En la grieta acecha (Spanish Edition)

Lorca sup- ports appeals for clemency. Yerma performed 29 December. Final draft- ing of Poet in New York August. Signs anti-fascist manifesto November. Doha Rosita the Spinster performed 12 December. Lorca signs appeal for peaceful co-operation. Writing Sonnets of Dark Love , and projects for theatre. Lorca travels to Granada on 13 July.

Military uprising 17 July seizes power in Granada 20—3 July. Mass arrests and killings. Lorca murdered by firing squad at Viznar. La luz me troncha las alas y el dolor de mi tristeza va mojando los recuerdos en la fiiente de la idea. Todas las rosas son blancas, tan blancas como mi pena, y no son las rosas blancas, que ha nevado sobre ellas. Antes tuvieron el iris. Tambien sobre el alma nieva. La nieve del alma tiene copos de besos y escenas que se hundieron en la sombra o en la luz del que las piensa. La nieve cae de las rosas pero la del alma queda, y la garra de los anos hace un sudario con ella.

From Book of Poems Autumn Song November igi8 Granada Today in my heart a vague trembling of stars, but my way is lost in the soul of the mist. Light lops my wings. Earlier they wore a rainbow. Will the snow melt when death claims us? Or will there be more snow and more perfect roses? Will we know peace as Christ promises?

Libro de Poemas ; nunca sera posible la solucion del problema? Si la esperanza se apaga y la Babel se comienza, d'que antorcha iluminara los caminos en la Tierra? Si el azul es un ensueno, d'que sera de la inocencia? Y si la muerte es la muerte, d'que sera de los poetas y de las cosas dormidas que ya nadie las recuerda? Hoy siento en el corazon un vago temblor de estrellas y todas las rosas son tan blancas como mi pena. If blue is dream what then innocence?

What awaits the heart if Love bears no arrows? If death is death, what then of poets and the hibernating things no one remembers? Sun of our hopes! Rough souls of the stones! Today in my heart a vague trembling of stars and all roses are as white as my pain. Libro de Poemas Cancion menor Diciembre de igi8 Granada Tienen gotas de rocio las alas del ruisenor, gotas claras de la luna cuajadas por su ilusion.

Tiene el marmol de la fiiente el beso del surtidor, sueno de estrellas humildes. Las ninas de los jardines me dicen todas adios cuando paso. Las campanas tambien me dicen adios. Y los arboles se besan en el crepusculo. Yo voy llorando por la calle, grotesco y sin solucion, con tristeza de Cyrano y de Quijote, redentor de imposibles infinitos con el ritmo del reloj. Y veo secarse los lirios al contacto de mi voz manchada de luz sangrienta, y en mi lirica cancion llevo galas de payaso empolvado. El amor bello y lindo se ha escondido bajo una arana. El sol como otra arana me oculta con sus patas de oro.

The girls in the gardens all bid me farewell as I pass. Bells too bid me farewell and trees kiss in the half-light. I see irises dry touched by my voice bloodstained by light, and in my lyric song I wear the costume of a grease-painted clown. Beautiful marvellous love hides under a spider. The sun like another spider hides me beneath its golden legs. Dare todo a los demas y llorare mi pasion como nino abandonado en cuento que se borro. Balada triste Pequeno poema Abril de igi8 Granada jMi corazon es una mariposa, ninos buenos del prado!

De nino yo cante como vosotros, ninos buenos del prado, solte mi gavilan con las temibles cuatro unas de gato. Pase por el jardin de Cartagena, la verbena invocando, y perdi la sortija de mi dicha al pasar el arroyo imaginario. Fui tambien caballero una tarde fresquita de Mayo. Ella era entonces para mi el enigma, estrella azul sobre mi pecho intacto. Cabalgue lentamente hacia los cielos, era un domingo de pipirigallo, y vi que en vez de rosas y claveles ella tronchaba lirios con sus manos. Yo siempre fui intranquilo, ninos buenos del prado. Book of Poems whose arrows are tears, whose quiver the heart.

When I was a boy I sang like you, good children of the field, I let loose my sparrow-hawk with its four frightful cat-claws. I was a horseman too one fresh afternoon in May. She was my enigma then, blue star on my unspoiled chest. Slowly I rode towards the skies. That Sunday of sainfoin I saw her hands were cutting lilies not roses and carnations. Always I was restless, good children of the field. En abril de mi infancia yo cantaba, ninos buenos del prado, la ella impenetrable del romance donde sale Pegaso. Yo decia en las noches la tristeza de mi amor ignorado, y la luna lunera, jque sonrisa ponia entre sus labios!

Y de aquella chiquita, tan bonita, que su madre ha casado, i'en que oculto rincon de cementerio dormira su fracaso? Yo solo con mi amor desconocido, sin corazon, sin llantos, hacia el techo imposible de los cielos con un gran sol por baculo. Book of Poems the she of the romance engulfed me in limpid dreams: Good children of the field, in the April of my childhood I sang the impregnable she of the romance where Pegasus rides out. By night I told the sadness of my unsuspected love — and what a smile the moonish moon wore on its lips!

And that so pretty little girl, given in marriage by her mother, in what dark cemetery plot will they lay her ruin? Such grave sadness shades me! Libro de Poemas Elegia Diciembre de igi8 Granada Como un incensario lleno de deseos, pasas en la tarde luminosa y clara con la carne oscura de nardo marchito y el sexo potente sobre tu mirada.

Vetusta Morla:La Grieta Lyrics

Llevas en la boca tu melancolla de pureza muerta, y en la dionisiaca copa de tu vientre la arana que teje el velo infecundo que cubre la entrana nunca florecida con las vivas rosas, fruto de los besos. En tus manos blancas llevas la madeja de tus ilusiones, muertas para siempre, y sobre tu alma la pasion hambrienta de besos de fuego y tu amor de madre que suena lejanas visiones de cunas en ambientes quietos, hilando en los labios lo azul de la nana. Como Ceres dieras tus espigas de oro si el amor dormido tu cuerpo tocara, y como la virgen Maria pudieras brotar de tus senos otra Via Lactea. Te marchitaras como la magnolia.

Nadie besara tus muslos de brasa. Ni a tu cabellera llegaran los dedos que la pulsen como las cuerdas de un arpa. Venus del manton de Manila que sabe del vino de Malaga y de la guitarra.

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Book of Poems i3 Elegy December igi8 Granada Like a censer filled with desires, you pass through clear evening, flesh dark as spent spikenard; your face pure sex. In your white hands the twist of lost illusions, and on your soul a passion hungry for kisses of fire, and your mother-love dreaming distant pictures of cradles in calm places, lips spinning azure lullabies. No kisses burnt on your thighs, no fingers in your hair, playing it like a harp.

