procura desmentir los elogios que a un retrato de la Poetisa inscribió la verdad, que llama pasión
Let's go back a bit; let us start this translation when I woke up in the late dawn of this morning and put my headphones on. I have been listening to the San Francisco Jewish jazz ensemble Davka's The Golem over and over. It is the soundtrack to Der Golem (1920) from Germany.
In the last couple of years I have been fascinated with the Hebrew Golem legend; how Rabi Loew of Prague made a clay statute and brought to life a savior to protect the Jews from persecution. Jorge Luis Borges, one of a handful of poets who have examined the myth, writes:
Thirsty to know things only known to God,
[Loew] shuffled letters endlessly,
trying them out in subtle combinations
till at last he uttered the Name that is the Key,the Gate, the Echo, the Landlord and the Mansion" (Borges, 1999).
It is a curious thing but the Golem myth has been compulsively showing up in my life of late. There are two authors who've experimented with it I'd recommend, Gustav Meyrink and Jonathan Stroud. Then there is Borge's poem, of course, and the movie with its music. And now. it seems, there is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's poem.
I won't try to claim this has anything superficially to do with the Golem, however. This is simply a flight of fancy on my part. You can see what I mean by the sonnet:
Este, que ves, engaño colorido,
que del arte ostentando los primores,
con falsos silogismos de colores
es cauteloso engaño del sentido;
éste, en quien la lisonja ha pretendido
excusar de los años los horrores,
y venciendo del tiempo los rigores,
triunfar de la vejez y del olvido,
es un vano artificio del cuidado,
es una flor al viento delicada,
es un resguardo inútil para el hado;
es una necia diligencia errada,
es un afán caduco y, bien mirado,
es cadáver, es polvo, es sombra, es nada.
Like I say, no Golem here. What interests me is the Platonic idea that we are but false images of a real thing. Her engaño colorido, her "colorful perversion," is similar to the idea of Loew's clay man brought to life with the word Emet (truth) written on a stone and stuck into its mouth. By erasing the first letter on the stone to form the word Meth (death) the power is destroyed. Though Sor Juana writes about a painting someone made of her, the sentiment to me is the same; that under all that falsely animated beauty lies, … cadáver, es polvo, es sombra … nada, "… a corpse, dust, shade … nothing." Her is my translation of the poem. Of course, I would recommend you first read Barnstone's, Trueblood's and Peden's, as I did, to understand what Sor Juana was really saying.
Before you, this colorful perversion
boasts all about art's illusive glamor,
sets up such false conclusions in color
as to leave your eye in some confusion.
Before you, this paint tries to claim
it can ward off the horror of the years,
it can defy the strength of time's rigors
to wipe clean our memory and our name.
It is our hollow concerns with scheming,
it is a flower in a fragile breeze,
it is vain defense against destiny;
it is our foolish misplaced loyalties,
it is lost passion and, seen carefully,
it is a corpse, dust, shade, it is nothing.
Work Cited
Barnstone, Willis. Six Masters of the Spanish Sonnet. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press (1993)
Borges, Jorge Luis. Selected Poems. Edited by Alexander Coleman. New York: Viking. (1999)
Peden, Margaret Sayers (trans) Poems, Protest, and a Dream: selected writings of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. New York, NY, USA: Penguin Books (1997)
Trueblood, Alan S. A Sor Juana Anthology. Foreword by Octavio Paz. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press (1988)