Abstract
This chapter analyzes a set of sacred villancicos written in 1676 by renowned Mexican nun and writer Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz. The set, composed to be sung at the Cathedral of Mexico during the celebration of the feast of the Assumption, consists of a series of poems in different languages and registers, including Latin, Nahuatl, and several literary registers of Spanish. The poems, which offer alternative versions of the Virgin’s Assumption, are read in this analysis as figurative translations of each other. In particular, it is argued that Sor Juana uses self-translation as a model for this multilingual composition. In doing so, she generates a critical dialog with multilingual translation practices that had been previously used in the context of the Spanish American conquest and colonization—and that today could constitute a meaningful historical context for some of the practices discussed in the initial section of this volume.
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Notes
- 1.
“Villancicos que se cantaron en la Santa Iglesia Metropolitana de Méjico, en honor de María Santísima Madre de Dios, en su Asunción Triunfante, año de 1676, en que se imprimieron” (Sor Juana 1952, 3–17). All translations into English are my own unless otherwise noted.
- 2.
Their most frequent function was that of responsories to the lessons in the liturgical service of Matins. Álvaro Torrente notes that the use of villancicos in a liturgical context became an established practice in the cathedrals of Spain by the mid-sixteenth century and was soon adopted in the Spanish colonies (2000, 64). Alfonso Méndez Plancarte has found sets of villancicos printed in Mexico as far back as 1648 (1952, xxxv).
- 3.
For a study of this earlier, secular form, see the classical work of Antonio Sánchez Romeralo (1969).
- 4.
The name of the author was seldom included when the sets were printed, but scholars have been able to identify the authorship of several sets composed by Góngora, some of which have been found in his manuscripts or explicitly included in a compilation of his works printed in Madrid in 1633 (Borrego Gutiérrez 2012, 104–107). In the case of Sor Juana, at least twelve sets of villancicos, written between 1676 and 1691, have been attributed to her by scholars with full certainty (Tenorio 1999, 58).
- 5.
Alfonso Méndez Plancarte, in his canonical edition, already noted that while the final poem in other sets of villancicos usually combines “a variety of languages: including Latin, Nahuatl, Portuguese, Congolese, and Basque,” this particular set only combines two poems written in different languages, one in a literary parody of the Spanish spoken by African slaves and one in Nahuatl. Méndez Plancarte also mentions that this is the only set in which a poem is written exclusively in Nahuatl (instead of combining Nahuatl and Spanish phrases). Additionally, his note to the Latin poem in this set points out that some of Sor Juana’s other sets of villancicos have Spanish-and-Latin “hybrid” poems (Sor Juana 1952, 356, 362 and 365).
- 6.
Jan Walsh Hokenson and Marcella Munson believe there is another piece, included in Sor Juana’s complete works in three consecutive versions, that may also involve some form of self-translation. The versions include a décima (a poem of ten Spanish octosyllabic verses) described as a gift to Sor Juana, an accompanying Latin translation identified as Sor Juana’s own, and a second Latin version identified simply as “Otra” [Another] (Hokenson and Munson 2014, 112).
- 7.
[From her maternal name changed in part, the name Camilla / she is given, so that the Triple Goddess, as a worthy acolyte, she could attend. / I, the whole name of my Parent, as a Servant to the Trinity, / transform: in me, EVE is fully turned into HAIL.]
- 8.
[Her maternal name / Camila had changed in part, / so that the Triple Goddess / she could fittingly attend. / I, a Slave of the Threefold God, / the whole name of the Mother / transform, and exclusively for me, / the EVA turns into AVE.]
- 9.
Sor Juana’s Latin verse points explicitly to lines 542–543 of Book 11 of the Aeneid: “matrisque vocabit / nomine Casmillae mutata parte Camillam” (Virgil 1991, 56).
- 10.
There are only two poems in the third section, because, in the office of Matins, the Latin hymn known as the Te Deum was usually sung after the last reading instead of a villancico.
- 11.
[Heaven and Earth on this day / are competing against each other: / she, because God came down, / and he, because Mary goes up.]
- 12.
[Says Heaven: —I shall give / shelter that entails more pleasure: / for God came to suffer, / while Mary rises to triumph; / …… / Earth says: —I suspect / that mine was more beautiful, / since Mary’s Womb / is much better than Heaven; / …… / —Your complaints are unfair, / since you lean to crown / Christ with your Thorns, / while I [crown], Mary, with Stars / (says Heaven); and with the most beautiful ones… ]
- 13.
