Sor Juana or, The Traps of Faith/A Sor Juana Anthology/Sor Juana's Dream
Arenal, Electa
BOOKS Aria of a cloistered feminist SOR JUANA OR, THE TRAPS OF FAITH Octavio Paz Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden Belknap/Harvard, $29.95, 547 pp. A SOR IUANA ANTHOLOGY Translated by Alan...
...The Paz, Trueblood, and Harss books will finally introduce the life and work of a major figure of Hispanic letters to a wide English-reading public...
...A year before her death, with Mexico suffering economic and social crises, she was forced to divest herself of her library and her musical and scientific instruments and to begin leading an entirely ascetic life...
...She made brilliant use of Catholic values and baroque aesthetics to develop an overarching historical and mythical feminist ideology...
...SOR KAMA'S DREAM Translation, Introduction and Commentary by Luis Harss Lumen Books, $9.95, 146 pp...
...Paz calls it the most important philosophical poem in the Spanish language and devotes thirty pages to underscoring its modernity and originality...
...Sor Juana humorously defended herself against warnings that her secular poetry might damn her, claiming that sins against art (the only ones she could commit in her nonreligious work) were not punishable by the dreaded Holy Office (Inquisition...
...But her theological critique also precipitated her most famous prose work, the Reply to Sor Philothea, an essay of self-vindication, a declaration of the intellectual traditions and rights of women in which she asserted her intention to renounce the use of the written word in the face of envy, persecution, and betrayal...
...Perhaps thinking of the lines "...to undaunted spirit/that, disdaining life, determines/to immortalize itself in ruin," he sees in it an anticipation of T.S...
...Daughter of an unmarried criolla (woman of Spanish descent born in the colonies), Juana Ramirez (b...
...It was here that for more than two decades Sor Juana produced texts for the highly elaborate ceremonial life of the vice-royalty and the church...
...Sor Juana or, The Traps of Faith is a symphonic tourde force, orchestrating the intellectual, political, and religious climate of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century New Spain (as Mexico was then called...
...Like most critics still, they treat Sor Juana's feminism as if it were an overlay rather than a point of departure...
...Eliot's assemblage of "Fragments I have shored against my ruins...
...The prevalent Marian cult allowed her to place Mary sometimes above, sometimes next to God...
...Trueblood admires in First Dream, her stance "in favor of the human spirit's right to unimpeded growth...
...the poet as . rebel against orthodoxy, then and now...
...Catherine of Alexandria (about whom Sor Juana wrote her most feminist religious verse) hovers in the dream, "a constant reminder of the dangers of the Word turned against those who would usurp its powers...
...Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz possessed a more woman-centered vision than the three authors acknowledge, although all three recognize that her understanding of scholastic tradition, her concept of reason, wisdom, and conciliation, and her psychological insights led to far-reaching interpretations...
...Adam, not Eve, became the first sinner...
...Although filtered through orthodox Catholic texts, much of her inspiration came from pre-Christian and heterodox early Christian sources...
...His translation takes more liberties than does True-blood's, in reinventing baroque grammatical convolutions and recreating the poem's verbal intensity...
...In this latter, autobiographical essay, she mentions as a "trifle" and the only writing undertaken of her own volition, rather than by commission, The Dream- , also known as First Dream-her longest and most complex poem...
...A SOR IUANA ANTHOLOGY Translated by Alan S. Trueblood Harvard, $29.50, 248 pp...
...Indeed, she left no written expression of doubts about her faith, but in some of her works Sor Juana offers a comparatist viewpoint, tracing ancient usages and misinterpretations of words and symbols, and contrasting belief systems...
...In the Virgin Mary, the "Queen of Wisdom," she found her ultimate court of appeal and the authority to replace male metaphors that defined nature and evil as female...
...Luis Harss understands that St...
...On the fly-leaf, the translations are justifiably praised by Georgina Sabat-Rivers for their "metaphysical passion and baroque precision...
...In her salon-like convent quarters she often entertained prominent visitors...
...Significant, too, was the encounter between pre-Columbian and Spanish cultures, initiated a little more than a century before her birth...
