9. The line paraphrases Sor Juana’s own lines on this topic.
10. In a footnote to his translation of Sor Juana’s First Dream, Trueblood writes of Nyctimene: “For tricking her father into incest with her, this girl of Lesbos was changed into an owl, a bird believed to drink the oil of holy lamps in order to extinguish them.” The oil, presumably, was olive oil, Athena’s gift to Greece.
11. For past generations of translators, the challenge with Sappho was to fill in the blanks. In Davenport’s translation, the square brackets reflect the gaps in the extant text. But here, too, to subtract is also to add, though not by human hand: inflections of contingency, mortality, earthbound process, time …
12. Quise ayunar de tus noticias … line from a Romance written for the Countess of Paredes.
13. Discalza was the word in the original, which has been replaced with ‘barefoot’ and this explanatory endnote: Roughly speaking, convents fell into two categories, and the discalzas were those convents conforming to the most austere rules of ‘death to the world’ and penitence. One such was the convent of the Discalced Carmelites, which Sor Juana quickly left before coming to San Jerónimo.
14. Machiavelli.
15. The story is almost certainly that of Sor Juana’s contemporary and compatriot Sor María de San José, a nun and mystic eventually known throughout New Spain.
16. Many commentators have touched on the conjunction of the White Island, women and sacrifice in the Greek classical tradition. Beulah’s principal source here appears to be Gregory Nagy’s “The White Rock of Leukas.” But the legendary home of the Mexica (‘Aztlan’) is also sometimes translated as White Island or Isle of Whiteness, their exodus from which was triggered by the Aztec war god’s sacrifice of his sister. Curious (for her) that Beulah notes this fact but has made no discernible use of the parallel.
17. Though Sor Juana and Sappho were each called the Tenth Muse, there are only one or two direct mentions of Sappho in all of Sor Juana’s surviving works.
18. Transit to Venus’s gardens,
organ of marble, your songster’s
throat imprisons even the wind in
sweetest ecstasy.
Tendrils of crystal and ice,
alabaster arms that bewitch
fasting Tantalus’s pendant desire,
banquets of sweetest misery …
19. Beulah’s adaptation of an adaptation by Dusquesne and of direct translations by Davenport and Barnstone.
20. A wry allusion, perhaps, to one of the posts held by the painter Velázquez at the court of Philip IV.
21. Matins being the last prayer of the night, Lauds the first in the morning. Though the Divine Office may vary widely, the hours at San Jerónimo may reasonably be supposed as follows: Lauds—daybreak. Prime—7 A.M. Terce—9 A.M. Sext—noon. Nones—3 P.M. Vespers—5 P.M. Compline—8 P.M. Matins varies the most, anywhere from 9 P.M. to, say, 1 A.M. at San Jerónimo, in particular.
22. Bénassy-Birling (p. 226) appears to have provided the basis for speculations about the Godinez affair.
23. In one of the great scandals of the early seventeenth century, the Ursuline convent at Loudun was reported to have been seized by mass visions of erotic congress with the Devil.
24. Núñez writes these injunctions to nuns in his Distribucion de las obras del dia. Cited by Wissmer in Coloquio Internacional: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y el pensamiento Novohispano.
25. The Council of Trent was convened to formulate responses to the Protestant Reformation. Among the reforms introduced: strict enclosure of nuns; no preaching except by approved ministers, especially not by women; institution of Inquisition Index of banned works.
26. As Queen Christina’s tutor, Descartes was called to answer questions at all hours of the night. Unused to the Swedish climate, Descartes caught cold one winter night and died shortly afterwards. Or so the legend goes.
27. Probable source of the translation: http://www.windweaver.com/christina/.
28. Clytie/Clytia was an Oceanid said to be in love with not Apollo but Helius, designated in Sor Juana’s phrase as ‘father of lights.’
29. The ontological distinction between the written and the oral in New Spain, as illustrated by the Conquest’s Requerimiento, seems to be one first offered by Margo Glantz.
