ABSTRACT
“Neurotic, perfectionist, player (convenciera), narcissist, lesbian, enlightened, saint, coward, perjurer, great poet,” recites Sergio Salazar in a description of the polyfacetic Sor Juana for an academic collection eerily titled Sor Juana: 300 Years of Immortality (16). The 1995 publication celebrates the 300th anniversary of Sor Juana’s death, which given her “immortality,” supplies an interesting tension. Is she dead or ain’t she? I prefer to hedge the answer, at least when writing about versions of Sor Juana narrated for young Mexican readers: “Oddly, since Sor Juana never dies in a definitive way in the recent histories of the colonia for children, she belongs to a strange temporality of inimitable, transcendent exception” (“Children’s” 223). I can illustrate this point with a picture book that I did not know existed when I drafted the previous analysis of uses of Sor Juana in literature for children (“Children’s Literature”). In Hear Me with Your Eyes: Sor Juana for Kids (2012) Carmen López Portillo writes:
There [Nepantla] I was born many years ago, so many, that if I had only spent my time counting, I would have reached the number 11 billion, 360 million, 476 thousand 800 and then some, so that I could meet you. If you were to count one by one all those numbers you would spend more than 361 years counting. Imagine! Now you can figure out the year I was born, [sic] subtract 361 from the year this book was published, and voilà! (7) 1
