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About Sor Juana (English)

About Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz



1. Introduction
The seventeenth-century poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz may not for many of you be the most well-known writer on the Introduction to Hispanic Texts course, and perhaps only a few of you will have thought of choosing her as as a writer to work on in supervisions. So, in this lecture, I hope to show you:
· why I think her work is well worth studying in depth
· something of the uniqueness of her poetry
· the relevance of her thinking today, particularly the appropriation of her work that has been made for modern feminism.

The title I have given this lecture is DIFFERENCE and INDIFFERENCE. Some of the initial ideas I'd like to gather around these two poles are:
DIFFERENCE in the sense of - sexual difference (she forces us to change the way in which we read the cannon of male writers) - linguistic difference (her work is not, as some have claimed, a mere copy of contemporary Spanish styles) - socio-cultural difference (her work is not reducible to European literature and themes)
INDIFFERENCE in the sense of - a feminine strategy of resistance to male appropriation - denial of fixed sexual roles - a telling silence in her work on questions of theology and religion.


2. Context
Before going any further, however, it is necessary to give some sense of a context for Sor Juana's poetry. You can gain a sense of this by watching the film, Yo la peor de todas, made by the feminist Argentine director María Luisa Bemberg (available in the language laboratory; see also the video clip included on this website). This is a fairly accurate dramatization of Octavio Paz's major study Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, o, las trampas de la fe, which remains the fullest account of her life and work to date, and which you should dip into. I can only outline some of the major points here:
Seventeenth-century Mexico, known then as Nueva España, was a highly autocratic society, ruled by viceroys sent from Spain and rotated in practice every seven or eight years.

The arch-bishop held great power, and the Santo Oficio, or Holy Inquisition, was greatly feared (Sor Juana mentions it in a famous letter, saying that she does not wish to get into trouble with it).
The religious climate of Nueva España was much more orthodox than in Spain: Catholicism was a well implanted religion in Spain, but in the Americas it was relatively new.

The colonial state was highly centralized:
the indigenous people were governed by specific laws, and there were special statutes for different ethnic groups -- blacks, mulattoes, indians, mestizos, creoles, and Spaniards
religious orders were governed by specific laws, as were virtually all different social groups
ownership of land was strictly controlled -- much was owned by the Church, while the state was interested in preventing the rise of large, powerful, creole land-owners who might represent a source of antagonism to the rule of Spain.
Mexico City had a population of roughly 100,000, of which 20,000 were Spaniards and creoles, and 80,000 were indigenous, mestizos, and mulattoes.
It was the centre of education, with the University, only open to men, founded in 1551.
It was the seat of the viceregal Court, rivaled in importance only by the court of the Viceroyalty of Perú in Lima.

The Court was the centre of the moral, literary and aesthetic codes and conventions, and it is impossible to understand Sor Juana's poetry without realizing its importance:
Octavio Paz says that, of the three central institutions of the country -- the University, the Church, and the Court -- the Court represented an aesthetic and vital way of life, a "dramatic ballet whose characters were the human passions, from the sensual to the ambitious, dancing to a strict yet elegant geometry" (in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, o, las trampas de la fe).

One of the major themes of Sor Juana's work is knowledge, and in particular the right of women to have access to learning. In the context of seventeenth-century New Spain, however, knowledge is a dangerous commodity and one that is carefully controlled by the religious hierarchy, rigorously policed by the Holy Inquisition. Scientific knowledge poses a threat to the basis of religious power, as does any interpretation of Scripture that runs counter to the prevailing orthodoxy. In the hands of a woman, any claim to knowledge is triply suspect because access to knowledge of the "Divine Order" (whether scientific or theological) is strictly mediated through a patriarchal hierarchy of men. It is hardly surprising, then, to find that Sor Juana's meditations on knowledge are peppered throughout her work with silence, hermeticism, and contradiction.
The Court, in which Sor Juana spent four years of her adolescence, was the point of contact with Europe and European aristocratic culture; the Church was the controller and censor of knowledge and culture as ideological instruments, and was at times in conflict with the more liberal atmosphere of the Court. Sor Juana's work negotiates a precarious feminine space between these competing institutions. For the culture they controlled was almost entirely a masculine culture. Its writers were men and its readers were men. The doors of the educational institutions were entirely locked for women. This is why it is so extraordinary that the greatest writer to emerge from Nueva España, the first great poet of Spanish America, should have been a woman.