30. The discussion of Aristophanes and Aeschylus appears to entwine observations made separately by Alan H. Sommerstein (on Aristophanes) and Richard Lattimore (on Aeschylus).
31. In another translation, Aristophanes has Lysistrata refer to these as Milesian Six-Inch Ladies’ Comforters and to lament the wartime constraints on the importation of leather phalluses from Miletus that cruelly increased the dissatisfaction of the women who waited….
32. Translation by Lattimore.
33. Translation by Sommerstein.
34. According to Ovid, the spring’s waters changed the hitherto male offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite into an androgyne, thence ‘hermaphrodite.’ Hermaphroditus proceeded to put a more general curse on the spring: that any man entering it should emerge half-man. Therefore Sor Juana’s reference has been thought a careless one, as regards her. But it may be a subtle way of suggesting that were one an androgyne already, the curse might be reversed.
Tarquin meanwhile, according to legend, committed the rape of Lucretia that led to her suicide.
35. Sor Juana, Or the Traps of Faith, a magisterial biography of one great Mexican poet by another, a book destined to become an instant landmark in both Sor Juana scholarship and the history of intellectual biography. All of the quotations remaining in this chapter are from Paz’s work, notably from pp. 216–18, 482–84, 505–08.
36. Based on their content, I would be tempted to place these letters closer to the end of Beulah’s descent into the underworld, but logically they must have been written much sooner, so I place them here. Yet again I find myself stunned that she could crash so hard, then within a few days pick herself up and keep going, keep working, keep the holocaust raging in her mind concealed from the rest of us, from me. I have not been able yet to determine which of these letters—if any, or in what form—she might have actually sent. I have found no evidence that Mr. Paz ever replied.
37. A discussion of Sor Juanas putative heretical quietism appears in Bénassy-Birling.
38. That Sor Juana was the first in her time to return to an ancient notion of Beauty as the Fourth Transcendental is the thesis of Tavard, fully developed in Sor Juana and the Theology of Beauty.
39. The phrase ‘this white Eden’ in reference to Canada was used in a valedictory address, by a recent arrival from Vietnam, to an assembly of graduands at Bow Valley College in Calgary.
Phoenix BOOK FOUR
1. Mexican cosmology is so complex that I undertake these few lines of gloss supremely confident of being fundamentally in error and in excellent company. Take a hard right at the Greeks. Abandon the concepts of monotheism and polytheism. Ponder instead a split such as numberlessness and multiplicity. Think not of a pantheon but of a palette—tones and hues, lights and darks. Think not of metamorphosis but of molecular biology, genetics, nuclear physics—valences and charges, base pairs and sequences of attributes … orbits. Imagine a series of masks but with no face behind them; the masks change and the constellation of attributes varies, depending on the context or season. Consider the metaphor of polarities, pairings of extremes—male/female, many/none, both/neither. One such pairing is Lord/Lady Two, the Lord and Lady of Duality itself, presiding over the highest level of heaven. Male/female pairings are common—it may be about androgyny, or it may be that this offers the most intuitive and natural emblem for the notion of elements in tension. Think hydrogen, think fission. The myth of the dragon twins may be an account of the forces unleashed when the pairings and constellations are broken, or may be an account of something else altogether….
2. Variously translated as Plumed Serpent, Precious Serpent, FeatherSerpent, PreciousFeatherSerpent. Sometimes referred to as the Phoenix of
America.
3. The kinsmen of FeatherSerpent appear to be guises and avatars of the broader constellation of powers attributable to Quetzalcóatl.
4. Precious Eagle Fruit: the human heart.
5. Again, little of this made any sense at all until Beulah’s notes on clostridium dificile turned up: one of 400 species of benevolent foreign organisms colonizing the human intestinal tract in vast quantities (constituting a mass of nearly a kilogram) and, if present in the proper proportions, making digestion possible and preventing disease.
