Sor Juana's Dream, Original, Translation, Background Meaning, is a beautifully illustrated book that offers to poetry lovers a new translation of one of the greatest poems of the Spanish language, followed by fresh analysis of its meaning.
"Reads like the original" and "will be THE translation, honestly", said Dr. Rocío Olivares Zorilla of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. The book includes source texts Sor Juana tapped, including Ovid's Metamorphoses, Plato's Cave Analogy, Aristotle's ten Categories, and the observations of Galen. The world view Sor Juana conveys in the poem is a spiritual one, although not expressed through Christian imagery or creedal references. Instead, Sor Juana invokes the Perennial Philosophical concepts associated with Plotinus, Hermes and the metaphysical pyramid associated with Masonry. Thought by some readers to be about intellectual disappointment due to frustrated desire for a holistic grasp of the Cosmos and the mysteries of Creation, the author finds the reason for this disappointment in the existential mistake of hubris. This mistake is not explained in Christian terms, but it is, in a nutshell, that of the Biblical unwise virgins who fail to buy oil for their lamps; or the wedding guest cast out for not wearing the wedding garment of purity. Both of these tropes originate with Jesus Christ, so, as it turns out, the poem has a deeply Christian message expressed in philosophical terms and mythic imagery. Like her co-religionaries, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, Marcilio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola, Sor Juana shows herself to be an ecumenical thinker in the widest sense, as they were. First Dream, known by three titles in Spanish (El Sueño, Primer Sueño, and Primero Sueño) is undoubtedly one of the greatest poems ever written in the Americas if not the greatest. Octavio Paz said of it, "First, we must underscore Sor Juana's absolute originality; nowhere in all of Spanish literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is there anything like First Dream. Neither do I find precedents in earlier centuries."
This new translation of Sor Juana's Dream follows the aural patterns, phonetics, registers, rhythms, deictics, etc., of the original. It can thus be justly termed a stand-alone literary translation that brings the freshness, beauty and truth of the original to the English language reader for the first time. The book is conceived of as the "coffee table" type, richly illustrated to assist even readers with little taste for poetry to keep the pages turning while "giving poetry a chance". Poetry aficionados, philosophers and those who delve into psychology and science will also find much to admire in this volume on First Dream.