Woman strong with ebony and spikenard, breath white as lilies, Venus of the Manila shawl tasting of Malaga wine and guitars! Libro de Poemas jOh cisne moreno! Martir andaluza, tus besos debieron ser bajo una parra plenos del silencio que tiene la noche y del ritmo turbio del agua estancada. Pero tus ojeras se van agrandando y tu pelo negro va siendo de plata; tus senos resbalan escanciando aromas y empieza a curvarse tu esplendida espalda.

Virgen dolorosa que tiene clavadas todas las estrellas del cielo profundo en su corazon, ya sin esperanza. Eres el espejo de una Andalucia que sufre pasiones gigantes y calla, pasiones mecidas por los abanicos y por las mantillas sobre las gargantas que tienen temblores de sangre, de nieve y aranazos rojos hechos por miradas. Te vas por la niebla del Otono, virgen como Ines, Cecilia y la dulce Clara, siendo una bacante que hubiera danzado de pampanos verdes y vid coronada. La tristeza inmensa que flota en tus ojos nos dice tu vida rota y fracasada, la monotonia de tu ambiente pobre viendo pasar gente desde tu ventana, oyendo la lluvia sobre la amargura que tiene la vieja calle provinciana, mientras que a lo lejos suenan los clamores turbios y confusos de unas campanadas.

Andalusian martyr, left barren. But below your eyes circles start, and your black hair turns silver. Your breasts ease, spreading their scent and your splendid shoulders start to stoop.

Slender woman, meant for motherhood, burning! Virgin of sorrows; forever hopeless heart nailed by every star of the deep sky. The great sadness floating in your eyes tells us your broken, shattered life, the monotony of your bare world, at your window watching people pass, hearing rain fall on the bitterness of the old provincial streets; far away, a troubled clash of bells. Libro de Poemas Mas en vano escuchaste los acentos del aire. Nunca llego a tu oido la dulce serenata. Detras de tus cristales aun miras anhelante. Tu cuerpo ira a la tumba intacto de emociones.

Sobre la oscura tierra brotara una alborada. De tus ojos saldran dos claveles sangrientos y de tus senos rosas como la nieve blancas. Pero tu gran tristeza se ira con las estrellas como otra estrella digna de herirlas y eclipsarlas. Yo voy a dormirme; si no me despiertas, dejare a tu lado mi corazon frio. The sweet serenade never reached you. Behind your windows still you look and yearn. The sadness that will flood your soul when your wasted breast discovers the passion of a girl new to love.

Your body will be buried untouched by emotion. A dawn song will spread across the dark earth. Two blood-red carnations will spring from your eyes, and from your breasts, snow-white roses. But your great sadness will join the stars, a new star to wound and outshine the skies. The wind on the panes, my love! Why do you desert me on this road? If you go oft so far Libro de Poemas mi pajaro llora y la verde vina no dara su vino. Un silencio hecho pedazos por risas de plata nueva. Such joy for the deep silence of the alleyway!

A silence smashed to pieces by bright new silver laughter. En el monte solitario un cementerio de aldea parece un campo sembrado con granos de cala veras. Y han florecido cipreses como gigantes cabezas que con orbitas vacias y verdosas cabelleras pensativos y dolientes el horizonte contemplan.

Sueno Mayo de i gig Mi corazon reposa junto a la fuente fria. Llenalo con tus hilos, arana del olvido. El agua de la fuente su cancion le decia. Mi corazon despierto sus amores decia. Arana del silencio, tejele tu misterio. Book of Poems 21 ii I take the afternoon path among orchard flowers leaving on the way the water of my sadness. On the lonely hill a village cemetery looks like a field sown with seeds of skulls.

Cypresses have flourished like green-haired hollow-socket giant heads pensive and in pain contemplating the horizon. Sacred April, now here with your cargoes of essence and sun, fill the flowering skulls with nests of gold! Dream May igig My heart rests beside the cool fountain. Fill it with your thread, spider of oblivion. The fountain water sang it its song. My wakened heart told of its loves. Spider of silence spin it your mystery. Libro de Poemas El agua de la fiiente lo escuchaba sombria.

Mi corazon se vuelca sobre la fuente fria. Y el agua se lo lleva cantando de alegria. Balada de la placeta X 9 X 9 Cantan los ninos en la noche quieta: YO Un doblar de campanas perdidas en la niebla. Spider of silence, spin it your mystery. My heart capsizes in the cold fountain. White hands, far away, hold back the waters. And the water carries it off singing with joy.

White hands, far away, nothing remains in the waters! Ballad of the Little Square igig In the still night the children sing. Clear stream, calm fountain! What do you hold in your springtime hands? Libro de Poemas YO Una rosa de sangre y una azucena. YO jVoy en busca de magos y de princesas! YO La fuente y el arroyo de la cancion aneja. Book of Poems 25 1 A rose of blood and a white lily. Why do you stray so far from the little square? Y yo me ire muy lejos, mas alia de esas sierras, mas alia de los mares, cerca de las estrellas, para pedirle a Cristo Senor que me devuelva mi alma antigua de nino, madura de leyendas, con el gorro de plumas y el sable de madera.

Las pupilas enormes de las frondas resecas, heridas por el viento, lloran las hojas muertas. La balada del agua del mar A Emilio Prados cazador de nubes El mar sonrie a lo lejos. Dientes de espuma, labios de cielo. Huge pupils of dried-out fronds, wounded by the wind, weep for dead leaves. Teeth of foam, lips of sky. El mar sonrie a lo lejos. Sueno Mayo de i gig Iba yo montado sobre un macho cabrlo.

El abuelo me hablo y me dijo: Dream May igig I rode astride a billy goat. Grandfather said to me: Mirando al cielo, pensaba: Las rosas del fin seran como las del principio. En niebla se convierte la carne y el rocio. Yo lo abandone en la tierra, lleno de tristeza. Vino la noche, llena de arrugas y de sombras. Alumbran el camino, los ojos luminosos y azulados de mi macho cabrio.

Otra cancion igig Otono jEl sueno se deshizo para siempre! En la tarde lluviosa mi corazon aprende la tragedia otonal que los arboles llueven. Y en la dulce tristeza del paisaje que muere Book of Poems and a snake bit my pilgrim smock. I looked at the sky and thought: The last roses will be like the first. In the mist flesh changes, and dew. I left it in the earth, filled with sadness. Night came full of folds and shadows. The way is lit by the luminous azure eyes of my billy goat.

Another Song i gig Autumn The dream came apart for good! In the rain-swept afternoon my heart discovers the tragedy of autumn raining from the trees. And in the sweet sadness of the dying landscape Libro de Poemas mis voces se quebraron. El sueno se deshizo para siempre. Va cayendo la nieve en el campo desierto de mi vida, y teme la ilusion, que va lejos, de helarse o de perderse.

