JUANA DE ASBAJE, in religion Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, was, like most great spirits, at once the glory and the victim of her age. She was born in Mexico in 1651, of aristocratic Spanish parentage, and won the respect of the most advanced scholars of her time by her achievements in mathematics, astronomy, languages, and poetry. Her austere, impassioned and mystical mind led her to the cloister, where she ended by renouncing her studies, and writing out her confession of faith in her own blood.
She was, in her beauty, her learning and her Catholicism, the perfect flowering of seventeenth century European civilization in the New World, a civilization imperfectly transplanted, imposed artificially, due to be swept away by the rising flood of revolution. But her own pure and candid legend persists and grows, a thing beloved for its unique beauty. She died in her forty-fifth year of a plague which swept Mexico City. This sonnet is almost literally translated.
by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
translated from the Spanish by Katherine Anne Porter
This which you see is merely a painted shadow
Wrought by the boastful pride of art,
With falsely reasoned arguments of colours,
A wary, sweet deception of the senses.
This picture, where flattery has endeavored
To mitigate the terrors of the years,
To defeat the rigorous assaults of Time,
And triumph over oblivion and decay—
Is only a subtle careful artifice,
A fragile flower of the wind,
A useless shield against my destiny.
It is an anxious diligence to preserve
A perishable thing: and clearly seen
It is a corpse, a whirl of dust, a shadow,—
nothing.
1924