Customer Reviews

Poems, Protest, and a Dream (Penguin Classics)

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Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz is one of those remarkable literary figures whose extraordinary body of work forces one to either reevaluate or refine one's ideas about the complex interrelationships between religion, gender, national identity, and ethnicity. A nun who lived in seventeenth century Mexico, she distinguished herself as a poet, playwright, and prose writer.

"Poems, Protest, and a Dream" is an excellent introduction to the life and work of this fascinating woman. This selection of her works includes her famous prose piece addressed to "Sor Filotea de la Cruz," a hearty helping of her poetry, and two selections from her dramatic corpus. The bilingual format of the text, with Sor Juana's Spanish original on each even-numbered page and Margaret Sayers Peden's elegant English translation on each odd-numbered page, allows one to easily compare the two versions.

The distinguished scholar Ilan Stavans has written an extensive 32 page introduction. Stavans describes in detail the historical and cultural context from which Sor Juana wrote; his sensitive and intelligent portrait of the woman and her age made me appreciate and enjoy her writings even more.

Sor Juana takes on themes that are still relevant (and often hotly debated) more than three centuries after she wrote these works. The response to Sor Filotea is a defense of female intellectual aspiration in a male-dominated culture; in the defense Sor Juana critically responds to those who use the Judeo-Christian Bible as a tool for intimidating and marginalizing women. With certain factions of the "religious right" still using the Bible as a weapon for demonizing certain individuals and social agendas, Sor Juana's words continue to ring fresh and clear.

Equally extraordinary is Sor Juana's loa (a dramatic scene which prefaces a longer play) to "The Divine Narcissus." The loa is an allegory depicting the early contact between Christianity and the religion of the Aztecs; in this piece I detect a subtle satirical thrust which adds to the complexity of Sor Juana's vision.

Sor Juana was a masterful stylist in multiple literary genres, and her depth of psychological and moral insight adds to her stature as a literary giant. Nobody should consider herself or himself literate in the fields of women's studies or Latin American studies without having read the works of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. "Poems, Protest, and a Dream" is an excellent resource for both independent reading and classroom use. Enjoy Sor Juana's artistry, and reflect on her ideas.

A great intellectual is not commonly thought of to be a woman, especially in 17th century New Spain. In the midst of the highly structured Baroque literary period, an illegitimate child was baptized as Juana Ramírez de Asbaje, spent her adolescence at court, and left to become a nun where she could continue her studies in peace, rather than marrying. Although she was almost entirely self-educated, the word quickly spread of her intelligence. This caused envy and animosity towards her that she tried to avoid her entire adult life. Four years before she died, the church forced her to give up her writings and worldly studies. In her letter of response to this request, (included in the book) she became the first woman in Latin America to defend her gender's right to study and write as men could. Much of her work was commissioned, but more is being discovered of her autobiographical writings. This book includes one of the few known poems (Primero Sueño) that was not commissioned. The book is in Spanish and English on opposing pages. This is very advantageous if you are bilingual, and even if you aren't, I can't say enough about Margaret Sayers Peden's translations. Not only does she give you as close to word for word; she also preserves the original structure, themes, and rhyme schemes that are so essential in Baroque literature. Even if you go no further than this book, you will not be disappointed. It has a very complete collection of her most famous works. Unfortunately, so few people in the English-speaking U.S. has even heard of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. I was first introduced to her wonderful poetry in a Mexican History / English dyad in college. Since that first poem I read, I have been searching for books of her works, and about her life. I highly recommend the addiction.

An excellent selection of texts--from the "Response" to the long poem "First I Dream" to some wonderful short poems and the "loa" or dramatic prologue to the drama "The Divine Narcissus." Margaret Peden's translations are fluent and readable, and the Spanish is on facing pages so you see the original easily. Ilan Stavans' introduction is very helpful, giving the facts of Sor Juana's life (insofar as known), the complexities of the situation that the "Response" addresses, and some help with the context and conventions of her poetry. Sor Juana is an astounding writer--her subtlety and complexities unfold more and more as you read and reflect on her writings. The "Response" is a rhetorical complex defense of her position as a "learned" woman, gathering the rhetorical authority to defend herself out of the very sources (the Bible, church teachings) that were used to attack her and turning the persona under which her Bishop attacked her (a letter pretending to be by a fellow nun) into a deft weapon against him. She articulates a tradition of women's learning and turns a seemingly self-effacing self-limitation to the "philosophy of the kitchen" into a far-reaching claim to a unique female source of knowledge. The "loa" presents dramatically the complex interaction between a colonizing and colonized culture, native language and a Spanish that is becoming at home in the New World, and a native religion which is not simply abandoned for Catholicism but already contains truths which Catholicism confirms and validates even in the process of converting it. She is one of the great writers of the Seventeenth Century and especially interesting in relation to contemporary multicultural identities and cultural interactions.

I haven't read this book yet, but I just ordered it. I have been dreaming of such a work, because at the moment I'm reading Octavio Paz's book on Sor Juana, entitled "The Traps of Faith," and the quotations in it from her poetry are tantalizingly few. Paz, who won the Nobel Prize in 1990, gave the work of Sor Juana an immense boost when he wrote this book, which is both a biography and a critical meditation on her work. His admiration for her is nearly unlimited and his ability to depict the world she lived in, that of New Spain (Mexico) in the late 1600s, is almost magical. The skill with which Paz brings to life that world, it's social codes, laws, customs and morality is astonishing. Beyond that, he can explain why the literature of Baroque Spain is so alien to the decayed romantic sensibility of our own time. Writers in that century did not confess themselves in their work. Paz explains what they did instead, and shows why Sor Juana was the equal of Lope de Vega or Calderon, and far superior to Gongora. Paz's erudition seems boundless. Of course he knows every major and minor Spanish writer of the last four centuries and can spot the smallest allusion to any of them in Sor Juana's work, but he can also make extremely intelligent comparisons between her and John Donne, Paul Valery or Emily Dickinson. A passing reference to Andrew Marvell was so apt it made me drop my jaw in amazement. And that's just literature. Sor Juana was also vitally interested in theology and philosophy and Paz can discuss all the authors she knew, from the imaginary Hermes Trismegistus to the fabulizing Jesuit Andreas Kircher.
It is good that the work under review, "Poems, Protest and a Dream," includes a 32 page introduction, but trust me, to understand Sor Juana you will need far more than 32 pages, and "The Traps of Faith" by Octavio Paz should be your next purchase. With both volumes in hand, you will have Sor Juana's life and her work. Sor Juana: Or, the Traps of Faith

Coming from someone who has a tattoo of one of Sor Juana's signatures on her back and is always on the lookout for anything and everything printed about her, take my word for it: this is simply the best translation of Sor Juana's "Primero Sueño" and other poems.
To make it short and sweet, I'll tell you this: I understood the poem much more reading the English translation than reading the original in Spanish. If you're bilingual, you'll notice this right away.
Sor Juana is hard to understand but this perfect little volume will make it all clearer for you. It includes mythological and other obscure references at the end and is absoultely beautifully translated.
It also has a prologue that will acquaint you better with Sor Juana's life and work.
The Penguin edition is a perfect introduction to Sor Juana, as it includes her magnificent and unrivalled poem "Primero Sueño" and her Protest, which is a kind of autobiography.

I found Sor Juana dull the first time I read her 'Responce' and even more dull when I reread it. She is very good at being subtle though, and alot of the time its what shes not saying that makes you think, I don't know if it was the translators fault, or what, but I just didn't enjoy it. But her poetry was beautifully translated in this edition.