Mi ritmo va contando que el sueno se deshizo para siempre. Y en la tarde brumosa mi corazon aprende la tragedia otonal que los arboles llueven. El macho cabrio El rebano de cabras ha pasado junto al agua del rio. En la tarde de rosa y de zafiro, llena de paz romantica, yo miro al gran macho cabrio. Eres el mas intenso animal. Book of Poems my voices cracked. The dream came apart for good. How the water tells me that the dream came apart for good! And in the misty afternoon my heart discovers the tragedy of autumn raining from the trees. The Billy Goat igig The herd of goats passed where the river flows.

In the sapphire pink afternoon heavy with romantic peace, I watch the great billy goat. Greetings, mute demon, you most intense of animals, eternal mystic Libro de Poemas Mistico eterno del infierno carnal Vas por los campos con tu manada hecho un eunuco jsiendo un sultan! Tu sed de sexo nunca se apaga; jbien aprendiste del padre Pan! La cabra, lenta te va siguiendo, enamorada con humildad; mas tus pasiones son insaciables; Grecia vieja te comprendera. Book of Poems 35 of hell made flesh So many spells in your beard, on your broad brow, you brute Don Juan! Your need of sex is never satisfied.

The nanny goat follows you cautiously, humble in her love; but your passions have no boundaries; Ancient Greece would have understood. You come from the oldest Bible tales of withered ascetics and Satan with black stones, rude crosses, tame beasts, and hollow caves where in the shadows they watched you fan the flames of sex!

Maleness of wild beard and horn! Dark emblems of the medieval world! Libro de Poemas Nacisteis juntos con Filomnedes entre la espuma casta del mar, y vuestras bocas la acariciaron bajo el asombro del mundo astral. Sois de los bosques llenos de rosas donde la luz es huracan; sois de los prados de Anacreonte, llenos con sangre de lo inmortal.

Sois metamorfosis de viejos satiros perdidos ya. Vais derramando lujuria virgen como no tuvo otro animal. Pararse en firme para escuchar que desde el fondo de las campinas el gallo os dice: Billy goats, metamorphosis of old satyrs gone for good! Without another animal you spill virgin lechery. Stand still to hear the cock in a lost field wish you God speed! Poemas de Suites Cancion con reflejo En la pradera bailaba mi corazon era la sombra de un cipres sobre el viento y un arbol destrenzaba la brisa del rocio.

Nothing About Me

No me importa la estrella ni la rosa. En la pradera bailaba mi corazon. Era la sombra de un cipres en el viento. From Suites Song with Reflection In the meadow my heart danced a cypress shadow on the wind and a tree unplaited the dew breeze. Breeze, silver to the touch! The star the rose do not concern me. In the meadow my heart danced a cypress shadow on the wind. El rio y el cielo son puertas que nos llevan a lo Eterno. Por el cauce de las ranas o el cauce de los luceros se ira nuestro amor cantando, la manana del gran vuelo. Lo real es el reflejo. No hay mas que un corazon y un solo viento.

Da lo mismo estar cerca que lejos. Naturaleza es el Narciso eterno. Cancion bajo lagrimas En aquel sitio, muchachita de la fuente, que hay junto al rio, te quitare la rosa que te dio mi amigo, y en aquel sitio, muchachita de la fuente, yo te dare mi lirio. Esto lo hare ,no sabes? Cuando vuelva a ser nino. The river and sky are doors to take us to the Eternal. Down beds of frogs or beds of bright stars our love will go off, singing the morning of the great flight.

Only a heart remains, only one wind. Why have I wept so much? Por la llanura tostada va caminando un olivo. Horizonte Sobre la verde bruma se cae un sol sin rayos. La ribera sombria suena al par que la barca y la esquila inevitable traba la melancolia. En mi alma de ayer suena un tamborcillo de plata. Pescadores El arbol gigantesco pesca con sus lianas topos raros de la tierra. El sauce sobre el remanso se pesca sus ruisenores. Suites 43 Landscape without Song Blue sky. Across the scorched plain an olive tree drifts. One lone olive tree. Horizon A sun without rays spills on green mist.

The shaded riverside dreams at the pace of a boat and the unavoidable bell measures melancholy. In my spent soul the sound of a small silver drum. Over the pool the willow fishes nightingales 44 Suites. Delirio Disuelta la tarde y en silencio el campo, los abejarucos vuelan suspirando. Los fondos deliran azules y blancos. El paisaje tiene abiertos sus brazos. En el jardin de las toronjas de luna Prologo Asy como la sombra nuestra vida se va, que nunca mas torna nyn de nos tornara Pero Lopez de Ayala, Cornejos morales Me he despedido de los amigos que mas quiero para emprender un corto pero dramatico viaje.

Sobre un espejo de plata encuentro mucho antes de que amanezca el maletin con la ropa que debo usar en la extrana tierra a que me dirijo. El perfume tenso y frio de la madrugada bate misteriosamente el inmenso acantilado de la noche. En la pagina tersa del cielo temblaba la inicial de una nube, y debajo de mi balcon un ruisenor y una rana levantan en el aire un aspa sonolienta de sonido.

Yo, tranquilo pero melancolico, hago los ultimos preparativos, embargado por sutilisimas emociones de alas y circulos concentricos. Delirium Fragmented evening, field in silence. Bee-eaters in flight, a sigh. Backcloth of blue and white deliriums. The landscape opens its arms wide. All too much, Dear God! In the Garden of Lunar Grapefruit Prologue And so like a shadow our life passes, never to return, nor we. The tense, cold scent of dawn mysteriously strikes the huge slop- ing cliff of night. Piadosamente descuelgo esa espada, vestida de herrumbre amaril- lenta como un alamo bianco, y me la cino recordando que tengo que sostener una gran lucha invisible antes de entrar en el jardin.

Lucha extatica y violentisima con mi enemigo secular, el gigantesco dragon del Sentido Comun. Una emocion aguda y elegiaca por las cosas que no han sido, buenas y malas, grandes y pequenas, invade los paisajes de mis ojos casi ocultos por unas gafas de luz violeta.

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Una emocion amarga que me hace cam- inar hacia este jardin que se estremece en las altisimas llanuras del aire. Los ojos de todas las criaturas golpean como puntos fosforicos sobre la pared del porvenir. Jamas ningun hombre cayo de espaldas sobre la muerte. Pero yo, por un momento, contemplando ese paisaje abandonado e infinite, he visto pianos de vida inedita, multiples y superpuestos como los cangilones de una noria sin fin.