...First Dream, Sor Juana's complex 975-line chefd'oeuvre, prefaced by a prose summary, and her famous autobiographical self-defense, the Reply to Sor Philothea, complete the book...
...men who wielded ecclesiastic power, and the life, times, and art of a woman who like many of the greatest writers of Spain's Golden Age, took religious vows...
...Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, seventeenth-century Mexican poet, playwright, intellectual, and nun, caps and closes the baroque period of Hispanic letters...
...Sor Juana dramatically recreated that encounter...
...In the Loa (prelude) to her great religious drama The Divine Narcissus, the character America (dressed as an Indian woman) rejects the firearms of the con-quistadores and the deceptive compassion of the priests, both serving the state's organized repression...
...Thus they fail fully to grasp her persistent and cunning subversions of official stories, or to perceive how, by counterbalancing patrimonialism with imaginative variations of Mariology, she reclaimed in part the God-like power of women...
...Harss's Sor Juana's Dream is a bilingual presentation of the poem, with an introduction and segment-by-segment commentary that enriches and stimulates the reading'experience...
...I would encourage everyone to buy or borrow them, keeping in mind an inevitable and shared bias that causes varying degrees of-distortion in all three...
...Eleeta Arencd Octavio Paz, poet, essayist, critic, was once described in the New York Times Book Review as "an intellectual-literary one-man band who performs everything from five-finger sonatas to full-scale symphonies...
...Although ultimately compelled to submit, America's initial credo strongly resembles that of Sor Juana herself: If your pleading for my life while you show me your great mercy arises in your hope that I will be beaten by your proud strength -as before with physical weapons, not with intellectual arms- you are certainly mistaken: for though, as prisoner, I mourn my freedom, my free will with liberty grown still larger will worship and adore my Gods...
...Her exceptionality and the favor of the viceroyal couples and of some church dignitaries allowed her to keep at bay, until four years before her death in 1695, those in the ecclesiastical hierarchy who would persecute her daring...
...1648) was a child prodigy who created her own supportive milieu among the books in her grandfather's library, refused marriage, and, after five years as lady-in-waiting at the viceregal court, took the veil at the age of nineteen as Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz...
...The graceful, Renaissance convent she joined-after an unsuccessful attempt to embrace the ascetic life of the Carmelite order-was run by a complex hierarchy, not unlike the social structure extra muros: at the top, nuns of the black veil, fully doweried, supposedly legitimate of birth and pure of blood...
...As male readers of Sor Juana's texts and of hef life, all three authors, but especially Paz, present us with a polished view of patriarchal culture into which they fit Sor Juana's oppo-sitional perspectives...
...Alan Trueblood's companion volume, A Sor Juana Anthology, presents a brief but well-selected sampling of Sor Juana's poetry and prose...
...and at the bottom, mulatto and black slaves, some belonging to the community at large, some to individual nuns...
...Designed to parallel Paz's biographical and critical organization, it includes poems in a variety of meters, among them her most notable sonnets, and selections from her villancicos (lyrics for interludes of song and dance during religious festivities) and The Divine Narcissus, the best of her three autos sacramentales (one-act plays in celebration of the Eucharist...
...Despite her absorption in the theology and literature of a male-dominated civilization, Sor Juana read men as a woman 'reader and writer, noticing the poison darts aimed toward those of her gender (darts so proverbial as to be considered harmless truths...
...But Sor Juana feared the Inquisition, as well she should have, because, in an extremely restricted and restrictive intellectual climate, she aimed unrelentingly at promoting respect for intelligence (which for women went against Counter Reformation decrees), at stimulating changes in the social relations between the sexes, and at publicizing images of women as a powerful force in Catholicism, in history, and in culture...
...in the middle, mestizo and Indian servants...
...She had become convinced that only the cloister would provide the solitude, independence, and economic support she needed for the pursuit of knowledge...
...Neo-Platonism, hermeticism, literary love in the Western world...
...Her one incursion into formal theological discourse, which was printed against her expressed wishes, precipitated her final silencing...
...Trueblood's succinct introductory overview synthesizes- doing in a few pages what takes Paz several chapters-the various literary and intellectual currents upon which the poet drew...
Vol. 116 • January 1989 • No. 2
