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

[Frances Karttunen]

The fact of the matter is that in the collected works of Sor Juana there are
just two poems that reflect her knowledge of Nahuatl.  One poem is entirely
in Nahuatl, and it contains numbers of infelicities of the sort that reflect
Spanish interference.  The other is a parody of how Nahuatl speakers speak
Spanish and is very much on the mark.

My guess is that she was very fluent in spoken Nahuatl that she learned by
ear as a child, but when she applied the extraordinarily high standard she
set for herself in her literary work, she realized that she did not command
the language's complex rhetorical structure sufficiently to write the
beautiful poetry she produced in Spanish, so she did not write more.

Fran Karttunen

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>From: Paul Anderson <indus56 at telusplanet.net>
>To: nahuat-l at server2.umt.edu
>Subject: Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Nahuatl in the early years
>Date: Tue, Aug 15, 2000, 12:28 AM
>

> 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
>
>
>
>
>