Sor Juana's Dream, Original Spanish, New English Translation, Background, Meaning, Significance is a beautifully illustrated book that features a new and highly praised translation of one of the greatest, if not THE greatest, poems in the Spanish language. Featured also is a detailed discussion of what Sor Juana means to convey in the poem. The central thesis is that its meaning is spiritual and not, as is commonly believed, a poem about intellectual disappointment alone.
"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 Sor Juana's source texts, including Ovid's Metamorphoses, Plato's Cave Analogy, Aristotle's ten Categories, Galen on belief and much more. Modern psychological writings center on the findings of Robert Ornstein, Iain McGilchrist, and Wilfred Bion. Although the world view Sor Juana conveys in the poem is spiritual, it is not expressed through Christian imagery or creedal references. Instead, Sor Juana invokes the Perennial Philosophical concepts of Plato, Plotinus, Nicholas of Cusa and others. Sor Juana's veiled understanding of salvation is philosophical, more about the Annunciation on terms enunciated by Meister Eckhart ("Eveyone needs to be a Mary, because God is always needing to be born"). 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 attributes the disappointment expressed in the poem to the first deadly sin, that of pride. Sor Juana's view of spirituality is that of Jesus, when he said, "The Kingdom of God is within you." In that sense, Sor Juana conveys a Christian message, though not based on redemption through blood sacrifice. 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. 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. It may indeed be the greatest. Octavio Paz said, "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."
Professor Rocio Olivares Zorilla, a Sor Juana specialist at The National Autonomous University of Mexico, points out that the translation, which she parsed for accuracy purely as a gesture of solidarity with the translator, follows Sor Juana's deictics and "reads like the original." This is because the translator follows changing rhythms and tonal registers extremely closely as he transfers the soul of the original Spanish into the English language with tremendous accuracy, conveying, also, Sor Juana's meaning with astonishing accuracy.
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 in order to keep the pages turning while "giving poetry a chance". Poetry aficionados, philosophers, and those who delight in psychology and science will also find much to admire in this volume on First Dream.