Antes de marchar siento un dolor agudo en el corazon. Mi familia duerme y toda la casa esta en un reposo absoluto. El alba, revelando torres y contando una a una las hojas de los arboles, me pone un cru- jiente vestido de encaje luminico. Algo se me olvida Senor, ;que se me olvida? Un pedazo de madera Creo que hay que ir bien presentado De una jarra con flores puesta sobre mi mesilla me prendo en el ojal siniestro una gran rosa palida que tiene un rostro enfurecido pero hieratico.

Ya es la hora. En las bandejas irregulares de las campanadas, vienen los kikirikis de los gallos. On the white wall of my room, stiff and rigid like a snake in a museum, hangs the glory-covered sword my grandfather wielded in the war against Don Carlos the Pretender. A most violent, ecstatic fight against my secular enemy, the monster dragon called Common Sense.

A sharp elegy of nostalgia for things that have never been — good, bad, large, small — invades those landscapes of my eyes which my tinted glasses all but cancel. A bitter feeling that makes me head towards this garden shimmering on the highest plains of air. The eyes of every creature throb like phosphorescent points against the wall of the future No man ever fell backwards into death.

But I, briefly contemplating this abandoned, infinite landscape, see early sketches of the life unpublished, multiple and superimposed, like the scoops of an endless waterwheel. Preparing to leave, I feel a needle of pain in my heart. My family is still asleep, and the whole house is in perfect repose. Dawn, reveal- ing towers, and counting one by one the leaves of the trees, dresses me in glinting clothes of lace that crackle. Lord, what am I forgetting? Ah, yes, a scrap of wood. I believe in being well turned out when I travel. From a vase of flowers on my side-table, I select a large pale rose and pin it to my left lapel, a rose with an angry but hieratic face.

The time has come. In the clashing silverware of bells, the cockadoodledoos of the cockerels. Sobre el olivar hay un cielo hundido y una lluvia oscura de luceros frios. Tiembla junco y penumbra a la orilla del rio. Se riza el aire gris. Los olivos estan cargados de gritos.

Una bandada de pajaros cautivos, que mueven sus larguisimas colas en lo sombrio. La guitarra Empieza el llanto de la guitarra. Se rompen las copas de la madrugada. Empieza el llanto de la guitarra. Llora monotona como llora el agua. Above the olive grove a sunken sky, and a cold dark rain of morning-stars.

The olive trees are freighted with cries. A flock of captive birds moves long long tails in the gloom. The Guitar The guitar begins to sob. The guitar begins to sob. Impossible to silence it. A monotone of sobs like water, 50 Poema del Cante Jondo como llora el viento sobre la nevada.

Llora por cosas lejanas. Arena del Sur caliente que pide camelias blancas. Llora flecha sin bianco, la tarde sin manana, y el primer pajaro muerto sobre la rama. Corazon malherido por cinco espadas. El grito La elipse de un grito va de monte a monte. Desde los olivos, sera un arco iris negro sobre la noche azul. Como un arco de viola, el grito ha hecho vibrar largas cuerdas del viento. Las gentes de las cuevas asoman sus velones. It sobs for distant things. Hot Southern sands imploring white camellias. It sobs for aimless arrow, evening without morning, and the first dead bird on the branch.

Heart deep-wounded by five swords. The Shout The shout, an arc from hill to hill. A black rainbow will hang from the olive trees over blue night. The cave-dwellers bring out their lamps. Es un silencio ondulado, un silencio, donde resbalan valles y ecos y que inclina las frentes hacia el suelo. El paso de la Siguiriya Entre mariposas negras, va una muchacha morena junto a una blanca serpiente de niebla.

Tierra de luz, cielo de tierra. Va encadenada al temblor de un ritmo que nunca llega; tiene el corazon de plata y un punal en la diestra. Despues de pasar Los ninos miran un punto lejano. Los candiles se apagan. An undulating silence, a silence of sliding valleys and echoes tilting brows towards the ground.

Tan dulces dos palabras. Tan dulces y tan bellas. Oh, mis dedos quisieran. Alfonsina Storni — Dos Palabras. The Sound and the Fury is a dramatic presentation of the decline of the once-aristocratic Compson family of Yoknapatawpha County, in northern Mississippi. Divided into four sections, the history is narrated by three Compson brothers—Benjamin, Quentin, and Jason—followed by a section by an omniscient narrator.

Section One is seen through the sensitivities of Benjamin Benjy , Compson, on April 7, , when Benjy is thirty-three years old. The youngest of the Compson children, Benjy was christened Maury in honor of his uncle, but by the time he reached the age of five, it became apparent that he was retarded. The eight scenes that comprise the Benjy section jump about in time, from one of his earliest memories when, in fact, he was still called Maury and extend to the present Because of his impaired mental facilities, Benjy is literal, simplistic, and sensual.

This section of the novel centers on his impressions of his sister Candace Caddy , the only one in his family who was truly solicitous of him, and arguably one of the most significant characters in the novel. The Compson children are ignorant of the death of their grandmother. While Caddy does this, her brothers stand below, gazing up at her muddy underwear, which were soiled earlier when they were playing in a creek adjoining the Compson estate.

Just as Benjy did, Quentin reflects on Caddy, her emerging sexuality, and the mortification he experiences at the implications of her unwed pregnancy. In many ways, Quentin represents pre—Civil War views of honor, Southern womanhood, and virginity. The flashbacks dramatize just how ineffectual Quentin is in his dealings with his family, his Harvard studies, and his belief that the Compsons can return to their earlier days of Southern tradition. Unlike his brothers, Jason is much more focused on the present, offering fewer flashbacks—though he does have a few, and he refers frequently to events in the past.

Also present in this section is another ironic comparison: Among the surprises and revelations in this section: Banished from the family home, she has taken up residence in a neighboring county and has been sending money to her daughter. Jason gives his mother the forgeries, which Mrs. Meanwhile, Jason cashes the actual checks and pockets the money, giving little or none of it to his niece. Section Four has an omniscient or authorial viewpoint.

The time is the present, which, in terms of the novel, is Easter Sunday, April 8, All traces of Caddy, including her daughter and even the very mention of her name, have been removed. Jason pursues her, hopeful of recovering some of the money she has taken from him. Louis, Reverend Shegog, delivers a sermon that stirs in Dilsey an epiphany of doom for the Compson family. I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin. The only Compson daughter; her promiscuity is one of the central narrative concerns of the novel. The youngest of the Compson children, whose name is changed when it is discovered that he is severely retarded.

The black cook whose task it is to bring order out of the sound and fury created by the Compsons. For lack of a better word, Francisco de Quevedo is a poet of the soul. These are the metaphysical poems of time, existence, consciousness. They are the poems of the interior world as they are also speculations and observations of the nation that he treats as a national soul in trouble. I am a was, a will be, and a weary am. To now, tomorrow, and the past I tie diapers and winding sheet.

