Poetry
First Dream
Primero sueño
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz · 1692
Synopsis
Night falls: the earth's shadow rises in a pyramid towards the sky, and beasts, men and things fall asleep. Freed from the sleeping body, the soul rises and tries to embrace in a single glance everything that exists. The undertaking dazzles it and fails: there are too many things, and the understanding is not equal to them. It then tries again another way, by degrees and by categories, climbing the ladder of beings.
Context
The poem, a silva of 975 lines written in the manner of Góngora's Solitudes, first circulates in manuscript. Its author calls it, in her reply of 1691, the only text she remembers having written for pleasure and not on commission. It is printed in Seville in 1692 in the second volume of her works, under a title that is not hers: “Primero sueño, que así intituló y compuso la madre Juana Inés de la Cruz, imitando a Góngora”. It is translated into French in 1987, with a preface by Octavio Paz, and into English in 1988.
Who it is for
A long learned poem, with Latinate syntax, difficult even for a Spanish reader; an annotated edition, such as Antonio Alatorre's, is almost indispensable.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's most important work and one of the great poems of the Hispanic Baroque, along with Góngora's Solitudes.
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