1
[Las páginas 234 a 236 presentan el aparato de notas del original. (N. del E.)]
2
Sor Juana is cited by volume and page(s) from the four-volume edition of her Obras completas by Méndez Plancarte and Salceda. On her «conversion», see Bénassy-Berling («Hipótesis» and Humanismo 159-77); Egan («Donde Dios»), Sabat-Rivers («Ejercicios»), and Paz (511-631). On the silence imposed on Sor Juana, see Fuentes («La tradición» 23 and El espejo 214-16). (N. del A.)
3
Fuentes has published a detective thriller: La cabeza de la hidra (1978), but all his novels are what Todorov (33) calls gnoseological because they seek gnosis through discourses in which conundrum, enigma and mystery drive the narrative and the reader toward a desired revelation. (N. del A.)
4
One of her earliest masterpieces, the Neptuno alegórico (1680), is, on its own smaller scale, as labyrinthine an intertextual maze as Fuentes's Terra Nostra. Her metaphysical poem Primero sueño, a dense web of imported texts and extreme hyperbatons, is widely held to be one of the most enigmatic poems in the Spanish language. (N. del A.)
5
The 1987 soft-cover edition of Cristóbal Nonato bears a coloured photo of the Flayed One, Xipe Tótec, a humanoid deity made strange because fully encapsulated in a body-mask of sculpted clay. (N. del A.)
6
On the first, see, for example, Baudot, Leal, and Sabat-Rivers («Apología»). On the second, Sabat-Rivers provides an excellent summation of Sor Juanas Marian convictions in «Ejercicios». (N. del A.)
7
Fuentes uses the name Adelita as metonym for the «genre» of woman who gained her greatest fame in the popular Revolutionary song. (N. del A.)
8
In a Christmas villancico of 1689, she sings to the baby Jesus «a lo Criollito» (II, 113) and proudly confides elsewhere to a Portuguese noblewoman, «que yo, Señora, nací / en la América abundante, / [...] / que en ninguna parte más / se ostenta la tierra Madre» (I, 102-03). Metapoetically, she speculates before her European admirers on the ways in which her writing might have been influenced by the «mágicas infusiones / de los Indios herbolarios / de mi Patria, [que] entre mis letras / el hechizo derramaron» (I, 160). (N. del A.)
9
See my «Donde Dios» and Diosas; Pascual Buxó; and Paz, especially «La Madre Juana y la diosa Isis» (229-41). On Fuentes's involvement with alternative traditions, see his Cervantes 22-26; Befumo Boschi and Elisa Calabrese; Durán; Filer; Gyurko; and Simson (especially 117-34, on the Cabala and Aztec mythology). (N. del A.)
10
Fuentes includes himself with the artist «fruitfully at odds with himself [...] a thinker capable of rebelling back into faith» (Myself 32), while Sor Juana alludes to being «festiva y llorosa a un tiempo» (I, 112) and having «en dos partes dividida / [...] el alma» (I, 234). Fuentes cites this allusion under a photograph of the nun in El espejo 214: «Mi alma está dividida». (N. del A.)