I am a bed of torturing successions of the dead. And when he attacks purple tyrannyand one of the purple-shining Felipes cannot be far from his gazehe has no soft words for all "tyrants living by their vain illusions," whom, as in traditional medieval "La danza de la muerte" The dance of death , death levels equally, and causes king and pauper alike to sleep in the same eternal bed: Do you see this fat giant of a man strolling along with haughty gravity? Well, inside he's a mess of rags, a pan of trash, a young brat keeps from anarchy. He moves about, parading his live soul, and aims his greatness anywhere he wants; yet gaze astutely at this emerald mole, you'll laugh at all the ornaments he flaunts.

Such are the grandiose and pretentious ways of tyrants living by their vain illusions, those eminent, fantastic bags of germs. They burn in purple as their fingers blaze with diamonds and hard gems in white profusion, while inside they are nausea, earth, and worms. He saw everywhere the misery and vanity of all things, and he assailed himself as mercilously as he did others. And even more so. Those full and lively verbal objects contain words of enduring salvation in an existence of exuberance and disaster.

In the course of our lives of disaster, time, through which life breathes, gets around to killing us all. The poem endures in its disturbing wisdom and pathos, providing us interludes of hope. I felt my sword coffined in rust, and walked about, and everything I looked at bore a warning of the wasted gaze of death.

You cannot find the site of Rome in Rome. What glowed as walls is now a corpse's home, a tomb for its own being, the Aventine. The Palatine lies ruined, a mere cage, and its medallions are filed down by time; destruction from the battle wounds of age command great Latin emblems now in slime. Only the Tiber flows, yet its current watering the city now is watering a tomb for which it mourns in painful funeral song. A room of darting lights endures to make us long.

Llega a ser hombre y todo lo trabuca; soltero, sigue toda perendeca; casada, se convierte en mala cuca. Breve combate de importuna guerra, en mi defensa soy peligro sumo, y mientras con mis armas me consumo, menos me hospeda el cuerpo que me entierra. Azadas son la hora y el momento, que, a jornal de mi pena y mi cuidado, cavan en mi vivir mi monumento.

About All and Nothing: Some more Borges- For a Version of the I Ching

Then come the gurgles, mamas, and the bogeyman, followed by smallpox, drivel, snot and scum, then rattles, spinning tops, a noisy can. Grown up he finds a girlfriend to seduce with whom he gluts his crazy appetite. As a young man he feels his words are trite and every declaration a mere ruse. As a real man he is a hopeless pest, a bachelor chasing every hooker in the street. Married he's cuckold in his nest. As an old man he wrinkles, dries up, grays. And when death comes, upturning all, he pays for gurgles, girlfriends, and each groaning sin.

In the brief combat of a futile war I am the peril of my strategy, and while cut down by my own scimitar my body doesn't house but buries me. Gone now is yesterday, tomorrow has not come; today speeds by, it is, it was, a motion flinging me toward death. The hour, even the moment, is a sharpened spade which for the wages in my painful tower digs out a monument from my brief day. Falta la vida, asiste lo vivido y no hay calamidad que no me ronde. Before the foot learns how to walk, it takes the road of death.

On it I loose my obscure life, a rut for my dark river swallowed in a breath of black sea and high waves. Brief moments are long steps, reluctant, on this road I take, and standing, even sleeping, I spur on. Inherited, forced death is quick, is far, an ultimate brief bitter sigh, last dawn. Since it is law, not punishment, why ache? Can no one answer me? My early days I simply wasted here; Fate has comsumed my temples, robbed each year, the hours have hid my madness thoroughly. How helpless not to have a clue of how and where my health and age have fled my gaze!

My life is void, I'm haunted by old ways, and every cataclysm plagues me now. The past is gone; tomorrow hasn't come; unceasingly the now is racing by. Los dos embustes de la vida humana desde la cuna son honra y riqueza. El tiempo, que ni vuelve ni tropieza, en horas fugitivas la devana; y en errado anhelar, siempre tirana, la fortuna fatiga su flaqueza. Vive muerte callada y divertida la vida misma; la salud es guerra de su propio alimento combatida. O how my age slithers into the earth! What muted steps you take, O frozen death, cutting down silently until all stands the same!

Voracious for the earth, you spring over the flimsy wall where green youth lay. My heart already waits for that last day, heeding the flight, not looking at its wing. I cannot live tomorrow without weight of my death leaning on me now! And each quick second of this human life is plainly a decreewarning me in plain speech: From cradle on, the ruins of human life are traps of honor and prosperity, and time that never stumbles or comes back spools out its hours, renders them fugitive; in errant craving, always punitive, our fortune wastes us weary on the wrack.

Silent death lives, and life itself becomes a joke, a game; our health turns into war, assaulted by its very nourishment. Oh how a man blunders through unseen scum! On earth I fear I'll fall and disappear, yet fail to see by living I ferment. Alone I go on battling night and day, a phantom in my arms I won't release, and when I want to lash it tighter in these ropes, watching the sweat fall off of me, I'm back, lost in my own obstinacy, with an obsessive love that makes me spin. I'm out for vengeance. Her false image will not leave my eyes.

She mocks me; in the fact of making me a fool, I have the shivers. I start to follow her. I have no will, yet since I feel like drowning her, my act is for my dirge to follow her in rivers. Love Constant Beyond Death The final shadow that will close my eyes will in its darkness take me from white day and instantly untie the soul from lies and flattery of death, and find its way, and yet my soul won't leave its memory of love there on the shore where it has burned: My soul, whom a God made his prison of, my veins, which a liquid humor fed to fire, my marrows, which have gloriously flamed, will leave their body, never their desire; they will be ash but ash in feeling framed; they will be dust but will be dust in love.

Mas a los seis planetas no hace guerra, ni estrella fija sus injurias siente. Las manchas de la tierra nos las siento. Drinking up fervor my hydropic life which is a lump of amorous coal unfed, a corpse made out of handsome fire is rife with light in smoke, in dark, and dead. People I shun, and day to me is horror; in endless voices I dilate black tears which my hot pain sent off to a deaf sea. I gave my voice of song to sighs, while fears and chaos inundate my soul. I see my heart become a nightly realm of terror.

He Says That His Love Has No Terrestrial Place Because the border of the burning gold of sun is vaster than our opaque globe of earth, and less than earth's enclosing robe holding the moon's three faces in her fold, we see her waning or about to grow; eclipse drops us in shadow on the floor although across six planets there's no war, nor does a fixed star feel each hurting blow. My lover's flamebare in the airless strip in the high zenith of the firmament never grows weak in shade, nor is eclipsed.

