Reviewed by:

• Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. La resistencia del deseo by Francisco Ramírez Santa Cruz
• Stephanie Kirk

IN THE WORDS of the contemporary Mexican poet Luis Felipe Fabre, “Todos los sorjuanistas discrepan en algo. Discrepan / entre ellos. Discrepan / en algo que suele ser casi todo” (“Sor Juana y otros monstruos,” Poemas de terror y de misterio, Almadía, 2013). These disagreements began during Sor Juana’s day as her many defenders took on her equally numerous critics. More recently, the polemic intensified after the 1982 publication of Octavio Paz’s Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y las trampas de la fe and has continued unabated since then. The most contentious issues are less concerned with interpreting her works and more with understanding key moments in her life. Given the paucity of biographical documents relevant to Sor Juana’s life, scholars pore over her writings in search of clues. (Additional information has been unearthed in recent years, although some of it seems to inspire more questions than answers.) While many mysteries enshroud Sor Juana’s life, three main questions remain unsolved: Why did she take the habit? What was the nature of her relationship with María Luisa, vicereine of New Spain? And why did she seemingly renounce her literary and intellectual pursuits and embrace an ascetic life? Into these murky waters valiantly wades the Mexican literary scholar Francisco Ramírez Santa Cruz with a highly readable and fastidiously documented new biography of the nun poet, part of a series of biographies of famous writers from the Hispanic and wider Western world recently launched by the Spanish publisher Cátedra.

Ramírez de Santa Cruz carefully explains his approach to the book in his introductory note. He divides previous biographies on Sor Juana into two general groups, “por un lado, aquel que hace una lectura de su vida desde el liberalismo laico y, por el otro, aquel que defiende a ultranza una interpretación hipercatólica de sus motivaciones y obras literarias” (12). The only two previous biographies he references in his introduction are the first, written by a Spanish Jesuit, Diego Calleja (1638–1725), with whom Sor Juana exchanged letters but never met. Calleja’s Vida is a short, hagiographic text replete with fascinating anecdotes upon which critics relied for centuries. The other is Octavio Paz’s monumental and spellbinding intellectual biography of the nun. While he was critiqued for his collapsing [End Page 131] of the viceroyalty’s treatment of intellectuals with the persecution of similar figures by more contemporary regimes, the poetic undercurrents with which Paz inflects New Spanish society and the way he unravels the intellectual strands upon which she drew render it nonetheless the most compelling of books, its tricks and snares notwithstanding. Ramírez de Santa Cruz situates his text at a remove from both books, claiming that his biography “propone una exégesis lo más objetiva posible de todos los datos que se conocen de sor Juana hasta el día de hoy” (12).

It is a wise ambition and one in which he succeeds. Like Paz, Ramírez Santa Cruz writes eloquently and reads Sor Juana’s work skillfully, but he is a more levelheaded and straightforward biographer than Paz, avoiding the extravagant speculations that the Nobel laureate permitted himself. The reader, for example, might want to contrast the circumspect manner with which Ramírez Santa Cruz tackles the issue of Sor Juana’s absent father with Paz’s riotous psychoanalytical reading to understand the difference in methodology between these two biographers. At the same time, La resistencia del deseo is no dull read, and the author powerfully conjures the era and its culture for the reader. Of note in this regard is his portrayal in chapter 1 of Sor Juana’s early years and his riveting description of what life on a rural hacienda might have looked like for a young criolla. According to the author, in the Hacienda Panoaya in Amecameca Sor Juana first became acquainted with Nahuatl speaking communities and with the...

审核人：

• 索尔胡安娜·伊内斯·德拉克鲁兹。弗朗西斯科·拉米雷斯·圣克鲁斯 (Francisco Ramírez Santa Cruz)
• 斯蒂芬妮·柯克

用当代墨西哥诗人 Luis Felipe Fabre 的话来说，“Todos los sorjuanistas discrepan en algo 。Discrepan / entre ellos。Discrepan / en algo que suele ser casi todo”（“Sor Juana y otros monstruos” ，Poemas de Terror y de Misterio，Almadía，2013 年）。这些分歧始于苏尔胡安娜时代，因为她的许多捍卫者接受了同样众多的批评者。最近，在 1982 年 Octavio Paz 的Sor Juana In é s de la Cruz y las trampas de la fe出版后，争论愈演愈烈从那以后一直有增无减。最有争议的问题不在于解读她的作品，而在于理解她生命中的关键时刻。由于缺乏与 Sor Juana 生平相关的传记文件，学者们仔细研究了她的著作以寻找线索。（近年来发现了更多信息，尽管其中一些似乎激发的问题多于答案。）尽管 Sor Juana 的生活笼罩着许多谜团，但三个主要问题仍未解决：她为什么养成这个习惯？她和玛丽亚路易莎的关系是什么性质，新西班牙总督？为什么她似乎放弃了她的文学和知识追求并过着苦行僧的生活？墨西哥文学学者弗朗西斯科·拉米雷斯·圣克鲁斯勇敢地涉入这些浑浊的水域，带着一本具有高度可读性和精心记录的修女诗人新传记，这是西班牙出版商最近推出的西班牙裔和更广泛的西方世界著名作家系列传记的一部分卡特德拉。

Ramírez de Santa Cruz 在他的介绍性说明中仔细解释了他对这本书的态度。他将之前关于 Sor Juana 的传记分为两大类，“por un lado, aquel que hace una lectura de su vida desde el Liberismo laico y, por el otro, aquel que defiende a ultranza una interpretación hipercatólica de sus motivaciones y obras literarias” (12)。他在引言中引用的前两本传记是第一本，由西班牙耶稣会士 Diego Calleja（1638-1725 年）撰写，Sor Juana 曾与他交换过信函，但从未见过面。Calleja 的Vida是一部简短的圣徒式文字，充满了几个世纪以来批评家们依赖的引人入胜的轶事。另一本是奥克塔维奥·帕兹 (Octavio Paz) 的修女传记，其意义非凡且引人入胜。虽然他因崩溃而受到批评[完第 131 页]总督府对待知识分子的方式包括更现代的政权对类似人物的迫害、帕兹影响新西班牙社会的诗意暗流以及他解开她所描绘的知识分子链的方式，使其仍然是最引人注目的书籍，尽管有它的诡计和陷阱。Ramírez de Santa Cruz 将他的文本置于两本书之外，声称他的传记“propone una exégesis lo más objetiva posible de todos los datos que se conocen de sor Juana hasta el díade hoy”（12）。

这是一个明智的抱负，也是他成功的抱负。与帕斯一样，拉米雷斯·圣克鲁斯 (Ramírez Santa Cruz) 写得雄辩，阅读索尔·胡安娜 (Sor Juana) 的作品很有技巧，但他是一个比帕斯 (Paz) 更加冷静和直截了当的传记作家，避免了诺贝尔奖得主允许自己进行的奢侈猜测。例如，读者可能想将拉米雷斯·圣克鲁斯 (Ramírez Santa Cruz) 处理索尔·胡安娜 (Sor Juana) 父亲缺席问题的谨慎方式与帕兹 (Paz) 疯狂的精神分析阅读进行对比，以了解这两位传记作者在方法论上的差异。同时，La Resistanceencia del deseo读起来并不枯燥，作者有力地为读者勾勒出时代和文化。在这方面值得注意的是他在 Sor Juana 早年的第 1 章中的描绘，以及他对年轻 criolla 的农村庄园生活可能是什么样子的引人入胜的描述。据作者说，在 Amecameca Sor Juana 的 Hacienda Panoaya，他首先熟悉了说纳瓦特尔语的社区和...