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A NOTE ON THE PROLOGUE TO SOR JUANA´S SUEÑO Elias L. Rivers The State University of New York at Stony Brook T he prologue to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz´s Primero Sueño is a clearly delimited unit of 150 lines, entitled “Noche y sueño del cosmos” in the Sabat-Rivers edition (pp. 435-39). It begins with a baroque scientific evocation of night as the shadow, shaped like an Egyptian pyramid or group of obelisks, that is cast by the dark side of the Earth upon the Moon and into stellar space by a revolving Ptolomaic Sun. The narrative focus quickly shifts from astronomy to the sub-lunar world of our Earth, where nocturnal birds and bats still flit in growing silence as fish and animals and birds everywhere go to sleep. The 146 hendecasyllables and heptasyllables in silva form, with their complex syntax and run-on lines, lead up to these four simple lines, without enjambment, that serve as a remate or coda: El sueño todo, en fin, lo poseía: todo, en fin, el silencio lo ocupaba, aun el ladrón dormía, aun el amante no se desvelaba. As a classical antecedent for this prologue, the great annotator A. Méndez Plancarte (p. 584) cites only Statius´s Latin Silvae V, 4. No one, so far as I know, has pointed out that there is a much more generalized antecedent, in Latin and in Italian, which we may identify as a commonplace or topos usually associated with the words “nox erat, et . . .”. The contemporary Spanish poet Enrique Moreno Castillo has recently documented this topos in his Anotaciones al Poema heroico a Cristo resucitado de Francisco de Quevedo (51-53), citing as the locus classicus Virgil´s Aeneid, IV, 522528 : CALÍOPE Vol. 14, No. 2, 2008: pages 87-89 88 Elias L. Rivers ! ! ! ! ! Nox erat, et placidum carpebant fessa soporem corpora per terras, silvaeque et saeva quierant aequora, cum medio volvuntur sidera lapsu, cum tacet omnis ager, pecudes pictaeque volucres quaeque lacus late liquidos, quaeque aspera dumis rura tenent, somno positae sub nocte silenti lenibant curas et corda oblita laborum. [It was night, and throughout the Earth exhausted bodies enjoyed their placid slumber; the woods and wild seas had sunk to quiet rest while stars roll midway in their gliding course and all the land is still, while flocks and brightly colored birds, those that swim the broad liquid lakes and those that dwell in brambles and rough fields, recline in sleep beneath the silent night, resting from their cares with hearts forgetful of their labors.] Moreno in his note (p. 51) refers to very similar passages elsewhere in Virgil, and in Ovid, Horace, Propertius,Valerius Flaccus, Silius Italicus, Statius, Claudian, Dante, Sannazaro, Ariosto, Tasso, Marino. Sor Juana had many of these passages in the back of her wellread mind as she began her “nox erat” with 18 complicated lines in a baroque poetic idiom: Piramidal, funesta, de la tierra nacida sombra al cielo encaminaba de varios obeliscos punta altiva, escalar pretendiendo las estrellas . . . We can see in Virgil´s “cum medio volvuntur sidera lapsu” a point of departure for Sor Juana´s astronomical explanation of night. Her lines 19-24 correspond to Virgil´s “volucres . . . sub nocte silenti.” Her own silent night en la quietud contenta de imperio silencioso, sumisas sólo voces consentía A NOTE ON THE PROLOGUE TO SOR JUANA’S SUEÑO ! ! ! ! ! 89 de las nocturnas aves, tan obscuras, tan graves, que aun el silencio no se interrumpía. Her “El mar ya no alterado” is his “saeva quierant aequora.” But there is no Virgilian antecedent for her fish “dos veces mudos” or for her elaborate mythological animals: the incestuous screech-owl that sacrilegiously drinks olive oil from the temple lamps, the three Theban maidens transformed into bats by Bacchus for ignoring his rites, as well as several other birds and animals with similar mythological and moral attributes. These elaborations simply give new baroque life to the traditional Virgilian commonplace of “Nox erat, et caetera . . .” Works Cited Moreno Castillo, Enrique. Anotaciones al Poema heroico a Cristo resuscitado de Francisco de Quevedo. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva...

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