I don't feel stains of earth; I'm ignorant of how her night lies on her holy face, that region where my faith has found its place. A snake or asp, a squashed-down foot, a lion who has escaped her prison cell; a flying horseno reins to keep her put in place, a nested eagle wild to yell, a sword gyrated by a maddened hand and flint compounded out of solid steel; gunpowder waiting for the burning wick. Rich peasant with a terrible command, viper, caiman, ferocious crocodile is womanif the man withholds his prick.

Disillusionment with Women A whore is any man who trusts a whore. But call me also just a whore in love if I don't leave you as a whore one day, and like a whore I'll perish burning hot if I brag about the whores who've come my way; for serious-minded whores now cost a lot and little cheap ones curse and kick and shove.

Mas pronunciada con el labio acedo y con pujo sonoro despedida, con pullas y con risa de la vida, y con puf y con asco siendo quedo. I can't describe her holy penitence since to an endless chain of belted monks her shaking ass became a sacred bunk; their snakes they used to counter abstinence. They showered her with priestly deep reward, after each pumping feat, from each good brother who in our century lives for his thighs. But all those laymen sinners she abhorred; she worshiped eager rods that dance and rise inside her chapel from each prelate lover.

The Voice from the Red Eye We Call a Fart The voice from the red eye we call a fart a nightingale to the male whores has smell to kill the health of proud men out of hell, and even Mongol kings shake in their heart. It's most distinct when with its sour lip and sonorous squeeze it lets a big one fly, giving a life to laughter, filthy drip, and nauseating puffs that linger by. I shit on the royal emblem of the kings who boast, ringed in by Germans and buffoons, how they bequeath us life and shape our Fate. Well, in the court of their broad pantaloons, by loosening and straining one tight ring, any fat ass easily farts out his weight.

Ni lo quiero probar ni lo concedo. Of course its lashes stiffened like a thorn have the moist duty to conceal the eye, and every time it feels like pushing corn it blinks against the yellow lumps of pie. Will your fart have a better roar than ones by the disheveled poor Mallorca whore? I'm not about to try it, I admit. Your piss is piss and yes, your shit is shit. That is the only truth, the rest a bore, and now I feel an urge to purge my buns.

Why do you look for faults in the Greek tongue when you are just a rabbi of the Jews, a matter which your nose cannot deny? Don't scrawl more poemssave us, God in the sky! Quitarnos el dolor quitando el diente es quitar el dolor de la cabeza, quitando la cabeza que le siente. It was a sundial crooked as a crime, an elephant, its snout on high, a blur of nostrils on a scribe and executioner and Ovid Naso in his nosy prime.

It was a galley's pointed battering ram; it spread like an Egyptian pyramid and was twelve tribes of noses of a nation. It was a noseness grown ad nauseam, a mask, a Frisian archnose ugly as a squid, a fried and purple swollen ulceration. The Toothpuller Who Wanted to Turn a Mouth into a Grinding Machine O you who eat with someone else's teeth, chewing with molars, mumbling groans to us, your gluttonous dragon fingers bite beneath the gums, and pinch and nibble flesh and pus.

You who dissuade us from indulgent forms of eating dive into a soup like stones down wells; for a few crumbs, in rampant storms you plunge in with your grandmother's jawbones. Because of you, a peeling blames a mouth, a hazelnut explodes in brave defeat, its shell still boasting it a fortress bed. Relieving hurt by pulling out a tooth is getting rid of pain from head to feet, and feels the same as pulling off your head.

Desta cura me pides ocho reales; yo quiero hembra, y vino, y tabardillo, y gasten tu salud los hospitales. Ciegos, con todos hablo escarmentado; pues unos somos ciegos y otros cojos, ande el pie con el ojo remendado. He speaks and for his farts she has to pay, for his ''Just feed him tidbits for the tomb.

A bridled mule drops dead; July? To cure me once, you sicken me for good. Did you learn medicine or how to kill? For your sage cures you kill me with your bill. I want my wine, my females, want to flirt, and you to rot in bed like stinking cod. Signifying the Interesting Correspondence of Things in Human Life The blind man lugs a cripple on his shoulders; such charity is but a cunning feat: If I begin to blab about sly ways, in these two can the world be understood: If you give me your feet, my eyes you'll find; in this world all is bartered selfishness and plunder is exchanged for plunder shared.

I learn from talking with the blind, and yes, since some of us are cripples, others blind, the foot is walking with the eye repaired. Pues asco dentro son, tierra y gusanos. Advantages of Not Using Eyes, Ears, and Tongue To hear, to see, and to say nothing might heal us in time; let sight and hearing and the tongue be felt as something fully right and not transgression ready to offend. With rowers deaf, wax in their ears, my choice has been to sail the gulf which has turned white from bones and not from foam whose siren site entombs those who have heard its flattering voice.

Being unheard, my ears unhearing, my eyes lazy, I live forgotten to the frown of forceful men who always rule the world. If it's a crime to know who's sinnedand spies and snoopers love to see a vice unfurled please let me live unknowing and unknown. Garcilaso, the mystics, and Cervantes were long dead. Tirso de Molina, author of El burlador de Sevilla, the first formal Don Juan play, died in , the probable year of Sor Juana's birth. Not only did her works become popular in her lifetime in Mexico and in Spain where they were principally published but until , they went through many editions.

Presumably, the literature from Spain, passed around readily among literary friends in Spain, took a while to reach the Americas. They were her masters and her model, and to use a musical term, her own poetry has significant literal "quotations" from their work. In Traherne's poems as in "First Dream," the body sleeps and the winged soul comes awake and voyages, seeking revelation, and wanders high over the moon. But oddly, Sor Juana's real companion for the rest of her work was her sister poet Anne Bradstreet ? Some say nine Musesyet count again.

Gaze on the tenth: Sappho It is difficult to know quite why this epithet of pagan divinity, "tenth Muse," feels silly and patronizing, but perhaps it is because it suggests an element of surprise and unreality that a woman could be both a mortal and a major poet. To be so, she must not be mortal but an unreal goddess.

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It is a defense of a woman's right to write and have a room of her ownin her case, a convent cell. A few decades earlier Anne Bradstreet's verses revealed the dramatic plight of the woman poet: I am obnoxious to each carping tongue Who says my hand a needle better fits, A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong, For such despite they cast on female wits: If what I do prove well, it won't advance, They'll say it's stol'n, or else it was by chance. Isabel was a criolla, meaning a Spaniard born in New Spain: Juana was a "daughter of the Church"a euphemism of the day to say that she was illegitimate.