4. Playing with form
To fully understand Sor Juana's work, it is necessary to understand something of the literary concerns of her time, and the way in which she plays with those concerns. Some of the main terms associated with the literature of Sor Juana's time are:
Gongorismo
Culteranismo
The Baroque
Gongorismo is a literary style named after the famous Golden Age Spanish poet Luis de Góngora. Sor Juana very much admired his work, and her great poem "Primero sueño" is in some senses a homage to Góngora's "Soledad primera".
Culteranismo is virtually synonymous with gongorismo: the style involves extreme complexity of imagery and metaphor, with neologisms and archaisms. In many ways it is a feast of language, an excess of the signifier over the signified, and it is one aspect of ...
The Baroque: this term is widely used to describe the music and literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and denotes a style in which an exuberance of detail represents a celebration of the signifying material of the work of art, be it wood, stone, paint, word, or sound.
Baroque art is obsessed with form to the extent that form itself can often become the content, the raison d'être, of the work of art
the wealth of detail and decoration become concerns in themselves, appear for their own sake rather than being motivated by the need to get a message across
Baroque poetry does not just employ metaphors of things, but instead metaphors of metaphors, or even metaphors of metaphors of metaphors
poems written in this style, such as those of Góngora and Sor Juana, do not just use tropes, but instead they trope their own troping activity (an ugly phrase, meaning simply that the very activity of using tropes and figures often becomes the subject of the art form, revelling in the excess of signifier over signified)
Baroque poetry delights in the rhythm and sound of words, in their materiality or palpability (the sense that you can almost feel or touch them)
modern theorists have defined this highlighting of the materiality of signs and sounds as one of the most basic aspects of all poetry -- the twentieth-century linguist Roman Jakobson defined poetry in this way when he wrote that "the poetic function promotes the palpability of signs".
It should now be possible to use some of these ideas in our discussion of Sor Juana's poems and their manipulation of literary form.
Poem 61 "Que pinta la proporción hermosa de la Excelentísima Señora condesa de Paredes" provides a very good example of a number of these concerns. The poem has a distinctive formal feature: it is written entirely in lines that commence with esdrújulas. These are words which are stressed on the antepenultimate syllable (three syllables from the end), and they are a relatively rare word form in Spanish (the technical word for them in English is "proparoxytone"). Examples are círculo, pólvora, fórmula, sílaba, but let's look at how Sor Juana uses them (these are the first four stanzas of an eighteen-stanza poem -- do not worry about the complex meaning of the words at this stage, just read it for its sound and let the images wash over you):
61
Pinta la proporción hermosa de la Excelentísima señora condesa de Paredes [. . .]

