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

[melesan at pacbell.net]

Paul,

Use the mexicanismo for twin what my high school students in Santa Ana, Ca
use for twin:  cuate from coatl from Quetzalcoatl.  One of the aspects of
this diety was that he was the morning and evening star, Venus.  His twin
was Xolotl (from which I believe but will have to substantiate comes the
word cholo, used throughout Latin America).  See Alfonso Caso's El Pueblo
del Sol (The People of the Sun) for a more scholarly explanation.

Would love to read any part of your novel beforehand.  Am a high school
teacher and we delve into Sor Juana and Mexica or Aztec culture in my high
school Spanish for Spanish Speakers courses.

Mel Sanchez.

Paul Anderson wrote:

> 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