Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz: Selected Writings Book

"Discursive reason is a sword quite effective at both ends: with the point of the blade it kills; the pommel on the hilt protects ... Knowing how to create subtle, specious reasons is not knowledge; true knowledge consists only in choosing salutary virtue."
Like I suspect a lot of Anglo readers, I came into this knowing more about Sor Juana's life than her work. (And six months ago, I didn't even know that.) There is a paucity of her work translated in English, and this fairly slim compendium contains little tasters of her poetry, a brief part of a play, as well as the more famous longer poem dealing with the nature of existence, and her prose defence of her scholarship. It is widely eclectic as a collection, which is no criticism of either the editor or translator, who are clearly trying to give a sense of the breadth of Sor Juana's accomplishments.
And they are considerable. Every inch of this work shows off: classical and Christian allusions comprise, rather than pepper, many of the texts. Her style is bold and unapologetic - the false modesty required of Seventeenth-Century intellectuals is weaponised in her pen, ensuring no blunting of her point - and arguments, puns and references come as fast as if she had marshalled them to march in tune.
This is the kind of poetry I find frustrating to read in translation. Sor Juana is one of those rare writers for whom the sound, meaning, allusion and written form of words work together. You get a sense of this through Edith Grossman's translation, but it doesn't *feel* quite right.
One of the reasons I wanted to pick this up was to broaden my reading, which has little Latinx culture in it now. I can be dense at times, and I hadn't really thought through how different 17C Mexican cultural barriers would be to modern Latinx culture. So the very Europeaness of Sor Juana's writing, despite her fluency in Nahuatl. Perhaps for this reason, the short preface from a farce was the aspect of her writing I wanted more of: a perspective on colonisation, Madrid and Mexico, universals and specifics, that was intriguing in its workpersonship.
The Dream is an enormous achievement - a summation of contemporary European learning in fields as diverse as physiology; philosophy; physics and ancient history. The poem encapsulated a longing for knowledge, an acceptance of limitation, and a surprising amount of pedagogy.
I suspect that Sor Juana, as staunch an advocate for the right of women to learn as could be imagined, would still be frustrated if that, rather than for her poetic and scholarly achievements, was how she was remembered. I enjoyed this slim volume, but still hope it will be superseded by longer works in English of her various mastered genres.

2019 Reading Challenge #50. A book set in an abbey, cloister, monastery, vicarage, or convent