6. In keeping with our stated policy of giving critical air-time to Beulah’s standard-bearers, a word on ambition from Italo Calvino: “Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function …” Six Memos for the Next Millennium.
7. Paz, p. 367.
8. Margaret Sayers Peden’s translation of Octavio Paz paraphrasing Sor Juana herself.
9. Sor Juana’s frequent recourse to structuring her ironies in triangles was detected and discussed in detail using romance 43 by Alessandra Luiselli, “On the Dangerous Art of Throwing Down the Gauntlet: the Irony of Sor Juana toward the Viceregents de Galve,” a close reading of Sor Juana’s relations with the last viceroy and vicereine she was to know and serve before her death.
10. Although many SorJuanistas have noted the irony in Sor Juana’s lines of welcome to an incoming archbishop who hated comedies and women in roughly equal measure, Antonio Alatorre and Martha Lilia Tenorio have developed the thesis (and imaginatively assembled the details) that a fateful enmity was set in motion that night. Indeed throughout this whole “Seraphina” chapter one recognizes their insights, on fencing, Camilla, the Seraphina letter and the Archbishop’s enmity.
11. Margaret Sayers Peden’s fine translation of Sor Juana’s response runs to seventy-two pages in Penguin’s bilingual paperback edition. It has been violently abridged here, with what remains only just sufficient to convey the flavour of a text that, as pointed out by Penguin, “predates, by almost a century and a half, serious writings on any continent about the position and education of women.” One might add here that for roughly two centuries, say 1725 to 1940, the name of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz went largely unmentioned.
12. “Several factors make Sor Juana’s last years seem sadly ‘modern.’The first is the theological—today we say ideological—nature of her personal difficulties and quarrels … Personal quarrels disguise themselves as clashes between ideas, and the true protagonists of our acts are not we but God or history. Reality is transformed into an enigmatic book we read with fear: as we turn the page we may find our condemnation. We are an argument with which a masked person challenges another, also masked; the subject of a polemic whose origins we are ignorant of and whose denouement we shall never know. Neither do we know the identity of the masked powers who debate and toy with our acts and our lives: where is God and where the Devil? Which is the good side of history and which the bad? … Another resemblance between our age and Sor Juana’s is the complicity, through ideology, of the victim with his executioner. I have cited the case of Bukharin and others accused in the Moscow trials. Sor Juana’s attitude—on a smaller scale—is similar; we have only to read the declarations she signed following her general confession in 1694. This is not surprising; her confessor and spiritual director was also a censor for the Inquisition. Political-religious orthodoxies strive not only to convince the victim of his guilt but to convince posterity as well. Falsification of history has been one of their specialties.” Octavio Paz, Sor Juana.
13. As an option slightly less inelegant than inserting dozens of citations throughout the chapter, the editor elects to acknowledge the principal and most likely sources for the ideas developed here. Two articles discuss Sor Juana as one of the great musical theorists of her age: Mario Lavista’s “Sor Juana musicus,” and Ricardo Miranda’s “Sor Juana y la música: una lectura más.” Tavard in his Sor Juana and the Theology of Beauty presents Sor Juana as being the first thinker of her time to take up Saint Jerome’s notions of beauty, treating it throughout her work as a fourth transcendental attribute of the divine, and in a sense the plus ultra of the other three. And one final source, Beulah’s Octavio Paz, hovers over this chapter, very near, before she discards him too.
14. …and like a pregnant cloud, encumbered
by her gravid charge
condensed of earthly exhalations,
cloudbursts of agony perspiring
—terrible cloud serpent
whose trumpet is the thunderclap
that rends the airs of the empyrean—
15. Fisher of flocks, Pastor of schools,
at times it is his crook
and shepherd’s call we answer to,
at times his net that gathers us in …
16. Alessandra Luiselli.
17. The Persian mathematician in question might well have ventured an opinion on the Catholic Monarchs’ expulsion of the Spanish Jews by edict and the Spanish Moors by force of arms. Of Christianity, Al-Biruni once wrote,“Upon my life, this is a noble philosophy, but the people of this world are not all philosophers…. And indeed, ever since Constantine the Victorious became a Christian, both sword and whip have been ever employed.”
