Librería 1. Estante 5.

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 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. ( )