Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695)

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz is perhaps Latin American literature's (as well as Spanish-language literature's) best kept secret. This is the nun who does it all, and this is the collection that demonstrates it. Included is Sor Juana's "Response to the Most Illustrious Poetess Sor Filotea de la Cruz," which ably argues why women have a right to education. It's an impressive essay, part autobiography and part defense, that is all the more notable when one considers how it was written well before show more Virginia Woolf ever started hanging out in a room of her own.

This collection also features Sor Juana's "First I Dream" (elsewhere known as "First Dream"). If you can get through it, supposedly it's Sor Juana's masterpiece. I didn't understand a line of it, so you'll have to take the professional critics' word for it. More accessible are her numerous romances, decimas, sonnets, and more. Many of these are pleasingly secular works that resonate to a surprising degree even today.

One can only hope that Sor Juana's popularity will pick up amongst English speakers. Her work makes an invaluable contribution to feminist literature as well as to lesbian literature, though many critics seem to shy away from this latter point. Regardless of Sor Juana's own sexual awareness, her love poems are undoubtedly Sapphic in nature and deserve study from this perspective.

No matter what the perspective, though, one also hopes that an increased interest in Sor Juana will bring about a full translation of her obras completas. In the meantime, Margaret Sayers Peden offers what she aptly calls an "approximation" of Sor Juana's poetry. If in translating poetry one has to choose between preserving the meaning of the poem versus preserving the rhythm, Peden definitely seems to err toward the side of protecting the rhythm. (But my Spanish is patchy, so in this I could be wrong.) This edition includes the original Spanish on one side and Peden's English translation on the opposite face, so one is free to compare and infer the literal meaning in Spanish from the one side while appreciating its poetic musicality in English on the other. Now matter how you approach this amazing work though, Sor Juana will not disappoint. show less

I ordered Poesía Lírica, a compilation of the work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, as a Christmas present for myself along with a few other books. I read the critical analysis at the beginning (thank you, Cátedra editions!) and the love poems, and a few of the shorter sonnets and romances that are contained in this edition, and will continue to come back to it periodically and read more. It´s a lot of poetry to take in at once, especially when it´s baroque poetry, and difficult to sort show more through the language and the complex plays in word order that she employs in her work. It´s an impressive collection and I loved the introduction to the text. I think Sor Juana sounds like an amazing figure, a person so smart and so encompassed by her love of learning that she was able to break through the gender stereotypes that prevented women from writing and publishing. The intro reproduces some of her defenses of herself as a writer, because the church wasn´t too happy with a woman doing what she did. They´re brilliant, and certainly convinced me that she was in the right. Then again, this is the 21st century. But for her to follow the creative muse that guided her, despite the repercussions that followed due to her gender and place in society, was courageous.

I also learned a lot about 15th and 16th century baroque poetry. I learned that poems from this time period were complex for a reason. Now I understand why it´s so hard to decipher the sentences in a sonnet by Luis de Góngora, for example. The name of the game was to challenge the educated reader, to make him or her work to understand what they were reading, and to show literary genius through complex series of symbols, mythological allusions, hyperbaton, and other techniques meant to turn a poem into a sort of labyrinth to be unraveled by the reader. I bet that much of the poetry written in this style by authors who weren´t quite as brilliant as a Sor Juana, or a Góngora, was complete and utter crap. Making shoddy poetic labyrinths to try and outsmart the reader, when you´re not quite up to the task, sounds like a recipe for disaster. But I guess that´s why the work of Sor Juana stands up to the test of time: because she was truly capable of taking the thematic vehicles employed by the poets of her day and build such amazing creations out of them. I am especially looking forward to reading her “Sueño,” which is lauded by the author of the introduction as a revolutionary interpretation of man´s search for reason. I´ll add on to this when I do. show less

Lesbian feminists like to fantasize about this lady because she wanted to dress like a boy to get into what was then a men-only university. Then she started her own personal library that ended up bigger than the university at that time, which is why she's now the symbolic muse of my own library. And she's on the front of the Mexican 100 peso note too. She was a plucky and spirited lady that genuinely had some insight into dreams as well but the baroque poetry in this book translated from show more Spanish isn't really my thing. show less

A wonderful, brilliant look into a woman’s struggle to pursue her intellectual endeavors. This collection of prose predates many of the most famous works that deal with women’s educations and their position in society.