-
Afterword: Translating Sor Juana
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Afterword Translating Sor Juana The ideas and conventions Sor Juana was at home with are foreign to our time and place. She lived in a profoundly hierarchical world. Images of relationships based on the roles of servant and master, serf and feudal lord, were not merely metaphors to her. Writing about love, she often speaks of disobedience, risk, rebellion; her mastery of poetic forms offers structures for the unpardonable. She wrote in the shadow of the Inquisition, when accused heretics were tortured, sometimes burned at the stakesomething she herself may have witnessed. Her experience included both viceregal court and women's monastery, privilege and restraint, patronage and repression-a life offering intellectual and creative freedom rare for a woman of her time, yet severely limiting and ultimately silencing her. How to convey an idiom, a sensibility, a culture so different from our own? Sor Juana doesn't deserve for essential elements of her astonishing art to be lost in translation, especially now that more of her poetry is finally being published in English. But translation-especially of poetry, which is an instrument for making many choices simultaneously-always involves compromise. With Jaime Manrique's knowledge of Spanish and mine of English, we began work on each poem by creating a word-for-word literal 77 78 translation, from which I then attempted an English version we continued to work on, separately and together. Our first task was always to try to hear what lay under pressure at a depth, to try to understand Sor Juana's intentions, sometimes encoded in a formal convention or deliberately ambiguous word choice. How literal should we be? In a word-forword equivalent, not only underlying meanings, but the movement and surprise in the flow of Sor Juana's sounds would have disappeared, the poetry lost. We wanted to suggest her musicality. But the melting, sensual music of Sor Juana's Spanish is at one end of a continuum, the sounds of current poetry in English at the other. It felt at times as if we were taking a liquid, expansive substance and making it into something compressed, understated, harsh. Sor Juana moves easily within the restraints of song form and sonnet, playing both with and against each form's requirements, suggesting the flow of a voice speaking with clarity and emotional force. We often found ourselves stepping into the dramatic situations she so vividly evokes. It was clear that, whether she had direct physical experience of the erotic life she wrote of, or simply observed and imagined, she was addressing living human beings who moved her. As translators, how could we show that? What would we have to give up to do it? If we faithfully reproduced her meter and rhyme, we would have to sacrifice the contemporarysounding voice we hoped to suggest. Sor Juana's voice was often earthy, always intense, [44.204.164.147] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10:56 GMT) active, passionate. It sounded fresh and current to her peers-not archaic. We wanted above all to make these translations speakable, while keeping as close as possible to the tone and the emotional journey of the original. Sor Juana had access to elegance and coarseness, high and low speech, and used the full range available to her with delicacy and wit. She played literary games (the bawdy sonnets to "Ines" are an example) in which she took words that had been given to her and wrote fourteen lines, each ending in one of the assigned words-which were a mixture of the archaic, the unusual, the comical, and the scatalogical. There were places where we translated more freely, in the hope of achieving greater accuracy of connotation or mood. We asked ourselves how, for example, we could translate coso (literally "thing"), the last word in one ofthe sonnets to "Ines" (for whom, we noticed, Sor Juana used one of her own names). What exactly was this erotic "thing"? We first tried the perhaps too delicate, perhaps too explicit "little hand." Then, scholar Lourdes Blanco unearthed the juicy information that in Sor Juana's time, coso was the name for a delicacy served with liquid refreshment: a small, crisply-fried worm. Hence our translation, "your succulent worm." We trust that coso was as vivid an erotic reference for some of Sor Juana's contemporaries as is "succulent worm" for us, though the double-entendre is lost in an age when few of lJS enjoy worms as hors d'oeuvres. When Jaime...