18. Sweet deity of the air, harmonious suspension of the senses and the will, in which the most turbulent awareness finds itself so pleasurably enthralled. And thus: your art reduces to what surpasses even science, to hold the soul entire suspended by the thin thread of one sense alone …
19. Sweet-throated swan, suspend the measures of thy song: Chorister behold, in thyself, the master before whom Delphi bows, and for earthly panpipes changes heavens’ lyre …
20. See “The Woman/The Witch: Variations on a Sixteenth-Century Theme (Paracelsus, Wier, Bodin)”by Gerhild Scholz Williams, which offers an enchanting introduction to the topic.
21. Translation by Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter.
22. Verses by John of the Cross, something of a graveyard for translators, apparently, for encompassing Dante’s depths and Sappho’s intensities beneath a surface simplicity.
… Of peace and piety
it was the perfect science,
in profoundest solitude
the narrow way
was a thing so secret, yet understood,
that there I stood, stammering,
all sciences transcended …
23. This craft of knowing nothing is of such exalted power—even with all the sages arguing—as never to be persuaded that its own simplicity does not come to encompass non-understanding … all sciences transcending.
24. As mentioned briefly in Book Two, Susan Gillespie traces the theme of‘women of discord’ through the Mexica histories and legends. Sacrificed, these women serve as catalyst—fuel, one would almost say.
25. Aeschylus, Oresteia, translated by Richard Lattimore.
26. Even the casual reader of Mexica histories is struck by the frequency with which themes and details recur in various narratives. Given that the storytellers and their audiences were influenced by the idea of Time as having a cyclical or spiral structure, it is not surprising that they should look for patterns, and therefore find them. But it would also appear that, in addition, the chroniclers planted them there: that is, the Mexicas revised the ancient histories, in inscribing themselves within a cycle of stories predating their own by at least a millennium; in highlighting those elements of new events corresponding to the older pattern; and, conversely, in drafting a revisionist version in conformity with what was seen to be the mythic structure of reality. In a sense, then, much of Mexica divination was not of the future but of the past, history being a form of prophecy. (Curiously enough, Carlos II, the last Hapsburg King of the Spanish Empire, had adopted methods at least superficially like those used by Moctezuma II, the last Emperor of the Aztecs.)
27. Don Juan S
áenz del Cauri is a near perfect anagram for Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. What is one to do with little touches like these? The sensible editor notes them and moves on. The man does not. If Beulah were here she might have laughed. Not everything’s about you, Don. But she is not here, will never be. How much could she foresee of what would happen to me in the aftermath of the train wreck she’d been planning for me? Was this anagram one of Beulah’s little taunts? If so how am I to respond—by inserting myself into the story, by placing my own little persecutions in the balance against those of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz? Or maybe I too am to see signs everywhere, patterns, and dismiss them as coincidence …
28. This excerpt from the sentencing request of Prosectur Deza y Ulloa, and the later one from the verdict of Master Examiner Dorantes, are verbatim translations from Inquisition records now in the Mexican National Archives, quoted in Castorena, pp. 297–300.
29. John of the Cross. From “I Live Yet Do Not Live in Me.” It’s not clear whether Beulah intended to translate these opening lines, as she had begun to do with other chapters. Roughly, “… Living in darkest fear / And yet I hope and wait / dying because I do not die …”
30. The Nahuatl phrase for ‘Enemy of Both Sides’ appears in a batch of e-mail printouts, this one from the distinguished scholar and lexicographer R. Joe Campbell. Other names for the Enemy of Both Sides: tenepantla motecaya, nezahualpilli (FastingPrince), tezcatlipoca, moyocoyatzin, chicoyaotl.
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