[Mary brings peace, when she goes up, / as does her Son when he comes down].
- 14.
It does so almost explicitly in the refrain: “—¿Quae est Ista? ¿Quae est Ista, / quae de deserto ascendit sicut virga, / Stellis, Sole, Luna pulchior? —Maria” [—Who is This? Who is This / Who ascends from the desert like a line of smoke, / fairer than the Stars, the Sun, and the Moon? —Mary!] (Sor Juana 1952, 5). Cf. Canticum Canticorum 3.6: “Quae est ista quae ascendit per desertum sicut virgula,” and 6.10: “Quae est ista […] pulchra ut luna, electa ut sol…”
- 15.
[She, who was worthy of conceiving / the Lord of Heaven in her uterus / …… / She whose virginal foot / the humble Moon is happy to kiss, / and who is crowned by the Stars, / clothed by the Sun’s radiance, / …… / triumphant, she ascends into Heaven, / may she live there for centuries.]
- 16.
[No one studied de Charitate / with more eagerness, / and of the subject de Gratia / she knew before she was born. / Later, de Incarnatione / she was able to study in herself, / for which, on de Trinitate, / she was able to reach great fame.]
- 17.
[From the ut of Ecce ancilla, / which is the base, she begins, / and she rises higher than the sol, / reaching the la of the Exaltata.]
- 18.
Cf. Canticum canticorum 1.4-5 and 4.8.
- 19.
[To rejoice in the arms / of her loving Lord, / she trades the humble valley / for the lofty Mountain.]
- 20.
[She carries a shining armor / made from rays of the Sun, / the helmet is made from Stars, / and the boots, from the Moon.]
- 21.
[Because she is Queen, it is fit that she accepts / the sacred antonomasia / she deserves as such; / and today, translated into Heaven, / she performs the metaphor.]
- 22.
In the Romance languages, starting in the early fifteenth century, the term “traducir” (<Lt. traduco, a synonym for transfero) started to replace other synonyms for “translating,” but at the time Sor Juana was writing, the verb “trasladar” was still used sometimes to indicate the activity of translation.
- 23.
[Refrain / —Ah, ah, ah, / the Queen is leaving us! / —Uh, uh, uh, / she is not white like you, / neither is she Spanish, for they are not good; / for She says: I am dark, / many Suns have looked at me!]
- 24.
[—Let’s sing, Perico, / for the Queen is leaving, / and let’s all give her / a good night. / …… /She will look very handsome, / dressed in silk, / looking at the Sun, / stepping on the Stars. / —Just let me cry, / Blasico, for Her; / she is going away, and we / are left in servitude.]
- 25.
“—Beloved Lady, / Since you are departing, / oh, Mother, please / do not forget us. / …… / Since the Son you love / is much in your debt, / entreat him, Mother, / for all your children. / If he seems unwilling, / remind him gently / how once you gave him / your virginal feeding” (Tr. in Sor Juana 1988, 125–127).
- 26.
For a comprehensive study of this practice in the early modern European realm, see Bistué (2013).
- 27.
[... the natives of the Chalco people who rebelled against the Mexica, causing damage by breaking four canoes with the rock that the man has in his hands.]
- 28.
[The reader must excuse the rough style and the translation of what is depicted in this history, since the translator was not given any room for digression. … Likewise, where the older alfaqui and the novice alfaqui are named, it has been an oversight on the part of the translator to use such names, for they are Moorish names. By older alfaqui, one should understand older priest, and by novice alfaqui, novice priest. And where the name mosque has been used, it should be understood as temple.]
- 29.
An initial bibliography of multilingual translations printed in Spanish America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is included in Bistué (2014).
- 30.
For more details on this controversy, see, for instance, Arenal and Powell (1994).
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Bistué, B. (2019). Self-Translation as a Model for Multilingual Writing in Sor Juana’s Villancicos de la Asunción (1676). In: Bujaldón de Esteves, L., Bistué, B., Stocco, M. (eds) Literary Self-Translation in Hispanophone Contexts - La autotraducción literaria en contextos de habla hispana. Translation History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23625-0_5
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