder sister’s lessons, Juana Inés learned to read at the age of three and proceeded to go through the books in her grandfather’s library, starting her long quest to comprehend all of human knowledge. Around the age of seven, she kept pestering her mother for permission to dress as a boy so that she could attend the university. This absurd dream never came true, but by age sixteen she was living in the viceroyal court in Mexico City, as favorite of the Vicereine, Doña Leonor Carreto, who became the child-prodigy’s friend and protector and would eventually save many of the poet’s works from destruction.

As a girl, Juana Inés usually used her mother’s family name, Ramírez de Santillana, and occasionally her father’s, de Asbaje. She is now known mostly as Sor (that is, Sister) Juana Inés de la Cruz. This was the name she adopted in her late teens, when she took the veil at the Convent of San Jerónimo in Mexico City. Never again, for the rest of her life, did she set foot outside that cloister. She later wrote that many aspects of a nun’s life were repugnant to her, but she understood that her ideal of living alone, studying and writing without interruption, was impossible. Marriage, she knew, would place even more constraints on her love for letters. The nunnery was thus “the least disproportionate and most decent thing” she could choose. This compromise life-choice worked well for over two decades: Sor Juana Inés carved out a space for her writing amidst her nun’s duties; in her conventual cell she produced a cornucopia of poems, plays, and prose. Personal and literary friends visited her in the convent’s locutory. Her work received much acclaim and became the seventeenth-century equivalent of a best-seller in Spain and its dominions. She is still considered Mexico’s greatest poet (her name and image appear on the two-hundred peso banknote). But a female who wrote erotic and jocose sonnets (as well as religious ones) and dared express opinions on theology was unendurable to certain powerful men, in particular Aguiar y Seijas, Archbishop of Mexico. This prelate hated women so much he never allowed one into his house, even to scrub the floors, and never looked one in the face. While Sor Juana Inés had viceroyal protectors, he was forced to tolerate her, but by 1693 they were gone and the Archbishop struck. The poet was compelled to give up her reading and writing, her library of 4,000 books and her collection of musical and scientific instruments were sold for a pittance; the Archbishop appropriated the proceeds “for charity.” She was allowed to keep only three small books – prayer books, of course. She did not live long after that. In 1695 an epidemic swept the city, carrying off most of the nuns in the convent; Sor Juana Inés nursed the sickest sisters and caught the infection, dying on the 17th of April, 1695. —Enriqueta Carrington