Hunger's Brides (222 page)
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 âmodern.'The first is the theologicalâtoday we say ideologicalânature 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 attitudeâon a smaller scaleâis 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.
â¦and like a pregnant cloud, encumbered
by her gravid charge
condensed of earthly exhalations,
cloudbursts of agony perspiring
âterrible cloud serpent
whose trumpet is the thunderclap
that rends the airs of the empyreanâ
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 â¦
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 philosophersâ¦. 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 â¦
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 â¦
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 â¦
23.
This craft of knowing nothing is of such exalted powerâeven with all the sages arguingâas 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 ofâwomen of discord' through the Mexica histories and legends. Sacrificed, these women serve as catalystâfuel, 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 Sáenz 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 respondâby 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 â¦
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. 297â300.
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, “â¦
Living in darkest fear / And yet I hope and wait / dying because I do not die â¦
”
30.
The Nahuatl phrase for âEnemy 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.
31.
The phrase seems to be lifted from DeLillo's
White Noise
.
32.
Toward the end of her life, Sor Juana began to sign documents with this.
La peor de todas
, âthe worst of all women,'âthe worst woman in the world.'
33.
A more or less literal translation: â¦
and I stooped so low so low / as to fly so high so high
/ that at last I caught the prey
⦠The lines are from a poem on falconry
âa lo divino'
by John of the Cross. The theme, according to John Frederick Nims, is common in Medieval love poetry: the pursuit of the heron by the falcon was thought âthe noblest and most thrilling' form of falconry. The heron rises in steep almost helical rings, while the smaller, faster falcon gains slowly in a widening gyre. Traditionally the heron was female, the falcon male, but I imagine Beulah had the converse in mind.
34.
This document, although undated (and perhaps incomplete), was undoubtedly written after Sor Juana's final poem, itself left unfinished. In all, three such petitions were written over the last two years of her life, constituting her last writings, and the only ones from this period. Depending on whether the “Plea before the Divine Tribunal” was the first or last of the three, it will have been composed not much earlier than February of 1693 and not much later than March of 1694. (The acclarative title was affixed to the text circa 1700 by the churchman Diego Calleja, her first biographer and the editor of a posthumous collection of her writings. For much of the next two centuries, her name scarcely enters the public record.)
35.
Prometheus Bound â¦
Aeschylus. Lines 514â520. [Paul Elmer More, trans.] From a scene involving Prometheus (PR) and Leader of the chorus (LE):
PR: Not yet hath all-ordaining Destiny decreed my release; but after many years, broken by a world of disaster and woe, I shall be delivered. The craft of the forger is weaker far than Necessity.
LE: Who then holds the helm of Necessity?
PR: The Fates triform and the unforgetting Furies.
LE: And Zeus, is he less in power than these?
PR: He may not avoid what is destined.
LE: What is destined for Zeus but endless rule?
PR: Ask not, neither set thy heart on knowing.
36.
Emperor of the Two Faiths: Alfonso VI of Spain. Lord Instructor of the World: a divine epithet used by the Inca. Lord of the Two Horizons: Ra of Egypt. Sovereign of the Two Worlds: the final honorific accruing to the throne of the Spanish Empire.
37.
The spelling of this fragment of Chapman's translation of
Iliad
has been slightly modernized.
38.
Prometheus Bound â¦
Aeschylus.
39.
John of the Cross,“La Fonte,” translated by John Frederick Nims as
Bounty of waters flooding from this well / invigorates all earth, high heaven, and hell / in dark of night
. The final stanza is translated in Beulah's notes by Willis Barnstone as
O living fountain that I crave / in bread of life I see her flame / in black of night
.
40.
A term of endearment of particular warmth, even among the many such to be found in Mexican Spanish, in this case denoting a fraternal twin; but the connotation
is perhaps soul-mate, soul-sister.
(Cuate
may or may not derive from Quetzalcóatl, or eagle, just as
cholo
might be from Xolotl, Quetzalcóatl's âdouble.')
41.
Bierhorst, p. 42. (The book title is not given. Possibly
Four Masterworks of American Indian Literature.)
42.
Bierhorst, p. 34.
BOOK FIVE
1.
Eliot,“Little Gidding.” Beulah is not above citing this editor's preferred poets.
2.
Paz,“The Poet's Labours.”