Lámina sirva el cielo al retrato, Lísida, de su angélica forma: cálamos forme el sol de sus luces; sílabas las estrellas compongan. Cárceles tu madeja fabrica: Dédalo que sutilmente forma vínculos de dorados Ofires, Tíbares de prisiones gustosas. Hécate, no triforme, mas llena, pródiga de candores asoma; trémula no en tu frente se oculta, fúlgida su esplendor desemboza. Círculo dividido en dos arcos, pérsica forman lid belicosa; áspides que por flechas disparan, víboras de halagüeña ponzoña.
[. . .]
The poem was probably written as a tour de force, a piece of verbal pyrotechnics designed to elicit the response "¡Vaya inteligencia!", and indeed it is extremely clever. Apart from the esdrújula form, clearly delighting in the rhythm and sounds of the words for their own sake, the poem sets up, in true Baroque style, a series of more and more elaborate images, similes, and metaphors, to describe the beautiful Lísida (Lysis), whose portrait is supposedly being "painted" by these lines. Many of these images push the bounds of similarity and comparison, threatening to swamp the "portrait" with improbable images. Many of the images are, indeed, comments on the poem's image-making process (its troping activity), and this time let's read with the emphasis on the meaning of the images (look at the translation if you need help):
Lámina sirva el cielo al retrato, Lísida, de su angélica forma: cálamos forme el sol de sus luces; sílabas las estrellas compongan. Cárceles tu madeja fabrica: Dédalo que sutilmente forma vínculos de dorados Ofires, Tíbares de prisiones gustosas. [. . .] Cátedras del abril, tus mejillas, clásicas dan a mayo, estudiosas: métodos a jazmines nevados, fórmula rubicunda a las rosas. Lágrimas del aurora congela, búcaro de fragancias, tu boca: rúbrica con carmines escrita, cláusula de coral y de aljófar.
May Heaven serve as plate for the engraving portraying, Lysis, your angelic figure; may the sun turn its beams into quills, may all the stars compose their syllables. Your skein of locks is as a prison-house, a Cretan labyrinth that twists and curls in webbings of golden Ophirs, in Tibbars of fair prison-cells. [. . .] Your cheeks are April's lecture halls, with classic lessons to impart to May: recipes for making jasmine snowy, formulas for redness in the rose. In your mouth Aurora's chill tears are kept in a many-scented vase; its rubric is written in carmine, its clause penned in coral and pearl.
Translated by Alan Trueblood
Just looking at the vocabulary of the poem, there are many words to do with form, method, style, writing -- some eighteen in all (e.g., retrato, forma, cálamos [=quills], sílabas, compongan, triforme, transforma, fórmula, cláusula, etc.). These suggest that the poem is as much about the act of portraying Lysis as it is about the countess herself.
Perhaps even more interesting than this emphasis on form is the imagery of labyrinths and prisons that runs throughout the poem. Words associated with prison and fixing are: cárceles, dédalo (labyrinth), prisiones, confinantes, congela, aprisiona, Tántalo (Tantalus, imprisoned in Hades), clausura. It is as if the very attempt to fix the image of Lysis in words represented a kind of imprisonment, with the beloved caught both in the labyrinths of poetical language and in the prisonhouse of desire.
While I have looked at this poem in terms of its play with form, issues of gender are also subtly hinted at. Addressing the beloved as Lísida (Lysis) clearly places the poem within the rhetorical conventions of Golden Age love poetry, but those conventions now threaten to become a subtle prison. It is the woman who is trapped within an incarcerating linguistic system, fixed and represented, but somehow lost behind the elaborate symbolic system. Moreover, the lines which absurdly compare the beloved's cheeks with a University Classics lesson are not just rhetorical play: Sor Juana was acutely aware that women were excluded from the lecture halls of the University (she declared in her famous letter that from an early age she had been aware of this as an injustice). To force the comparison between female beauty and the seats of learning from which women were excluded is to create a jarring image which must call into question the conventional assignments of femininity and aesthetics, masculinity and knowledge, as well as call into question the very modes of representation that depend on such a system.
Poem 126 is a simpler, but very intense, version of the ideas presented in the previous poem:
126 En un anillo retrató a la señora condesa de Paredes; dice por qué
Este retrato que ha hecho copiar mi cariño ufano, es sobrescribir la mano lo que tiene dentro el pecho: que, como éste viene estrecho a tan alta perfección, brota fuera la afición; y en el índice la emplea, para que con verdad sea índice del corazón.
Note the ambiguity of the word sobrescribir here: the poem and/or portrait (for the poem claims to be a miniature painting on a ring, of the type that lovers might have sent to each other when separated by long distances) is an over-writing, a writing in excess, which threatens at the same time to overwrite or expunge that which it would express -- her affection and love. The theme of this poem clearly illustrates the baroque idea of excess -- here writing or painting as an excess of the signifier, an overflow which does not 'fit' the body.
You should now be able to do for yourselves similar analyses for poems 127, 102, and 195.

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You Foolish Men


You foolish men who laythe guilt on women,not seeing you're the causeof the very thing you blame;
if you invite their disdainwith measureless desirewhy wish they well behaveif you incite to ill.
You fight their stubbornness,then, weightily,you say it was their lightnesswhen it was your guile.
In all your crazy showsyou act just like a childwho plays the bogeymanof which he's then afraid.
With foolish arroganceyou hope to find a Thaisin her you court, but a Lucretiawhen you've possessed her.
What kind of mind is odderthan his who mistsa mirror and then complainsthat it's not clear.
Their favour and disdainyou hold in equal state,if they mistreat, you complain,you mock if they treat you well.
No woman wins esteem of you:the most modest is ungratefulif she refuses to admit you; yet if she does, she's loose.
You always are so foolish your censure is unfair;one you blame for crueltythe other for being easy.
What must be her temperwho offends when she'sungrateful and wearieswhen compliant?
But with the anger and the griefthat your pleasure tellsgood luck to her who doesn't love youand you go on and complain.
Your lover's moans give wingsto women's liberty:and having made them bad,you want to find them good.
Who has embracedthe greater blame in passion?She who, solicited, falls,or he who, fallen, pleads?
Who is more to blame,though either should do wrong?She who sins for payor he who pays to sin?
Why be outraged at the guiltthat is of your own doing?Have them as you make themor make them what you will.
Leave off your wooing and then, with greater cause,you can blame the passionof her who comes to court?
Patent is your arrogance that fights with many weaponssince in promise and insistenceyou join world, flesh and devil.

