The Answer / La Respuesta (Expanded Edition). Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
sciences and tongues; a great fool cannot be contained in his mother tongue alone” (par. 32). Sor Juana interrogates and exposes her male superiors’ behavior toward others, toward scriptural interpretation, toward the acquisition and implementation of learning, toward the unity of knowledge, toward nature, culture, and gender. Most particularly, however, she castigates their myopic views on the role of women as intellectuals.
More than a century before the demise of the Inquisition and the mentality it represented, Sor Juana issued a call for a change in outlook, presenting herself as a test case but representing the intellectual cause of all women. Sor Juana used her art and her religion to be a scholar, and she used her scholarship to create a piece of literary art that defends the sacredness of poetry (as well as of women). She understood the power of language and ideology, and the unstated gender issues embedded in both. That is precisely why, despite the Baroque style of discourse, Sor Juana seems so “modern” and why she continues to rivet our interest.
A Note on the Texts
Proper names, titles of works, and quotes from textual sources (principally the Old and New Testament Bible, classical authors, and Christian commentators such as St. Jerome) are referenced in the annotations (pp. 106–143) by their line number(s) in the English translation. Other significant words, phrases, or concepts that receive clarifying and contextualizing annotation are indicated with asterisks.
In the English translation, passages given by Sor Juana in Latin (chiefly quotations) are translated and set in italics. The Latin text that Sor Juana cited can be found in italics in the Spanish text. Where surrounding passages of text seem significant to Sor Juana’s purpose, these are noted.
The biblical translation used here is the Douay-Rheims English Version of 1609, because it was translated (in many instances quite literally) from the Latin Vulgate, that Sor Juana used and knew, and because its seventeenth-century English gives a flavor closely contemporary with her time.
1 Her name is pronounced (approximately) HWA-na ee-NES day-la KREWS.
2 The term “Siglo de Oro” is applied to a period extending roughly from the early sixteenth century through the last decades of the seventeenth century.
3 “Tenth Muse” was a common term for women poets, whom men could not conceive of as other than unearthly. Sappho herself was referred to thus, as were poets of the seventeenth century, including Anne Bradstreet of England and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
4 Different sources give Juana’s name in various combinations and orders of her mother’s (maternal grandfather’s) and father’s last names: Juana Inés de Asbaje (patronymic) y Ramírez de Santillana (matronymic).
5 Of mixed white (peninsular Spanish or criollo) and indigenous Mexican ancestry.
6 Calleja’s biography appears as the substantive part of the required permission for publication (the nihil obstat) of the third and final volume of her works—that is, the assurance that nothing in its pages went against church teachings.
7 A few decades earlier the Catalonian Juliana Morel, another child prodigy, who would become a nun and translator of St. Augustine into French had been examined publicly in Lyon and Avignon. Reports of other precocious European women indicate that Sor Juana’s status may not have been as unique as claimed. Public examinations by “experts” also reflected the Baroque fascination with prodigiously learned (young) women and with the commingling or blurring of gender categories. It was a hagiograph-ic topos as well: St. Catherine of Alexandria had undergone perhaps the most famous of such legendary tests (see the discussion of villancicos in Selected Poems, below).
8 Saltimbanco (or saltabanco) may be translated variously as mountebank, charlatan, trickster, puppeteer.
9 Doña Leonor, the supposedly autobiographical protagonist of Sor Juana’s Los empeños de una casa (The Trials of a Household), says that she was known in this way (“celebrada por milagro de discreción”) OC4. 37:292–93.
10 Quoted by Sor Juana in a letter to Núñez. See Paz, Sor Juana, p. 500.
11 See Paz, Sor Juana, pp. 408–9. Paz cites a nineteenth-century history of the church in Mexico and a biography of the archbishop written by the latter’s confessor: these are, respectively, Francisco Sosa, El episcopado mexicano (Mexico City: H. Iriarte y S. Hernández, 1877–1879); José de Lezamis, Breve relación de la vida y muerte del Ilmo. y Revmo. Señor Doctor Don Francisco Aguiar y Seijas (Mexico, 1699).
12 Born in colonial New Spain of Spanish ancestry.
13 The order is named for Saint Jerome (c. 341–420).
14 The forty-nine professed nuns (those who had taken solemn vows) were supported by about a hundred and fifty other women, including some slaves. The nuns lived in independent, two-storied quarters, shared at times by younger relatives.
15 The ancient Roman imperial tradition of triumphal arches was revised during the Renaissance with constructions of wood and painted canvas, elaborately decorated with mythological themes. See Sabat de Rivers, ed., Inundación castálida, pp. 63–71.
16 In Paz, Sor Juana, pp. 495–96, 500, 502. (trans. modified by Powell).
17 Ester Gimbernat de González (in “Speaking through the Voices of Love”) discusses three love sonnets by Sor Juana (nos. 177, 178, and 183) addressed to women. While Gimbernat identifies the (conventionalized) speaker in all three as male, evidence internal to the poems supports this determination only in no. 178—the speaker’s gender is not explicit in the other two. For further discussion, see Powell, “Sor Juana’s Love Poems Addressed to Women.”
18 In Sor Juana’s lifetime, three more editions (entitled simply Poems) followed in 1690, 1691, and 1692; by 1725, a total of nine had appeared. See Sabat de Rivers, ed., Inundación castálida, pp. 26–27, 72–73.
19 Vieira (b. Lisbon, Portugal, 1608, d. Salvador, Brazil, 1697) was a prominent Jesuit, considered to be one of the great prose stylists of his day.
20 For a discussion of more recent perspectives on the still-mysterious circumstances at the end of her life, see our Preface to the Second Edition.
21 The exact nature of the “plague” is not known.
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