Hunger's Brides
Page 150
Kedos, yes, but kerein too—trouble, distress—and the Welsh cas—hate. But hatred of what? The synchronic God-mind troubles our torpor, disturbs our slacker dreams, drags a nightstick across the bars of the Sloth Cage. The lobotomy that does not placate—and as the patient goes ape / slashes at the web of connection / grounds the numen charge—disconnects … us. Hail all hail! to the gory idols of Delinkage, Dissociation, Coincidence, Contingency …
Phaëthon BOOK SIX
1. The quote, attributed to J. Bierhorst, is most likely drawn from Four Masterworks of American Indian Literature.
2. Clendinnen, in Aztecs: An Interpretation, describes one of the effects of obsidian wine as a kind of parrot dancing, imitative movements.
3. Rilke, apparently, from “The Spectator.” Conquests no longer fascinate. His growth consists in being defeated / by something ever-grandlier great.
4. A debt is owing here, obviously, to Camus’ The Plague.
5. Sor Juana’s First Dream. All translations of First Dream are by Alan Trueblood.
6. Sor Juana once wrote that First Dream was the only poem she had composed for herself. An exaggeration, no doubt, but there is little doubt that it was different—from her other work and from anyone else’s. Octavio Paz argues that it is without precedent in all of Spanish literature. Again Paz (and here at least one cannot quarrel with Beulah’s choice of sources, which for sentimental reasons I cite here at some length): “First Dream’s break with tradition … is a sign of her times. Something ends in that poem and something begins. This spiritual departure implies a radical change in the relationship between the human being and the beyond….” (Margaret Sayers Peden, trans.)
7. First Dream.
8. Harpocrates is sometimes identified as the Greek Horus, god of silence.
9. First Dream.
10. Edna Alford, A Sleep Full of Dreams.
11. First Dream.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. This note fragment is marked “from page 97 as observed by Emilie Bergmann.” The text in which this appears on page 97 is not specified. Emilie Bergmann has published widely on Sor Juana.
16. Antonia, it seems, draws upon devices used earlier in the century by William Shakespeare.
17. Attribution for translation?
18. Wordsworth.
19. Jann Arden.
20. Reference unknown.
21. For whatever reason, throughout this passage there appear references to and paraphrases of Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle.”
22. Plath.
23. Eliot.
24. From Ronald Wright, Time Among the Maya.
25. ‘Magic that loves the hungry.’ Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers.
26. “The Phoenix and the Turtle.”
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Debts of gratitude are owing.
To Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA), Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA), Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara, Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts for financial and logistical support covering the Hunger’s Brides theatrical tour to Mexico and a year or two of writing time. And, to the late, great Explorations program of the Canada Council.
To the staff and faculty of la Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, for inviting One Yellow Rabbit to perform staged readings from Hunger’s Brides in the Claustro’s chapel and for hosting us afterwards. To the venerable magazine Vuelta for letting us crash the party in the gran patio. A special word of thanks to the staff, faculty and writers of the Writing Studios at Banff Centre for the Arts, ’95 and ’97.
To Sor Juana scholars Emilie Bergmann and Fred Luciani for their sources and support; to Teresa Castelló Yturbide, distinguished Sorjuanista, and to Patrick Johansson, Mexicanist and Nahuatl scholar, for inviting me into their homes in Mexico to share their latest research. To Dr. Salvador Rueda Smithers of INAH for giving me free run of the Castillo museum archives. To John Pflueger for his professional and poetic ruminations on geology. To the dozens of researchers who shared their expertise on-line, through scholarly discussion lists such as FICINO, Renais-1, Aztlan, Nahuat-1, historia-matematica, ANE. Perhaps never has a book relied so greatly on the collegial offerings of so many scholars. For their often multiple replies to abstruse queries, I would particularly like to thank Mohammed Abattouy, Evelyn Aharon, Anthony Appleyard, Christopher Baker, Kevin Berland, Luc Borot, Luigi Borzacchini, Thomas Brandstetter, Galen Brokaw, Paul D. Buell, R. Joe Campbell, Geoffrey Chew, Duane J. Corpis, Chichiltic Coyotl, Sarah Davies, Myriam Everard, Joan Gibson, Jim Gomez, Paul F. Grendler, James Grubb, Scott Grunow, Jack Heller, Peter C. Herman, Chris Hermansen, Helen Hills, Tom Izbicki, Tomas Kalmar, Frances Karttunen, Dan Knauss, Anu Korhonen, Heinrich C. Kuhn, Ray Lurie, Mary Ann Marazzi, Michael McCafferty, Katherine McGinnis, Leah Middlebrook, Mark David Morris, Steven N. Orso, Helen Ostovich, Jack Owen, Dan Price, Francois P. Rigolot, Stewart Riley, Betty Rizzo, David Sánchez, Mel Sanchez, John F. Schwaller, Christoph J. Scriba, Jutta Sperling, Laurie Stras, Sharon Strocchia, John Sullivan, Roberto Tirado, Frank Young, Germaine Warkentin, Steve Whittet, the late Paolo Renzi and Linda Schele, and many others. And to Mata Kitimisayo, whoever you may be off-line, please get in touch; Random House Canada will know where to find me. A word of praise and gratitude, also, for the invaluable Sor Juana database created and maintained by Dartmouth University. And to the philosopher Terence Penelhum, for the first intimations of an ideal.
