A Rosario Castellanos Reader edited by Maureen Ahern (review)

90Rocky Mountain Review Works Reviewed Elliott, John R., Jr. Playing God: Medieval Mysteries on the Modern Stage. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989. Stevens, Martin. Four Middle English Mystery Cycles: Textual, Contextual, and Critical Interpretations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Tydeman, William. English Medieval Theatre 1400-1500. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986. MAUREEN AHERN, ed. A Rosario Castellanos Reader. Trans. Maureen Ahern, et al. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988. 378 p. In the urgency of revising the canon and rescuing Latin American women writers from oblivion, the appearance of numerous anthologies ironically has obscured the need for comprehensive English editions ofthe works of important figures such as María Luisa Bombai, Alejandra Pizarnik, Rosario Castellanos, and Julia de Burgos, among others. Besides Isabel Allende's recent popularity in the United States literary world, very few Latin American women writers have been systematically translated into English. Maureen Ahern's English edition of Rosario Castellanos' work, A Rosario Castellanos Reader, attempts to correct this situation. It offers the English reader a comprehensive view ofthe Mexican author's literary development and continuity ofthought across genres (poetry, fiction, essays, and drama), as well as a diachronic perspective which spans two and one half decades of her versatile writing, from 1948 to 1974, the year which marks Castellanos' untimely death in Israel. Some of the poetry, all of the short stories, the essays, and the play included in this collection appear in English for the first time. A Rosario Castellanos Reader represents an important contribution to literary studies. The collection reclaims the historical value of Rosario Castellanos as precursor of contemporary feminist thought. For example, the idea that feminine traits as such are not biologically determined but socially imposed, and thé relationship established between "sexuality and textuality," what Ahern calls "body as sign," are both tenets proposed by Castellanos in her essays written between 1960 and 1974. These ideas are illustrated in "Once Again Sor Juana" (1963), which appeared "more than a decade before Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray began to publish their radical feminist manifestos" (40). Ahern's monographic essay, "Reading Rosario Castellanos: Contexts, Voices, and Signs," contextualizes her work precisely within Anglo and French feminism, an indispensable task when one considers the marginalized status of Latin American women writers still in force today. Ahern also indicates Rosario Castellanos' contributions to women's poetry in Latin America, as seen in her appropriation of the language of domesticity as poetic discourse, which Book Reviews91 in turn becomes a subversive mode of expression. This legacy is clear today in poetry as well as in prose (e.g., Carmen Lugo Filippi's "Pilar, Your Curls"). In the context of literary translation, A Rosario Castellanos Reader exemplifies the role of the translator as critic and as ideal reader. Ahern is the principal translator in this collection (she translates all of the poetry, the short story "Cooking Lesson," and most of the essays); she is also editor and reader of the collaborators' work. Moreover, she is the critical voice that introduces Castellanos to the new audience. As Borges so aptly observed regarding Antoine Galland's translation ofA Thousand and One Nights, the translator is a mediator whose reading and rewriting of an author may very well mould his/her image in a second culture for many years to come. In this respect, Ahern is the ideal intermediary to introduce Castellanos to the Englishspeaking world. This edition is the mature product of many years of bibliographical research, and ofAhern's versions and revisions ofCastellanos' texts in English. The introductory essay is by itself a valuable contribution to the scholarly bibliography ofCastellanos' work. In addition to the feminist context in which the Mexican writer is appropriately regarded, Ahern's discourse analysis of her poetry fills a need identified ten years ago by Mary Seale Vásquez in her essay "Rosario Castellanos, Image and Idea" (37), an introduction to Homenaje a Rosario Castellanos which, in fact, Ahern co-edited. The analyses of the fiction, essays, and drama complete Ahern's critical perspective ofCastellanos' work as a collection of texts interrelated among each other, revealing a "coherence of [her] legacy: a lucid discourse on the ideology of culture and...