Redondillas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Redondillas


Hombres necios que acusáis
a la mujer, sin razón,
sin ver que sois la ocasión
de lo mismo que culpáis;

si con ansia sin igual
solicitáis su desdén,
por qué queréis que obren bien
si las incitáis al mal?

Combatís su resistencia
y luego, con gravedad,
decís que fue liviandad
lo que hizo la diligencia.

Parecer quiere el denuedo
de vuestro parecer loco,
al niño que pone el coco
y luego le tiene miedo.

Queréis, con presunción necia,
hallar a la que buscáis
para prentendida, Thais,
y en la posesión, Lucrecia.

¿Qué humor puede ser más raro
que el que, falto de consejo,
él mismo empaña el espejo
y siente que no esté claro?

Con el favor y el desdén
tenéis condición igual,
quejándoos, si os tratan mal,
burlándoos, si os quieren bien.

Opinión, ninguna gana,
pues la que más se recata,
si no os admite, es ingrata,
y si os admite, es liviana.

Siempre tan necios andáis
que, con desigual nivel,
a una culpáis por cruel
y a otra por fácil culpáis.

¿Pues como ha de estar templada
la que vuestro amor pretende?,
¿si la que es ingrata ofende,
y la que es fácil enfada?

Mas, entre el enfado y la pena
que vuestro gusto refiere,
bien haya la que no os quiere
y quejaos en hora buena.

Dan vuestras amantes penas
a sus libertades alas,
y después de hacerlas malas
las queréis hallar muy buenas.

¿Cuál mayor culpa ha tenido
en una pasión errada:
la que cae de rogada,
o el que ruega de caído?

¿O cuál es de más culpar,
aunque cualquiera mal haga;
la que peca por la paga
o el que paga por pecar?

¿Pues, para qué os espantáis
de la culpa que tenéis?
Queredlas cual las hacéis
o hacedlas cual las buscáis.

Dejad de solicitar,
y después, con más razón,
acusaréis la afición
de la que os fuere a rogar.

Bien con muchas armas fundo
que lidia vuestra arrogancia,
pues en promesa e instancia
juntáis diablo, carne y mundo

Obtenido de :http://www.los-poetas.com/l/sor1.htm#REDONDILLAS

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Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz


Máxima figura de las letras mexicanas, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz nació en la hacienda de San Miguel Nepantla, Estado de México el 12 de noviembre de 1648. Su nombre, antes de tomar el hábito, fue Juana de Asbaje y Ramírez ya que fue hija natural de la criolla Isabel Ramírez de Santillana y el vizcaíno Pedro Manuel de Asbaje.Se crió con su abuelo materno Pedro Ramírez, en la cercana hacienda de Panoayan. Su genio se manifestó desde temprana edad: habiendo estudiado apenas las primeras letras en Amecameca, a los tres años ya sabía leer, a los siete pedía que la mandaran a estudiar a la Universidad y a los ocho escribió una loa para la fiesta de Corpus.

En 1656, a la muerte de su abuelo, su madre la envió a la capital a vivir a la casa de su hermana, María Ramírez, esposa del acaudalado Juan de Mata, donde Juana estudió latín “en veinte lecciones” con el bachiller Martín de Olivas, bastándole solamente esas pocas para dominar esta lengua, cosa que se demuestra en la maestría de varias de sus obras, sobre todo en los villancicos, que contienen versos latinos.

Según ella misma cuenta en su Carta respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz leía, estudiaba mucho, y era tal su obstinación por aprender que llegó a recurrir al método auto coercitivo de cortarse el cabello para poner como plazo que le volviera a crecer, para haber aprendido ya algo que deseaba. Juana leyó mucho durante toda su vida tanto autores clásicos romanos y griegos como españoles.

En 1664 Juana ingresó a la corte como dama de compañía de la virreina, Leonor María Carreto, marquesa de Mancera, a la que dedicó algunos sonetos con el nombre de Laura. El virrey, admirado de su curiosidad científica y de su sapiencia, hizo reunir a cuarenta letrados de todas facultades para someterla a un examen sin igual del cual, por supuesto, salió triunfante, dejando admirados a los sabios por haber contestado con sabiduría toda pregunta, argumento y réplica que estos le hicieran.


