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Sor
Juana's Love Poems
Sor
Juana Inés de la Cruz
Translated by Joan Larkin and Jaime Manrique
Love poems by one of the world's
most daring erotic writers
These exquisite love poems, some
of them clearly addressed to women, were written by the visionary
and passionate genius of Mexican letters, the seventeenth-century
nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. In this volume they are
translated into the idiom of our own time by poets Joan Larkin
and Jaime Manrique. Some of them are rooted in Renaissance courtly
conventions; others are startlingly ahead of their time, seemingly
modern in the naked power of the complex sexual feelings they
address.
Love opened a mortal wound.
In agony, I worked the blade
to make it deeper. Please,
I begged, let death come quick.
Wild, distracted, sick,
I counted, counted
all the ways love hurt me.
One life, I thought—a thousand
deaths.
Blow after blow, my heart
couldn't survive this beating.
Then—how can I explain it?—
I came to my senses. I said,
Why do I suffer? What lover
ever had so much pleasure
—Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Joan Larkin has published the
poetry collections Housework, A Long Sound, and Cold
River. The editor of numerous anthologies, she is the recipient
of two Lambda Literary Awards for Poetry. She teaches poetry
writing at Sarah Lawrence and New England Colleges. Jaime
Manrique is the author of the memoir Eminent Maricones:
Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me, also published by the University
of Wisconsin Press, the novels Twilight at the Equator, Latin
Moon in Manhattan, and Colombian Gold, and two poetry
collections, My Night with Federico García Lorca
and Tarzan, My Body, Christopher Columbus. He lives in
New York City and is an associate professor in the MFA program
at Columbia University.
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March 2003
88 pp. 6 x 9
1 woodcut and decorative vignettes throughout
ISBN 0-299-18704-7 Paper $12.95 t
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