Book reviews -- The Answer/La Respuesta by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and translated by Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell

Comparative Literature, Winter 1995 by Maier, Carol

THE ANSWER/LA RESPUESTA. By Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Critical edition and translation by Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell. New York: Feminist Press, 1994.

Mexico City, 1690. The bishop of Puebla hears Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648/51-1695) deliver a brilliant--and bold--refutation of a well-known sermon. At his request, Sor Juana puts her comments in writing, in the form of a letter to him. The Bishop publishes Sor Juana's remarks with the title Carta Atenagorica (Letter Worthy of Athena). He also publishes a letter written by himself but signed pseudonymously as a nun, Sor Filotela de la Cruz. In it, he praises Sor Juana but also advises her that women should devote themselves to less secular learning. Apparently surprised by the publication of her letter and stung by the reprimand, Sor Juana writes a complex response that both addresses the points in Sor Filotela's letter and provides a moving account of her own life in a society whose conventions place strict limitations on the role of women.

A subject of intense speculation and scrutiny both because of the many unanswered questions that surround its composition and publication and because its author is a principal figure of not only Latin American literature but also the Hispanic Baroque, Sor Juana's reply to Sor Filotela (Respuesta de la poetisa a la muy ilustre Sor Filotela de la Cruz) has been translated three times into English. All of the versions have been realized by competent translators. The latest translation, Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell's The Answer/La Respuesta, however, makes two significant contributions in addition to a new English rendering of Sor Juana's missive.(1) The first comprises a comprehensive introduction to the poet's life and work; a detailed "reading" of the Respuesta; extensive annotations keyed to both English and Spanish versions (the edition is bilingual); a sampling of Sor Juana's poetry; and a selected but thorough bibliography of Sor Juana' s writings, translations of her work into English, and recent criticism. The second contribution--inseparable from the first and differentiated here only so as to examine it in greater detail--comprises an explicit "focus...on gender" (p. viii), which guides Arenal and Powell's work as translators and editors, and an effort to present fully Sor Juana's "spiritual, cultural, social and female context" (ix).

These two contributions must be discussed with respect to two distinct, although overlapping, areas. First, as Arenal and Powell's introductory remarks and bibliographic entries indicate, their reading of the Respuesta draws on and is consonant with current criticism in both English and Spanish about Sor Juana's life and work, much of which has sought to investigate questions of gender, in particular to explore what Stephanie Merrim has referred to as the possible womanscript" in her words and silences. Second, their approach to translation practice is consonant with two of the principal endeavors discussed in current North American translation theory: an effort to make the translator's work "visible" to readers and make it possible for them to participate knowingly in the mediation it implies;(2) and an effort to integrate translation theory and practice with feminist principles. Although, at least until quite recently, much of the translation identified as "feminist" has been realized using the work of explicitly feminist and largely contemporary writers, North American feminist translators have also begun to work with writing from earlier periods that may not conform to current definitions of feminism.(3) In such instances, translation often serves as a means as well as an end in itself, and the questions and disjunctures that arise in the practice of translation lead to an examination of the translator's points of departure and their applicability to texts from other cultures and times.

In the case of Arenal and Powell's Respuesta, then, what at first glance might seem to be a contradiction is in fact a deliberate strategy for engaging the reader in both the ambiguities that Sor Juana wrote into her reply to Sor Filotela and the questions that arise when one attempts to read a text written 300 years earlier in a different language. "Feminism animates the Respuesta," the translators affirm in their preface (p. viii), but they also ask, in the next sentence--and addressing the reader directly--if the use of "feminism," to refer to Sor Juana might not be an anachronism. This interrogative is anything but "rhetorical," and it is unfortunate that here Arenal and Powell do not provide a discussion of their own understanding and use of the term "gender" (and its relations to "feminism," for example, or "sex"). Given the thoroughness of their commentary and the complex discussions of gender that exist in the fields of linguistics, literary criticism, history, and the natural sciences, one can only assume that this was a deliberate omission and that Arenal and Powell believed that a definition of "gender" would arise implicitly from their remarks and examples. As a strategy this seems less than successful to me, because I do not believe that the "general reader" specified in their preface (p. x) will necessarily be familiar enough with current, interdisciplinary work in gender studies to construct that definition. Arenal and Powell do, however, make clear the difficulties inherent in any attempt to answer their question about feminism, and they proceed systematically to make available the tools that a non-specialist reader will need to consider the question in detail. In this way, they both stress the "gendered sense of the world and of language [that] permeates her [Sor Juana's] text" (p. 19) and prompt readers to think about the use of the term "gender" in relation to Sor Juana's writing. Reminded continually that to read Sor Juana's work today is, inevitably, to become a translator, readers must consider the extent to which Sor Juana is best discussed as a woman writer and they must grapple with the re-statement of Sor Juana's work in contemporary (and in this case, English) words.