I have been reading Octavio Paz's biographical, literary and historical study Sor Juana, or, the Traps of Faith .  It was published in the 1980s, almost exactly three hundred years after Sor Juana's first volume of collected poems.  It tells a dramatic story: a poor creole girl, illegitimate in an era when ancestry mattered, who was sent to Mexico City and became a favourite of the Viceroy's wife and a member of the glittering viceregal court.   At the age of twenty she left the court and became a nun. Then, against all odds in a patriarchal society, she carved out a career as poet, and in twenty years became one of the most famous poets of her age.  But women were not supposed to do that, they were supposed to shut up and be obedient.  Sor Juana attracted the hostility of the insanely misogynistic Archbishop of Mexico, and other influential clerics, and eventually they did terrorize her into shutting up. It's always interesting to see one poet's version of another poet; I thought of Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf , for instance.  The literary and social conventions of Sor Juana's age are very distant; what Australian poet would spend page after page praising the Prime Minister and comparing her to classical goddesses?  But once you get inside those conventions, you can see how a poet makes them work.  John Donne made staggeringly beautiful poetry out of post-mortem praise of a young woman he had never met. Octavio Paz makes a