For publishing excerpts from Hunger’s Brides years before the end was in sight, thanks especially to Andris Taskans of Prairie Fire, Natalee Caple of Queen Street Quarterly, Juan Manuel Gómez of the Mexico City daily La Crónica, and to the editors of the Banff Centre anthologies Meltwater and Riprap. To Linda Spalding of Brick, which does not publish fiction, for reading everything I sent, just for the hell of it.
For certain of Sor Juana’s chapters, I drew directly from articles developed by Sor Juana scholars whom I credit in endnotes. Influential, also, were comprehensive works by Stephanie Merrim, Antonio Alatorre, Martha Lilia Tenorio, Fernando Benítez, George M. Tavard, Margo Glantz and Marie-Cécile Bénassy. And it was only years after reading it that I understood how much I had been affected by Diane Ackerman’s Reverse Thunder. Alan Trueblood’s translations gave me a first audition of Sor Juana’s English music. Thanks to Harvard University Press for its extraordinary courtesy in allowing me to reprint at length from Trueblood’s splendid A Sor Juana Anthology and from Octavio Paz’s work as translated superbly by Margaret Sayers Peden.
Two writers and their works, above all others, fired and fed the genesis of this work: Eduardo Galeano in his Memory of Fire trilogy and Blake Brooker, in The Land, the Animals, a theatre masterpiece born in the same year as Hunger’s Brides—two verses of one song, of an America that is lost. And there is a book without which this novel could not even have been imagined. Octavio Paz’s magisterial Sor Juana or, The Traps of Faith.
To other writers and artists who gave comfort and blood: Kelley Aitken, Ken Babstock, Kevin Brooker, Gregg Casselman, Joan Clark, Bo Curtis, Chris Cran, Don Gillmor, Irene Guilford, Louise Halfe, Karen Hines, Lee Kvern, Richard McDowell, Dave Margoshes, Kirk Miles, Michele Moss, John Murrell, Rosemary Nixon, Peter Oliva, Joanne Page, Mariko Patterson, Howard Podeswa, Paul Rasporich, Barb Scott, Anne Simpson, Dorothy Speak, Joy Walker, Rachel Wyatt. And to Jane, for the gauntlet in the teeth.
Special thanks to theatre angels One Yellow Rabbit, and to the crew of the Hunger’s Brides road show. Blake Brooker (for who we were then), Grant Burns (for the ending), Ralph Christoffersen (great white bear, explorador), Denise Clarke (for the unbreakable commitment, the grace), Andy Curtis (who showed how deep Donald runs and, just perhaps, reintroduced Octavio Paz to Pablo Neruda), John Dunn (heart of the house), Michael Green (fo
r helping make Núñez more than a special effect), Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez (brain-squizzer, comic, translator, theatre master, lexicographer, bringer of books and laughter), Richard McDowell (with such as these, one crosses deserts), Steve Schroeder, Elizabeth Stepkowski (for her journals and superb companionship, and for bringing Beulah to life in all her passion and yearning).
To the friends who always asked, so generous in their optimism: It’s my fault if you don’t know who you are. Cathy J., wherever you are, I hope you are well. The crew of Maiden Light (Andy, Hermann, Paolo), for the first big dream. To the friends who heaped material support upon the moral—a reading, a meal, a bed, a book, a name. Heather Elton, Warren Fick, Anne Flynn, Anne Georg, Anne Green, Emma Greenstreet, Shawna Helland, Michele Moss, Deborah Roth. And to Gerald Simon, gifted reader, gentle critic, fellow traveller on roads of myth.
My friends in Mexico form a category all their own: Alberto Ruy Sánchez, Guillermo Diego, Norma Chargoy, their son, Diego. To Amanda, thank you for the doll and the dances. I wish you love and health. And to la familia Rivera Morfín—Tey, Raúl, Raulito, Octavio and Fernando—thanks for so many things, for the introduction to Sor Juana and Nezahualcóyotl. And, of course, to Z.
From friends to editors and back again: Edna Alford at the Banff Centre, who believed before I did; Anne Collins at Random House, who believed when I had begun to stop. Surely no writer has been more blessedly mistaken in his prejudices about the editorial soul.
