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

About the actual selection of those words Arenal and Powell have few comments, as if they have deliberately emphasized instead the contextualization they offer as a necessary point of departure for an informed contemporary reading. This is not to say, however, that they have been inattentive to the more commonly discussed aspects of translation practice. On the contrary, they offer a careful, accurate version that suggests the goal articulated by Powell in her previous translations of texts by Hispanic nuns: to create "a modern American idiom that preserves the gustatory commonplace, the 'flavor' of the original" (p. xiii). Powell's earlier aim has been successfully realized here, and the translators have achieved an appropriate accommodation between their gender-directed approach and Sor Juana's seventeenth-century Spanish. The choice of "answer," for example, to translate respuesta stands in noticeable contrast to--and suggests a confidence on Sor Juana's part absent from--the "response" or "reply" used by other English-language critics and translators.

At the same time, however, Areal and Powell have, wisely, not employed some of the more extreme, appropriate strategies found in many feminist translations of work by contemporary writers who address gender-related issues specifically in terms of language and thus invite elaboration on the part of their translators.(4) Such "supplementing" and "hijacking" (Von Flotow p. 74), Arenal and Powell seem to realize, would have been inconsistent with their effort to indicate Sor Juana's innovations in the context of her own tradition and contemporaries. In the few instances where they do make Sor Juana's comments about gender-related issues somewhat more explicit in English than they are in Spanish, they explain their decision in the annotations. For example, their translation of "todos" as "all men" rather than "everyone" or "all people" (p. 83) is accompanied by a comment about the fun Sor Juana herself makes of the "false inclusiveness of the generic masculine" (p. 130).

Although Arenal and Powell's introduction would have been strengthened by even further discussion of the ways in which gender-related concerns influenced specific decisions in their actual translation practice, that practice offers an innovative and rewarding combination of conventional academic scholarship, contemporary feminist goals and methodologies, and the varied tasks implicit in literary translation. In this it is reminiscent of Sor Juana's own effort to "[b]ridge medieval allegory and early modern rationalism" (p. vii), for with the publication of The Answer/La Respuesta, readers in English gain more than a new version of the Respuesta: they gain far greater access to the wide range of information one needs to approach Sor Juana as a knowledgeable participant in the discussion her work invites.

1 The scope of this review does not allow for a detailed comparison of the three translations, but I believe it is important to note that each of the translations of the ResPuesta is valuable and necessary. Peden, as her title suggests, also takes Sor Juana's gender as a point of departure and her work also involves a collaboration--with the photographer Gabriel North Seymour. Her book carries a short introduction and the text is "annotated" with photographs of landscapes and buildings associated with the life of Sor Juana. Trueblood includes a translation of Sor Filotela's letter to Sor Juana (and which Arenal and Powell do not include); in his introduction he stresses the difficulties Sor Juana encountered as a woman writer and intellectual and briefly discusses some of her strategies (pp. 6-10). Neither of these translations contains extensive annotations and neither is bilingual. Although it should be clear from this brief description that Arenal and Powell's translation differs significantly from those of Peden and Trueblood, it is unfortunate that the Feminist Press has chosen to advertise their work on the back cover of the book as "The first accurate translation." Not only is this claim not substantiated in Arenal and Powell's commentary (they themselves make no "revisionist" references to the other translations and in no way suggest a "competition" between their work and that of Peden and Trueblood), it demeans La respuesta, which certainly merits and can sustain more than one valid reading in English.