Sor Juana, portrait by Miguel Cabrera
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by Philip Gambone

Last week, I wrote about the life of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, as recounted in Octavio Paz's monumental biography, Sor Juana, or The Traps of Faith (Harvard, 1988). This week, yours truly, "The Writer in Mexico," takes a specific look at a few of Sor Juana's poems, some of "the most elegant and refined in Spanish," Paz says. "Few poets in our language rival her, and those who surpass her can be counted on the fingers of one hand." During her brief life (she died in 1695 at age 46), Sor Juana penned, Paz affirms, verses of "audacious beauty."

Sor Juana's greatness as a poet was recognized even in her own day. "There is no pen that can rise to the towering eminence where hers excels," wrote the 17th-century Mexican writer Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. "In her, Mexico enjoys what in previous centuries the Graces apportioned among those learned women who in history books were objects of veneration and amazement." It is no wonder that the title of her first collection, Inundación Castálida, published in Madrid in 1689, means something like "the outpouring of the Muses."

Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora
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Much of Sor Juana's work may be foreign, even off-putting, to a modern sensibility, but Paz's discussion helps us to appreciate Sor Juana's consummate achievements as a poet and a fairly independent woman of her time. Like the work of the other great Spanish-language poets of the Spanish Golden Age, her poems are intellectual, discursive, and complex. "Reason and sensibility are intertwined in her," Paz writes; "they quarrel, and again embrace like jealous lovers."

Inundación Castálida (first ed.)
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The word we use today for this kind of highly wrought poetry is "Baroque." It's a style that abounds in rich imagery and verbal mastery, full of learned allusions, artifice, and other mannerisms that now, in an age when authenticity and sincerity are valued in art, strike us as awfully contrived. Nevertheless, lovers of English Baroque poets like John Donne, George Herbert and John Milton (her near contemporary) may not find Sor Juana any more "contrived" or hard to follow.

John Milton, Sor Juana´s near contemporary
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What, asks Paz, are the distinctive elements in her poetry? He gives several answers: lucidity, irony, knowing how far to go and when to stop, clarity of thought and design, passion that ends in melancholy, a taste for introspection. Ultimately, he says, it's her love poems that define her, love poems that are unique in Spanish baroque poetry "because passion, in her, means neither fulfillment nor condemnation, but awareness."

Sor Juana's love poems (there are about 50 of them) are some of her finest, Paz declares.

"There is no other example of a nun who, with widespread approval, published erotic poems and even sexual satires." But Paz cautions us to not read too much into them. They were intended, he says, not as personal protestations of amorous intent but as "variations on a universal theme." While it is true that her poems reflect her life experience, it was a life experience primarily born out of her imagination, her ideas, and her reading. "Her erotic life was almost entirely imaginary, but not for that reason any less real or intense."

Manrique and Larkin anthology
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Sor Juana's love poems are about many things: solitude, nostalgia, desire, desolation, bitterness, contrition, jealousy, absence, grief. Her language, while often exquisitely luminous, can also be tempestuous, dark, "even purple," Paz writes. In Endecha 81, she imagines herself as Icarus, plunged into the sea by the burning passion she feels:

Sor Juana's sonnets are witty, humorous, saucy, and often include low humor, even licentiousness. "It is interesting," Paz writes, "that they were written in a convent and published as the work of a nun. This is yet another example of the conjunction of opposites so prized in her time."

Sor Juana´s Villancicos
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Paz contends that her Sonnet 165 is a key to her love poetry and to her erotic life. The title— "Que contiene una fantasía contenta con amor decente"— notes that the fantasy she will present in the poem contents itself with honorable love. "Honorable," Paz asks, "because it is a fantasy, or because it is resigned to being so? A question impossible to answer." Here are the first four lines:

Was Sor Juana a feminist? She herself would not have recognized the word, but there are many poems—in particular, her redondillas— where we find her satirizing and criticizing men:

Here, Paz writes, we see that "for the first time in the history of our literature a woman is speaking in her own name, defending her sex and, with grace and intelligence, using the same weapons as the detractors of her sex, accusing them of the very vices they impute to women."

I first became acquainted with Sor Juana's poems through a small anthology, Sor Juana's Love Poems, translated and edited by two fine LGBTQ writers, Jaime Manrique and Joan Larkin. The "thesis" of that collection was that Sor Juana penned many poems expressing an intense attraction to other women. No one would deny that. The question becomes, did she herself understand exactly what that attraction was. Paz, too, asks this question, noting that in Endecha 76, which describes a "scene of questionable taste," Sor Juana is expressing "something intimate that she does not know how to say":

Sor Juana's longest and most ambitious poem is Primero Sueño (First Dream), her 975-line spiritual autobiography about, to quote Paz, the "daring of the soul, its ecstasies, doubts, vacillations." It's a poem about "the intellect confronting the cosmos" and "the vertigo of being on the edge of the infinite."

In the poem, Juana falls asleep, dreams, tries to understand the totality of the universe, discovers she cannot and, disappointed, awakes. "Her soul," Paz writes, "had a vision so intense, so vast, so luminous and dazzling, that she was blinded; once recovered, she longed to ascend again … but she could not."

Paz contends that nowhere in all of 16th- and 17th-century Spanish literature is there anything like First Dream. Critics have called it surrealistic, a work that "prefigures the most modern modernity." I'd go so far as to call it psychedelic. But in fact, the poem is tightly composed. Sor Juana applied all her intellectual and artistic acumen to its composition.

Sor Juana (Paz)
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I confess to being totally stymied by First Dream, but also recognize the magnificence of its verbal pyrotechnics. Here are the opening lines:

Ultimately, this is a poem about intellectual passion—which, for Sor Juana, was a passion "as strong as the love of glory." And though, by the end of the poem, she has failed to grasp the totality of the universe, she has asserted, Paz says, her right to the adventure of daring to try. If you decide to tackle this poem—in English or Spanish—be ready for a rollercoaster ride. To put it crudely, it's as if she had been hitting the communion wine a bit too frequently as she was writing.

While the First Dream may not be the place to begin an acquaintance with Sor Juana's poetry, if your curiosity has been whetted, there's a lovely little anthology of her work, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden (who also translated Paz's biography), published by Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe (Tempe, Arizona) that's available at the Biblioteca.

Sor Juana stands as one of the glories of Mexico's colonial period in the arts, and indeed in all of this country's artistic history. She's not easy reading, but no one who loves Mexico and its literary heritage should ignore her.

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. He is the author of five books, most recently As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. It is available through Amazon, at the Biblioteca bookshop, and at Aurora Books off the Calzada de la Aurora.

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