To encounter the poems of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695) is to “sense a woman who pours out poetry as a tight faucet shoots out high-pressure water.” Or so argues the English poet Sally Read (b. 1971) in her introduction to “The Liquid Pour in which my Heart has Run,” Rhina Espaillat’s new translations of these poems, published today by Wiseblood Books. Every reader will quickly notice the intellectual intensity of this Spanish-Creole nun in 17th-century Mexico.

An autodidact as a girl, turned loose in her grandfather’s library to learn what she would, she was driven to learn everything. And exactingly so: For every mistake she made in Latin, Read tells us, she cut off another length of her hair. Her entry into religious life, in the Order of Saint Jerome, in 1667, was meant at least partially as an escape from marriage, a way to create a space for herself in which she could continue her studies.

At the same time, she feared that her vocation might stifle her intellectual life. Both those possibilities realized themselves. In her monastic cell, she found that her mind’s vistas opened out, ultimately, on eternity. As Thomas Aquinas had concluded four centuries earlier, she saw that intellectual pursuit became, in the end, the pursuit of God, author of truth and answer to every question. 

As a nun, she amassed a world-class library and dedicated herself to writing and debate. The intellectual salon she conducted attracted members of a growing female intellectual elite in New Spain. But Sor Juana also attracted the attention of the Bishop of Puebla, who in 1694 ordered her to sell off her books and perform charitable works among the poor. The next year, at forty-six, while caring for her religious sisters during a wave of the plague, she fell ill and died. 

Perhaps it’s inevitable that Sor Juana’s name should be invoked alongside that of Saint John of the Cross, if only because Rhina Espaillat has translated both these Spanish-language poets. Espaillat’s poetry was first noticed by The New York Sun on January 4, 1950, and in the year and a half of our revival of daily poetry in the Sun, she has been a frequent choice for the Poem the Day. Sun readers will especially remember her translation of St. John’s “Songs of the Soul in Intimate Amorous Communion with God,” which appeared this past June 23.

But where St. John appropriates the language of erotic love as a metaphor for the mystic’s experience of divine love, it’s less clear that Sor Juana’s love poetry is meant as metaphor. She was not a mystic but a solidly earthly human being in body, mind, and soul.

At the same time, she was not a materialist, but a believer in a transcendent reality. “Today, My Treasure,” a Petrarchan sonnet, shows us a human woman, whose hunger for a person is simply of a piece with her driving hunger for everything on earth and in heaven. If God is the “Love” of the poem’s fifth line, then far from condemning this poem, or the intense lower-case “love” that impels it, it is God himself who has “lent assistance to my art.”

Today, My Treasure
by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (translated by Rhina P. Espaillat)

Today, my treasure, when I said my part,
since in your face and gestures I perceived
that all my words, though true, were not believed,
I longed to let you see my naked heart;

and Love, who lent assistance to my art,
what seemed at first impossible achieved:
for as the tears flowed more the more I grieved,
my heart dissolved away and oozed apart.

No more of all this anger, love, no more:
let every doubt that troubles you be banned —
those phantom fears that wound you to the core,

those lying signs that your suspicions fanned —
since you have seen and felt the liquid pour
in which my heart has run into your hand.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.