From editors to family: My father, for the stories and the drives, my mother, for the nursery books and nursery rhymes, my sisters, for glimpses of the exotic orient of women’s lives. To the Ikeda-Cameron family and to Lil, for teaching me the Drabiuk house rules.
These books are written for Satsuki, for enfolding me in peace these long years.
Pale mountain flower … dancing mistress of my heart.
Who has the courage to face the hardest questions,
and strength to go on without answers.
The author would like to acknowledge the kind permission of the following rights holders to reprint from their material.
Guy Davenport: Translation of Sappho, from Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman, copyright © 1980. Published with permission of the author.
Constance Garnett, revised by Avrahm Yarmolinsky: Translations from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, copyright © 1920, 1933. All selections have been reprinted with the permission of Easton Press.
Excerpt from THE GOLDEN ASS by Apuleius, translated by Robert Graves. Copyright © 1951, renewed 1979 by Robert Graves. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Richard Lattimore: Translation of Aeschylus, from THE COMPLETE GREEK TRAGEDIES, AESCHYLUS I, copyright © 1953, reprinted by permission of the publisher, University of Chicago Press.
Miguel Leon-Portilla: Translation from Nezahualcoyotl, from Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World, copyright © 1992. Reprinted by permission of University of Oklahoma Press.
Miriam Lichtheim: Translations from Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings, Vols I-III, copyright © 1973. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press.
Richard Livingston: Translation of Thucydides, from The History of the Peloponnesian War, copyright © 1943. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. Margaret Sayers Peden: Translation of Octavio Paz, reprinted by permission of the
publisher from SOR JUANA: OR, THE TRAPS OF FAITH, by Octavio Paz, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright © 1988 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Margaret Sayers Peden: Translation of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s La Respuesta a Sor Filotea, originally commissioned by Lime Rock Press, Inc., in A Woman of Genius: The Intellectual Autobiography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, copyright © 1982 by Lime Rock Press, Inc. Reprinted with permission.
Dava Sobel: Translation of Galileo, from Galileo’s Daughter, copyright © 1999 by Dava Sobel. Printed by permission of Walker & Co.
Alan H. Sommerstein: Translation from Aristophanes, from Lysistrata and Other Plays, copyright © 1973, 2002. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
Thelma D. Sullivan: Translations of Nahuatl texts from A Scattering of Jades: Stories, Poems and Prayers of the Aztecs, copyright © Rita Wilensky, 1994. Reprinted with permission.
Alan Trueblood: Translations of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, reprinted by permission of the publisher from A SOR JUANA ANTHOLOGY, translated by Alan S. Trueblood, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, copyright © 1988 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
F.J. Warnke: Translation of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, from Three Women Poets: Renaissance and Baroque: Louise Labe, Gaspara Stampa, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, copyright © 1987. Reprinted by permission of Bucknell University Press via Associated University Presses.
A.E. Watts: Translation of Ovid, from The Metamorphoses of Ovid: an English version, copyright © 1954, reprinted by permission of University of California Press.
Selections from the following material have been reprinted in a manner consistent with provisions of Fair Use.
Robert Aziz: From C.G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity, State University of New York Press, copyright © 1990.
Anne Carson: Translation of Plutarch, from Men in the Off Hours, Knopf, copyright © 2000.
Sincere efforts have been made to obtain permission to reprint from all material cited in Hunger’s Brides. Notice of any omission would be gratefully welcomed by the author, and any oversight remedied at the earliest opportunity.
PAUL ANDERSON left Canada in his early twenties and spent years travelling in Asia, studying in Europe and teaching in Latin America, logging 25,000 miles of coastal and ocean sailing along the way. Hunger’s Brides, his first novel, has been a labour of twelve years. In 1996, Alberta’s One Yellow Rabbit theatre company toured a dramatic reading adapted by the author from an early manuscript of the novel, and performed in the convent where Sor Juana died. Anderson lives for the moment in Calgary.
To learn more, please visit Anderson’s website: www.hungersbrides.com.
LEGAL DISCLAIMER
This book is a work of the imagination. It contains no facts. The names, characters, places and incidents appearing herein either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. No recipe or prescription of any sort should be inferred from lists, sets, collections or sequences of this work’s elements.
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2005
COPYRIGHT © 2004 NEW SPECS INC.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2004. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Anderson, Paul (W. Paul)
Hunger’s brides: a novel of the Baroque / Paul Anderson.
eISBN: 978-0-307-36831-7
1. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, 1648–1695—Fiction. I. Title.
PS8601.N44H85 2005 C813′.6 C2005-901321-4
THANKS TO …
(Canada)
Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation
for the Arts
(México)
Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes
Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes
v3.0
rson, Hunger's Brides