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TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
FOR at least twenty years, a new translation of
the works of St. John of the Cross has been an urgent
necessity. The translations of the individual prose
works now in general use go back in their original
form to the eighteen-sixties, and, though the later
editions of some of them have been submitted to a
certain degree of revision, nothing but a complete
retranslation of the works from their original
Spanish could be satisfactory. For this there are two
reasons.
First, the existing translations were never very
exact renderings of the original Spanish text even in
the form which held the field when they were first
published. Their great merit was extreme
readableness: many a disciple of the Spanish mystics,
who is unacquainted with the language in which they
wrote, owes to these translations the comparative
ease with which he has mastered the main lines of St.
John of the Cross's teaching. Thus for the general
reader they were of great utility; for the student,
on the other hand, they have never been entirely
adequate. They paraphrase difficult expressions, omit
or add to parts of individual sentences in order (as
it seems) to facilitate comprehension of the general
drift of the passages in which these occur, and
frequently retranslate from the Vulgate the Saint's
Spanish quotations from Holy Scripture instead of
turning into English the quotations themselves, using
the text actually before them.
A second and more important reason for a new
translation, however, is the discovery of fresh
manuscripts and the consequent improvements which
have been made in the Spanish text of the works of
St. John of the Cross, during the present century.
Seventy years ago, the text chiefly used was that of
the collection known as the Biblioteca de Autores
Espa�oles (1853), which itself was based, as we shall
later see, upon an edition going back as far as 1703,
published before modern methods of editing were so
much as imagined. Both the text of the B.A.E. edition
and the unimportant commentary which accompanied it
were highly unsatisfactory, yet until the beginning
of the present century nothing appreciably better was
attempted.
In the last twenty years, however, we have had two
new editions, each based upon a close study of the
extant manuscripts and each representing a great
advance upon the editions preceding it. The
three-volume Toledo edition of P. Gerardo de San Juan
de la Cruz, C.D. (1912-14), was the first attempt
made to produce an accurate text by modern critical
methods. Its execution was perhaps less laudable than
its conception, and faults were pointed out in it
from the time of its appearance, but it served as a
new starting-point for Spanish scholars and
stimulated them to a new interest in St. John of the
Cross's writings. Then, seventeen years later, came
the magnificent five-volume edition of P. Silverio de
Santa Teresa, C.D. (Burgos, 1929-31), which forms the
basis of this present translation. So superior is it,
even on the most casual examination, to all its
predecessors that to eulogize it in detail is
superfluous. It is founded upon a larger number of
texts than has previously been known and it collates
them with greater skill than that of any earlier
editor. It can hardly fail to be the standard edition
of the works of St. John of the Cross for
generations.
Thanks to the labours of these Carmelite scholars
and of others whose findings they have incorporated
in their editions, Spanish students can now approach
the work of the great Doctor with the reasonable
belief that they are reading, as nearly as may be,
what he actually wrote. English-reading students,
however, who are unable to master sixteenth-century
Spanish, have hitherto had no grounds for such a
belief. They cannot tell whether, in any particular
passage, they are face to face with the Saint's own
words, with a translator's free paraphrase of them or
with a gloss made by some later copyist or early
editor in the supposed interests of orthodoxy.
Indeed, they cannot be sure that some whole paragraph
is not one of the numerous interpolations which has
its rise in an early printed edition -- i.e., the
timorous qualifications of statements which have
seemed to the interpolator over-bold. Even some of
the most distinguished writers in English on St. John
of the Cross have been misled in this way and it has
been impossible for any but those who read Spanish
with ease to make a systematic and reliable study of
such an important question as the alleged dependence
of Spanish quietists upon the Saint, while his
teaching on the mystical life has quite unwittingly
been distorted by persons who would least wish to
misrepresent it in any particular.
