Ballad 1 [1] [2]
Prologue to the reader from the author, who composed and sent it with the same haste used for those already copied, obeying the supreme command of her extraordinary patron, Her Excellency the Countless of Paredes,[3] that they be made public: this Sor Juana had denied her verses, which, like the poet herself, were in the safekeeping of the countless, for the poet barely had a single draft in her possession.
These verses, my dearest reader,
dedicated to your delight,
have but one virtue in them:
I know how imperfect they are,
I do not wish to discuss them
or even commend them to you,
for that would mean wishing to pay
them attention unmerited.
I do not seek your gratitude
for, if truth be told, you should not
esteem something I never deemed
worthy of being in your hands.
I grant and cede you liberty
if you should wish to censure them;
after all, to conclude, you are
free, and I have concluded too.
Nothing enjoys greater freedom
than the human understanding;
if God does not violate mind
then why would I even try?
Say all that you wish about them,
for the more merciless you are
in finding fault, the greater your
obligation will be to me,
for then you will owe me my Muse
that most flavorsome of dishes [4]
—speaking ill of another—as
an old adage of the court says.
I am always at your service,
whether I please you or do not:
if I please you, you are amused;
if not, you can speak ill of me.
I could easily say to you
as an excuse, that I did not
have the time to revise them,
they were copied so rapidly;
they are written by diverse hands,
and some, being the hands of boys,
kill the sense in such a way that
the word is no more than a corpse;
when I have written them myself,
it has been in the brief space
of leisure that can be bought from
the exigencies of my state;
for my health is poor and I am
so often interrupted that
even as I say this my pen
races along at breakneck speed.
But none of this is to the point,
for you will think I am boasting
that perhaps they might have been good
if I had composed them slowly;
I do not wish you to think that,
no, but only that I brought them
to light in order to comply,
to obey another’s command.
True, believe it or not, this is
not a question of life or death
to me, and to conclude, you will
do whatever occurs to you.
And farewell, for this merely shows
you a small sample of the cloth:
but if the piece does not please you,
then do not unroll the whole bolt.
- Ballads, called romances in Spanish, are composed of an indefinite number of stanzas of generally octosyllabic lines, the odd lines unrhymed, the even lines using assonant rhyme. Back
- First published in the revised edition of the first volume of Sor Juana’s poems: Poemas de la única poetisa americana (Poems of the singular American poetress)(Madrid, 1690) [Editor]. Back
- Maria Luisa, Countess of Paredes, was the wife of Tomás de la Cerda, third Marquis de la Laguna, Viceroy of New Spain from 1680 to 1686. Back
- The metaphor plays on the idea of finding fault, in the previous stanza, which is to “bite” in Spanish. Back