The young Juana scarcely knew her father, whom she did not see after childhood, and there is even uncertainty as to whether his name was Asbaje or Asvaje or Azuaje. His indeterminate name reflects the traditional social question of ascertaining fatherhood in contrast to the normal certitude of the true mother and recalls the similar dilemma over the father's name in the case of her poetic ancestor, the first "tenth Muse," Sappho: Her mother's name was Kleis" Sappho Further, Paz gives us a general picture of the mores in seventeenth-century Mexico, which explains, if not Juana's genius, the possibility that her time afforded her to develop and reveal it: Landholders, clerics, captains, nuns: How can the harmony among sisters and mother be explained?

We must modify our ideas about seventeenth-century morality. Sexual orthodoxy was much less rigorous than religious orthodoxy. Paz So while political and religious orthodoxies were dangerous to offend, the passions of the senses were safer terrain, and "free behavior" by women, Paz contends, would not seem to have any great effect on the reputation of a woman or on her ability to marry well and place her children in the Church, university, and military.

We have the confluence of extreme religiosity and extreme sensuality: Paz, who has often provoked his Mexican people, "the children of the mire," into confronting their history and traditions, offers his own offbeat homily: It is unwise to condemn it: These facts probably entered into her decision not to seek marriage but a life in the convent.

There at least she could write and did so. But Juana was also to suffer criticism from the Church for the erotic implications and religious impropriety of her profane poems as well as for the very activity of her writings, their publication, and her intellectual investigations.

Her famous Response to the bishop's accusations was articulate in its prose but disastrous for her life. In response to tormenting criticism, she chose a way leading directly to literary silence. A young reader As a young girl Juana was precocious in reading, writing, and literary composition. In her autobiographical observations she describes herself as imaginative and mischievous in her childhood. We gather some idea of her extraordinary notions of the physical and spiritual universe, which she was to elaborate in her "First dream" in the Response to Sor Filotea "Filotea" was a pseudonym for the bishop of Puebla who had chastised her: The source for information on her childhood comes from her Response and reveals a young child singularly obsessed with words, writing, Latin, philosophy, theology.

After a short time she could read better than her mother, but she kept this a secret, fearing she would hurt her mother's feelings or possibly earn herself a whipping for having acted without her permission. As part of her self-discipline to keep up her reading, she refrained from eating cheese because she heard that it made people stupid, and her desire for learning was stronger than her desire for eating.

She also engaged in other forms of mild self-castigation, which recall notions of another great writer of solitude, Franz Kafka. In his journal Kafka tells in meticulous detail how he put nails under the desk top so that if he leaned back to sleep when reading or writing, his knees would come up against the nails and alert him back to his literary duties.

Juana used scissors or a knife: I began to study Latin in which I believe I took less than twenty lessons, and my concern was so intense that although the natural adornment of hair is so important among womenand especially so in the flower of their youth, I would cut off two or three inches, after first measuring its length. And I made a rule that when it began to grow back to that length without my knowing it, I would cut it again as a punishment for my ignorance.

It turned out that it grew back and I hadn't learned what I was supposed to, because the hair grew quickly and I learned slowly. And so I cut it again as a punishment for my ignorance, for it did not seem right to me that my head should be adorned with hair that was so naked in knowledge, which is a more desireable adornment. Response Her few Latin lessons were enough for her to go on learning by herself. They set her on a course where eventually she would compose poems in Latin. The experience of learning Latin by herself was characteristic, then and later in the convent, of her autodidactic means of accumulating knowledge.

She would direct her entire life to adding to the books of her memory. After demonstrating by logic and geometric similes how all important branches of knowledge are related and essential to each other, Sor Juana affirmed her need therefore to study many subjects. Her teacher was her silent books as her classmate was her insentient inkwell. As proof of the need for knowing the natural world in order to know the divine mysteries, she writes in the Response that as a child of a Saint Jerome and a Saint Paul, she herself could not be the idiot daughter She lists the accomplishments of great figures.

Without knowledge they would not have been plausible. Could Daniel, she asks, have computed the mysterious meanings of the years and days without arithmetic; how without geometry could the holy arches and holy city of Jerusalem have been constructed; and how without architecture could the great temple of Solomon have been designed by God or could Solomon, his supervisor, have executed those plans?

Her reasoning tells us that since the patriarchs had to be fluent in arithmetic and geometry and God himself had to possess architectural knowledge, we too should aspire to that condition of gnosis. At six or seven Juana heard of the university in Mexico City, and she writes, "I began killing my mother with insistent and annoying requests to be sent there so I could study there" Response She asked that she be dressed as a man so they would let her in.

When her mother rejected her strategy, she consoled herself by immersing herself in her grandfather's library. Like Borges, Sor Juana found paradise in the small labyrinth of the family book collection. When she did go on a visit to the capital, she confessed that she had read so many books from that family library that she recited sections at length, at a time when she was hardly old enough, people thought, to know how to speak.

It is not certain whether he had actually lived in the house, but since Sor Juana scarcely mentions her father, it is probable that after his departure she did not see him or had little or nothing to do with him. But was he really dead in her mind? Octavio Paz thinks not. In fact he hypothesizes that he may be the fantasized lover of her poems and she, the widow of that relationship.

She may have taken her mother's place: The absent father, if not dead, had disappeared. His absence provoked nostalgia and idealization: Maybe her feelings were not those of pride but those of grief and shame: If, as her attitude suggests, she killed him in her imagination and buried him in silence, her poetry exhumed him, transfiguring them both: Paz 75 A confusion of lovers If her biological father was now a haunting ghost, her mother's new lover, Captain Diego Ruiz Lozano, was a physical presence and usurper of her father in the household, a role Juana herself held in part by the very nature of her studies and prestige ensuing therefrom.

The lover in her poems is not without psychological foundation whatever the source of inspiration , not without passion, and certainly not merely a convention of Petrarchan or Neoplatonic idealization, as some critics who read her poems lightly have supposed. Along with her original voice there are, of course, Petrarchan or Neoplatonic echoesas there were throughout European literatures in those centuries.

Echo, influence, and emulation are inevitable if we dare assume the existence of canon and tradition. Terminological notions should not, however, lead the reader away from her expression of lovewhether it was actual from secret or unreported friendships at court or convent or imagined; whether conscious or deeply transposed from the unconscious.

Through Sor Juana's cunning art and passion, the voice in each poem is fully realized. Having speculated on the background of the love poems, I also wish to argue for letting them stand alone. They need no explanatory justification. The love poems are powerful and should not be overread contextually to the point of their losing autonomous, artistic being. And it is certainly absurd to refute the love element by asserting that Sor Juana was merely a nun.

