Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Nahuatl in the early years

[Paul Anderson]

Dear fellow subscribers to Nahuat-l:

I’m a new subscriber and this is my first posting. I’ve had some initial
difficulty accessing the archives, so am not sure whether it’s customary
for newbies here to introduce themselves. As will quickly be apparent,
I’m not a professional in the field of Nahuatl studies.

I’m currently wrapping up my first novel, based in part on the life of
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and am delighted to be able to say that it
has just been accepted by Random House of Canada. While in Mexico on a
research trip in 1995, I had the great delight of speaking with Dr.
Patrick Johannsen (sp.) at UNAM for a couple of hours about Sor Juana’s
use of Nahuatl in her poetry.

Did he, I asked, have any opinion on just how well she used or spoke the
language?

By sheer happenstance he was then completing a paper on the topic, and
felt her usage to be highly sophisticated. This was consistent with some
notions I’d been noodling with regarding her first 11 years of life in
Nepantla and Panoyan. My publisher has asked for more from this period
and I’m happy to try to oblige. It’s natural to suppose there were a
number of Nahua speakers among the workers of both haciendas. I’ve come
up with a Nahua-speaking wetnurse, whose daughter is Juana’s age, and
her best friend.

In one chapter I have her wetnurse and best friend teaching her Nahua
proverbs during a long, bumpy ride by mule cart from Nepantla through
Chimalhuacan and into Nepantla. I’ve been working with a few of the
proverbs published in Thelma Sullivan’s _A Scattering of Jades_.

If there were anyone out there willing to look over the chapter as a
whole, I would of course be thrilled.

In the meantime, I have so far a few words or phrases I’m looking for
the Nahua equivalent of:

“Yes, hurry up.”
(Spoken, or rather parroted, impatiently by an imperious two-year-old
(Juana) to a small group of Macehual fieldhands.)

“Twins”
I have “cocoa” for serpents, as in, perhaps, “dragon twins” but these
two little girls fancy themselves twins also. Would “Cocoa” (pl.?) be
something they might run through a courtyard shouting as the equivalent
of: [we are] Twins! Mellisas! Cocoas!

“Ixayac”
I have this for “face”. It is a rock face, but the two girls call their
secret place that because it looks like a human face or mask. (There has
been discussion of masks already in the chapter.)

I know how it is with long postings – the shorter, the easier to answer.
So please feel free to weigh in with only one small bit.

And please accept my heartfelt thanks in advance.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Anderson