ABSTRACT
In 1688 María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga, Countess of Paredes and Marquise of La Laguna, friend and patron of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, left Mexico after having spent several years as vicereine of New Spain. She brought along many of Sor Juana’s creative works with the purpose of making them known among readers in Europe. One year later, Inundación castálida (Castilian Flood) was published in Madrid by the press of Juan García Infanzón; it included a “Prólogo al lector” (Prologue to the reader) attributed to Francisco de las Heras, secretary of the Counts of Paredes (Alatorre, Obras completas 19; Luciani, Literary Self-Fashioning 27). Thought of as the first of three volumes, Inundación castálida was a great success for its time and soon brought fame to the Mexican poet in the intellectual and artistic circles of Spain, its colonies, and Portugal. This volume incorporated seventy-nine texts, including eighteen romances (ballads) written for the most part as occasional poetry to celebrate noble, literary, and religious figures of Europe and Mexico. One of these poems, categorized by Alfonso Méndez Plancarte as a philosophical ballad (romance 2, “Finjamos que soy feliz” [Let’s pretend I am happy]), expressed the poet’s love of learning and subsequent torment of unsolicited fame. 1 The poem seemed to conclude that it was better to remain ignorant than have knowledge: “Aprendamos a ignorar, / pensamiento, pues hallamos / que cuanto añado al discurso, / tanto le usurpo a los años” (OC 1.8) [Let us learn about not knowing / O Thought, for we then discover / that for all I add to discourse / I usurp as much from my years] (Grossman 13). This reflection about the author’s work and her intellectual and creative self anticipated other romances that appeared in subsequent editions and volumes. One, Romance 51 (“¿Cuándo, Númenes divinos” [When, divine Numina?]), has been much-studied as Sor Juana’s late reflection about celebration, fame, and self-representation. The poem has been also seen as an example of the poet’s awareness of Creole subjectivity in the colonies of Spain and its place in the imperial political map of the seventeenth century. This innovative approach to Sor Juana’s ballads resonates with the consideration of Spanish American baroque literature as a space to contest imperial conceptions of the other in the colonial world.