Insofar as my awareness of Sor Juana as a nun colors my readingand surely it mustI confess that, given her complete dedication as a woman of letters, her being a nun intensifies and dramatizes the love situation. And beyond who Sor Juana was or was not, beyond biography and psychological conjecture, it is only fair to look first at the poem. Who reads Lope or Tirso and colors each love passage, reducing it to the notion that it was composed by a priest or a monk?

The balance between a reader's external knowledge of the poet's life and work, on the one hand, and the autonomy of the poem, on the other, is always debatable. In the astonishing instance of Sor Juana, these questions of voice appear to loom larger. I prefer to believe, however, that a fair reading of the poems will overwhelm the reader and that questions of speaker will be muted, allowing the poems to live in their own space. In her relentlessly metaphysical poems, Sor Juana acknowledges illusion and the images of her invention.

Don't leave me, shadow of my love, elusive and obsessed image which I care for most, handsome deceit for whom I'd be a ghost, sweet fiction for which pain is not abusive. If my own body of obedient steel serves as a magnet fated to your grace, why flatter me with lover's commonplace, only to drop me, run, while I congeal?

And yet you cannot brag of anything, of any triumph through your tyranny. If you elude the narrow noose I've set to capture your fantastic form, and spring out of my arms, who cares? You flee, and yet I've got you locked up in my fantasy. As for her mother, the real, earthly, sexual, active companion of men, Juana was ambivalent. I exclude San Juan's own books of interpretive commentary, whose theological discourse is radically intentional but irrelevant to the poems.

More important, San Juan's own erotic mysticism, in which fully sensual physical love is the simile for mystical union with God, is expressed in the voice of a woman in his three major mystical poems: So we read in the opening lines of ''Dark Night": Juan spoke in the voice of a Juana. While it is excessive to read, as some critics do, a religious or mystical dimension into Sor Juana's love poems, it is equally wrong to deprive Sor Juana of a literal reading in favor of a forced symbolic or allegorical one when she records passionate human loveits hopes and despairsbetween woman and man.

The same disfavoring of sensual literality is normal in most readings of San Juan de la Cruz's poems modeled after the erotic Song of Songs, just as until Denys Page's Sappho and Acaeus in , the lesbian element in Sappho's love lyrics was uniformly ignored or denied by serious European and American classical scholars. Even in the Response, Sor Juana's defiant defense against her critics of a woman's right to write, she is not immune to misreading for purposes of concealing eroticism. In sum, if others force religion into her love poems or expunge the clear, profound expression of human love, reducing the surface text to mere symbolism, that is the problem of the overintentional reader.

Sor Juana would have none of that interference, that interpretive judgment that carried with it praise, prescription, and proscription. In reality, less than a tenth of Sor Juana's poems are religious, and even these are largely occasion poems. She stood her ground against the censorship of the clergy, and in Response to Sor Filotea, she upheld her right to write what she wished. But they were men and in Spain, not in the provinces of New Spain. Clearly in her earlier years, Sor Juana too wrote what she cared to, following, at least outwardly, the conventions and tastes of the time.

Yet when a gale of ecclesiatical intolerance struck her in the form of a bishop's admonitions, she recorded her long document of defiance, declaring "her room of her own. A young writer in the library Juana's literary precosity continued. At the age of eight, she wrote a loa a "praise" or short dramatic poem serving as introduction to a sacred play for a religious festival celebrated in a church in neighboring Amecameca. Her library books and her writing began to inhabit a room where they become her surrogate life, a life which she chose in lieu of the one with carnal and ordinary reality, a literary realm in which from flesh to spirit she created her own habitat.

Her later "total antipathy for marriage" is all intriguingly contradicted in her marriage to the word, wherein she created lovers. Like Emily Dickinson, the nun of Amherst, her pen was passionately creative, and she was alive in its creations. These women inhabited New England attic or convent cell of the word. Given the word as the immense worldly center of Juana's life, it was natural that she moved from her grandfather's library to the convent where she had one of the most complete and sophisticated private collections of books in New Spain.

Even here, the report of it is not confirmed. It was said to contain four thousand volumes, making it one of the primary collections, especially in mathematics and the sciences, in the seventeenth-century New World. There is a possibility that the four thousand were actually four hundred select books, but this would still have put her in possession of perhaps the largest personal library of the time. Those books, which inspired her creation, also charted the borders of her solitude.

We are not certain of Juana's childhood after her eighth year. Again the fatherless daughter, beautiful, clever, poor but aided by relatives, found a fine place to escape into and nourish her obsession to read and know. In regard to the move to the capital, Alan Trueblood speaks of "Juana on the solitary course to which the superiority of her mind predestined her, a course followed henceforth with the avidity and tenacity of the inspired autodidact" Trueblood 2. Sor Juana was fortunate, for the vicereine, who cared for literature on her own, was sensitive and attendant to the young woman's intelligence and talents.

At the worldly court Juana was a brilliant figure of wit, charm, beauty. At the same time, one learns from her autobiographical letter that amid the glamor and surfaces of court activities, she possessed a gravity and determination of iron. Throughout her life, later as a nun and perhaps even as a result of her convent life, she managed to maintain her spirit of remarkable independence.

That stubborn intelligence showed itself to its fullest in her daring assertions and retorts to the criticisms and suggestions in her response to Sor Filoteathat is, the bishop. One of the principal preoccupations of the royal court in the Americas was galanteocourting, wooing, and all kinds of flirtations of the body and spirit.

As for Juana's involvement with suitors, we have nothing more than later conjectureno recollections or letters of the time. Most of the court gallants were married, however, and the eligible ones would hardly be interested in marriageor, rather, having their mutual families arrange marriagewith a smart beauty who had no dowry, family distinction, nor even natal legitimacy. She was still the fatherless orphan. The unlikeliness of marriage, at least with a court figure, surely contributed to Juana's own adamant rejection of marriage and her ultimate choice to find her worldly and spiritual life in books that she could read in her own cell.

This afternoon, my love, speaking to you since I could see that in your face and walk I failed in coming close to you with talk, I wanted you to see my heart. Love, who supported me in what I longed to do, conquered what is impossible to gain. Amid my tears that were poured out in pain, my heart became distilled and broken through. Don't be so stiff. Don't let these maddening jealousies and arrogance haunt you or let your quiet be upset by foolish shadows: One of the delightful stories, probably true, is recounted by her contemporary biographer, the Jesuit father Diego Callejas, based on the viceroy's recollection.

Even today the main sources for biographical information remain the Response, our richest source; the Callejas brief biographical essay based on the Response; and her poems. The viceroy, wishing to test the diversity and amazing wisdom of the young woman, gathered all the men of letters at the university and in the city of Mexico, which included the forty leading theologians, scripturists, philosophers, mathematicians, historians, poets, and humanists.