It was when writing the chapter on St. John of the
Cross in the first volume of my Studies of the
Spanish Mystics (in which, as it was published in
1927, I had not the advantage of using P. Silverio's
edition) that I first realized the extent of the harm
caused by the lack of an accurate and modern
translation. Making my own versions of all the
passages quoted, I had sometimes occasion to compare
them with those of other translators, which at their
worst were almost unrecognizable as versions of the
same originals. Then and there I resolved that, when
time allowed, I would make a fresh translation of the
works of a saint to whom I have long had great
devotion -- to whom, indeed, I owe more than to any
other writer outside the Scriptures. Just at that
time I happened to visit the Discalced Carmelites at
Burgos, where I first met P. Silverio, and found, to
my gratification, that his edition of St. John of the
Cross was much nearer publication than I had
imagined. Arrangements for sole permission to
translate the new edition were quickly made and work
on the early volumes was begun even before the last
volume was published.
II
These preliminary notes will explain why my chief
preoccupation throughout the performance of this task
has been to present as accurate and reliable a
version of St. John of the Cross's works as it is
possible to obtain. To keep the translation, line by
line, au pied de la lettre, is, of course,
impracticable: and such constantly occurring Spanish
habits as the use of abstract nouns in the plural and
the verbal construction 'ir + present participle'
introduce shades of meaning which cannot always be
reproduced. Yet wherever, for stylistic or other
reasons, I have departed from the Spanish in any way
that could conceivably cause a misunderstanding, I
have scrupulously indicated this in a footnote.
Further, I have translated, not only the text, but
the variant readings as given by P. Silverio,[1]
except where they are due merely to slips of the
copyist's pen or where they differ so slightly from
the readings of the text that it is impossible to
render the differences in English. I beg students not
to think that some of the smaller changes noted are
of no importance; closer examination will often show
that, however slight they may seem, they are, in
relation to their context, or to some particular
aspect of the Saint's teaching, of real interest; in
other places they help to give the reader an idea,
which may be useful to him in some crucial passage,
of the general characteristics of the manuscript or
edition in question. The editor's notes on the
manuscripts and early editions which he has collated
will also be found, for the same reason, to be
summarized in the introduction to each work; in
consulting the variants, the English-reading student
has the maximum aid to a judgment of the reliability
of his authorities.
Concentration upon the aim of obtaining the most
precise possible rendering of the text has led me to
sacrifice stylistic elegance to exactness where the
two have been in conflict; it has sometimes been
difficult to bring oneself to reproduce the Saint's
often ungainly, though often forceful, repetitions of
words or his long, cumbrous parentheses, but the
temptation to take refuge in graceful paraphrases has
been steadily resisted. In the same interest, and
also in that of space, I have made certain omissions
from, and abbreviations of, other parts of the
edition than the text. Two of P. Silverio's five
volumes are entirely filled with commentaries and
documents. I have selected from the documents those
of outstanding interest to readers with no detailed
knowledge of Spanish religious history and have been
content to summarize the editor's introductions to
the individual works, as well as his longer footnotes
to the text, and to omit such parts as would interest
only specialists, who are able, or at least should be
obliged, to study them in the original Spanish.
The decision to summarize in these places has been
made the less reluctantly because of the frequent
unsuitability of P. Silverio's style to English
readers. Like that of many Spaniards, it is so
discursive, and at times so baroque in its wealth of
epithet and its profusion of imagery, that a literal
translation, for many pages together, would seldom
have been acceptable. The same criticism would have
been applicable to any literal translation of P.
Silverio's biography of St. John of the Cross which
stands at the head of his edition (Vol. I, pp.
7-130). There was a further reason for omitting these
biographical chapters. The long and fully documented
biography by the French Carmelite, P. Bruno de J�sus-Marie,
C.D., written from the same standpoint as P.
Silverio's, has recently been translated into
English, and any attempt to rival this in so short a
space would be foredoomed to failure. I have thought,
however, that a brief outline of the principal events
in St. John of the Cross's life would be a useful
preliminary to this edition; this has therefore been
substituted for the biographical sketch referred to.
