Romance Notes

After wading through prefatory matter, the reader of Inundación Castálida (Madrid, 1689) by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz will find conspicuously featured two sonnets.¹ "El hijo que la esclava ha concebido" (poem 195) sits by itself on page 1, the pride of its place reinforced by the emptiness of page 2; I shall return to it later.² At the beginning of page 3 comes a second sonnet, "Este que ves, engaño colorido" (poem 145), which begins thus:

Este que ves, engaño colorido,que del arte ostentando los primores,con falsos silogismos de coloreses cauteloso engaño del sentido . . .

(1-4)

Who is the addressee? And what is the "engaño colorido" to which the speaker refers and to which she or he (no clues are provided as to the gender of the speaker) points, or next to which she or he stands? A title in Inundación Castálida provides the information needed to answer these questions: "Procura desmentir los elogios, que á vn Retrato de la Poetisa inscrivió la verdad, que llama passion" (3). The speaker is Sor Juana's poetic persona; the object to which she points, and next to which she stands, a portrait of herself; and the addressee, whoever gazes at the portrait. With this information, we understand why she calls it "engaño," for a portrait constitutes a representation [End Page 299] and not the thing itself; in a Platonic sense, it is deceit (Sabat de Rivers 48-49). The adjective "colorido" surely refers to the pigments with which the "arte" of painting captures the semblance of the sitter. And by "falsos silogismos de colores," the speaker designates the brushstrokes and composition that trick the spectator, even if for only a moment, into believing that he or she gazes at Sor Juana herself.

But this interpretation relies on the poem's title. These synopses in Inundación Castálida were likely not written by Sor Juana, but by Francisco de las Heras (Alatorre 387, n145), or another man that intended them for a male reading public in Spain (Luciani 85). Once we remove the title, the uncertainty returns. As Nicole Legnani notices, "the poem itself does not provide any indication that the poetic voice is speaking about or to a (physical) portrait" (957). Instead, the poem may refer to itself: "Este que ves" is, after all, the text that the reader has before his eyes as he reads it on the page. The adjective "colorido" and the noun "colores" may designate rhetoric, that "arte" of persuasion through language that employed tropes and figures, called colores in classical and early modern rhetorical theory. And the sonnet as genre consists in demonstrating "silogismos," as Pina Piras reminds us (272-73). In this reading, the speaker warns the reader to be wary of the charms of her poem, which attempts to "excusar de los años los horrores, / y venciendo del tiempo los rigores, / triunfar de la vejez y del olvido" (6-8). Despite its presence on a printed page reproduced many times, "es una necia diligencia errada, / es un afán caduco y, bien mirado, / es cadáver, es polvo, es sombra, es nada" (12-14).

But my interpretation, of course, also makes assumptions, and also relies on the context provided by Inundación Castálida. The final line echoes a famous sonnet by Luis de Góngora, the one that begins "Mientras por competir con tu cabello," penned in Spain a century earlier. It is "[e]qually feasible" that "Este" in Sor Juana's sonnet refers to that sonnet by Góngora (Legnani 964-65), alluded to "as an implicit claim of belonging" to the Spanish poetic canon (Clamurro 29). There is also, of course, the obvious interpretation: that "Este que ves, engaño colorido" refers to a portrait. Many other of Sor Juana's poems do, which Georgina Sabat de Rivers listed and classified (40).

By outlining a plurality of readings, I aim to show that the drama of deixis that Sor Juana enacts in "Este que ves, engaño colorido" belies what Jonathan Culler...