Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Works
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- 7,99 €
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- 7,99 €
Publisher Description
Latin America's great poet rendered into English by the world's most celebrated translator of Spanish-language literature.
Sor Juana (1651–1695) was a fiery feminist and a woman ahead of her time. Like Simone de Beauvoir, she was very much a public intellectual. Her contemporaries called her "the Tenth Muse" and "the Phoenix of Mexico," names that continue to resonate. An illegitimate child, self-taught intellectual, and court favorite, she rose to the height of fame as a writer in Mexico City during the Spanish Golden Age.
This volume includes Sor Juana's best-known works: "First Dream," her longest poem and the one that showcases her prodigious intellect and range, and "Response of the Poet to the Very Eminent Sor Filotea de la Cruz," her epistolary feminist defense—evocative of Mary Wollstonecraft and Emily Dickinson—of a woman's right to study and to write. Thirty other works—playful ballads, extraordinary sonnets, intimate poems of love, and a selection from an allegorical play with a distinctive New World flavor—are also included.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The first great poet to use a European language in the New World, Sor Juana (1651 1695) wrote elaborate, melancholy ballads, witty praise poems, tortured sonnets of love and mourning, dream-visions, allegories of empire and religion, barbed jokes, and vivid stage plays. Known in her day for her scholarly gifts as well as her poetic powers, the nun remains influential with Spanish-speaking and Latina writers today. Grossman renowned translator of Garc a M rquez, Cervantes, and other Spanish fiction remains true to the meters and syllabic patterns, but not to the rhymes, in Sor Juana's originals. While her accuracy is beyond question, her ear for verse can falter: in a love sonnet, Grossman's Sor Juana says "I conceive her great beauty as something so/ sacred that audacity does not wish/ to give the slightest opening hope." The absence of facing-page Spanish puts additional pressure on Grossman's English sounds. Though the poetry fascinates, the most impressive part of this compact selection might be the prose at the end: Sor Juana's famous 50-page defense of her life, her studies, and her writings against antifeminist currents in the Church. This careful book may ignite new attention to Sor Juana in English, for which Grossman will deserve even more praise.
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