In language, I have tried to reproduce the
atmosphere of a sixteenth-century text as far as is
consistent with clarity. Though following the
paragraph divisions of my original, I have not
scrupled, where this has seemed to facilitate
understanding, to divide into shorter sentences the
long and sometimes straggling periods in which the
Saint so frequently indulged. Some attempt has been
made to show the contrast between the highly adorned,
poetical language of much of the commentary on the
'Spiritual Canticle' and the more closely shorn and
eminently practical, though always somewhat
discursive style of the Ascent and Dark Night. That
the Living Flame occupies an intermediate position in
this respect should also be clear from the style of
the translation.
Quotations, whether from the Scriptures or from
other sources, have been left strictly as St. John of
the Cross made them. Where he quotes in Latin, the
Latin has been reproduced; only his quotations in
Spanish have been turned into English. The footnote
references are to the Vulgate, of which the Douai
Version is a direct translation; if the Authorized
Version differs, as in the Psalms, the variation has
been shown in square brackets for the convenience of
those who use it.
A word may not be out of place regarding the
translations of the poems as they appear in the prose
commentaries. Obviously, it would have been
impossible to use the comparatively free verse
renderings which appear in Volume II of this
translation, since the commentaries discuss each line
and often each word of the poems. A literal version
of the poems in their original verse-lines, however,
struck me as being inartistic, if not repellent, and
as inviting continual comparison with the more
polished verse renderings which, in spirit, come far
nearer to the poet's aim. My first intention was to
translate the poems, for the purpose of the
commentaries, into prose. But later I hit upon the
long and metrically unfettered verse-line, suggestive
of Biblical poetry in its English dress, which I have
employed throughout. I believe that, although the
renderings often suffer artistically from their
necessary literalness, they are from the artistic
standpoint at least tolerable.
III
The debts I have to acknowledge, though few, are very
large ones. My gratitude to P. Silverio de Santa
Teresa for telling me so much about his edition
before its publication, granting my publishers the
sole translation rights and discussing with me a
number of crucial passages cannot be disjoined from
the many kindnesses I have received during my work on
the Spanish mystics, which is still proceeding, from
himself and from his fellow-Carmelites in the
province of Castile. In dedicating this translation
to them, I think particularly of P. Silverio in
Burgos, of P. Florencio del Ni�o Jes�s in Madrid, and
of P. Cris�gono de Jes�s Sacramentado, together with
the Fathers of the 'Convento de la Santa' in �vila.
The long and weary process of revising the
manuscript and proofs of this translation has been
greatly lightened by the co-operation and
companionship of P. Edmund Gurdon, Prior of the
Cartuja de Miraflores, near Burgos, with whom I have
freely discussed all kinds of difficulties, both of
substance and style, and who has been good enough to
read part of my proofs. From the quiet library of his
monastery, as well as from his gracious
companionship, I have drawn not only knowledge, but
strength, patience and perseverance. And when at
length, after each of my visits, we have had to part,
we have continued our labours by correspondence,
shaking hands, as it were, 'over a vast' and
embracing 'from the ends of oppos�d winds.'
Finally, I owe a real debt to my publishers for
allowing me to do this work without imposing any such
limitations of time as often accompany literary
undertakings. This and other considerations which I
have received from them have made that part of the
work which has been done outside the study unusually
pleasant and I am correspondingly grateful.
E. ALLISON PEERS.
University of Liverpool.
Feast of St. John of the Cross,
November 24, 1933.
NOTE. -- Wherever a commentary by St. John of the
Cross is referred to, its title is given in italics
(e.g. Spiritual Canticle); where the corresponding
poem is meant, it is placed between quotation marks
(e.g. 'Spiritual Canticle'). The abbreviation 'e.p.'
stands for editio princeps throughout.
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