Harta de la vida cortesana y sin muchas opciones por delante, decidió entrar a un convento porque, según ella misma dice, “para la total negación que tenía al matrimonio era lo más decente que podía elegir en materia de la seguridad de mi salvación”. Primero entró al convento de San José de las Carmelitas Descalzas en 1667 pero salió de ahí a los tres meses, por la severidad de la regla y el rigor de la orden. Después ingresó a la mucho más flexible orden de las jerónimas, en el convento de Santa Paula, donde por fin profesó el 24 de febrero de 1669.

En el convento, donde vivió lo que le quedaba de vida, hizo oficios de contadora y archivista pero, más que nada, se dedicó al estudio y a la escritura. Dentro de su celda - que era individual y espaciosa- llegó a poseer más de 4,000 volúmenes, instrumentos musicales, mapas y aparatos de medición y a tener conocimientos profundos en astronomía, matemáticas, lengua, filosofía, mitología, historia, teología, música y pintura, por citar solamente algunas de sus disciplinas favoritas.

Famosa, aun dentro del claustro, constantemente era llamada para escribir obras por encargo: en 1689 se le encargó hacer el Arco Triunfal a la llegada a la capital de los Marqueses de la Laguna y Condes de Paredes, obra que concluyó con éxito y que tituló Neptuno Alegórico.

Tres años después ganó dos premios en el certamen universitario del Triunfo Parténico y constantemente se le encargaban villancicos para las festividades religiosas, además de la importante cantidad de sonetos, rondillas, décimas, silvas y liras que constantemente componía.

El primer libro publicado por Sor Juana fueInundación Castálida, que reunió una buena parte de su obra poética y fue publicada en Madrid, antes que en la Nueva España.


Durante mucho tiempo, Sor Juana no tuvo mayores problemas en su vida conventual hasta que, como lo afirma Octavio Paz, escribió “una carta de más”. Esa misiva se publicó con el largo título de Carta atenagórica de la madre Juana Inés de la Cruz, religiosa profesa de velo y coro en el muy religioso convento de San Jerónimo que imprime y dedica a la misma Sor Philotea de la Cruz, su estudiosa aficionada en el convento de la Santísima Trinidad de la Pueblade los Angeles, y era una crítica a un sermón del jesuita portugués Antonio de Vieyra, muy afamado teólogo de la época.


Esta crítica tuvo nefastas consecuencias aun cuando su publicación corrió a cargo de la citada sor Filotea, que no era otro que el obispo de Puebla, Fernández de Santa Cruz, que, finalmente, termina por reconvenirla y aconsejarle que se dedique a asuntos menos profanos y más santos. Todo el asunto terminó en que Sor Juana fue obligada a deshacerse de su biblioteca, sus instrumentos musicales y matemáticos y obligada a dedicarse exclusivamente al convento.

Sor Juana murió el 17 de abril de 1695 contagiada de la epidemia que azotó al convento de Santa Paula.

Entre su vasta obra poética se destaca el Primero Sueño una silva descriptivo- filosófica de unos mil versos y que continúa la tradición de los sueños de ascensión del alma en busca de la suprema verdad, Dios o el supremo conocimiento.

Entre sus obras se cuentan, para el teatro, tres autos sacramentales: El cetro de José, El mártir del sacramento y El divino Narciso; dos comedias :Los empeños de una casa y Amor es más laberinto.; en prosa Explicación del arco, Razón de la fábrica alegórica y aplicación del la fábula, las meditaciones del Rosario y la Encarnación, además de varios opúsculos y manuscritos hoy extraviados como El equilibrio moral y un tratado de música, El caracol. Al morir se editó el tomo que recopiló sus obras, Fama y obras póstumas.

Las aportaciones de Sor Juana al mundo de la cultura siguen siendo inestimables. Su presencia en el arte parece acrecentarse a medida que se le estudia, habida cuenta de que nada le fue ajeno.

Al igual que la música, la pintura, la escultura barrocas sus trabajos literarios corresponden a la grandeza de la arquitectura novo hispana y son el mejor ejemplo, no sólo del arte de la colonia sino de todo el arte mexicano.

Más información aquí : https://www.gob.mx/segob/articulos/conoce-mas-acerca-de-sor-juana-ines-de-la-cruz?idiom=es

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