Review: The Spring that Feeds the Torrent
The Spring that Feeds the Torrent: Poems by St. John of the Cross
Translated by Rhina P. Espaillat
Wiseblood Books, 2023; 92pp., $14
I once read an anecdote that as a young man, Karol Wojtyla, the pope-and-saint-to-be, turned his attention to learning Spanish so he could read the poetry of St. John of the Cross in its original tongue. The young Wojtyla was a poet, playwright, and actor, and as such, deeply invested in the literary culture of his native Poland, but he was also beginning to dive into spiritual depths he expressed through writing. As a young man he wrote his own mystical poetry, poems with titles like “Song of the Inexhaustible Sun” and “Song of the Brightness of Water,” in which he tried to pin down the soul’s experience of God with the vicissitudes of language.
He must have longed to access the poetry of St. John of the Cross without having to cross the perilous bridges of re-interpretation and approximation inevitable in every translation. Not speaking Polish, I often wish I could read Wojtyla’s work in its native tongue. Yet I remain grateful for the English versions of his poems, which remain works of significant import in my life. The translations are linguistic stepping-stones over a river I would not be able to cross otherwise, forming a worthy path to walk, even if at times the word-stones are a bit wobbly, or not quite reachable without a stretch.
Rhina Espaillat’s work, The Spring that Feeds the Torrent: Poems by Saint John of the Cross, is introduced by poet Timothy Murphy, who offers readers a caveat from John Frederick Nims. Nims, a poet who also endeavored to translate John of the Cross’ poetry, asserts that the task of the translator is perilous, because, in fact, “one cannot translate a poem.” In other words, readers will never experience a poem in exactly the same way once it has been moved from one language to another. Still, he says, “one can try to reconstitute [a poem] by taking the thought, the imagery, the rhythm, the sound, the qualities of diction, these and whatever else made up the original, and then attempt to rework as many as possible into a poem in English…if the translator is trying to show us how the poetry goes, what he writes first of all has to be a poem.”
Rhina Espaillat, an award-winning bilingual poet with an adept hand at formal verse, who is known for her translations of English poets into Spanish, is never at risk of offering readers something that is not a poem. Her translations echo the rhythm, rhyme scheme, and meter of St. John of the Cross’ original poems, often to great effect. She is attentive to how the reader experiences the poem in its wholeness, both its meaning and its musicality.
Dana Gioia, in his essay “Poetry as Enchantment,” speaks to how crucial this type of treatment is, because of the very nature of poetry itself. “Poetry compellingly communicates feelings that lie beyond or beneath rational discourse. The physicality of poetic speech separates it from the conceptual language of philosophy.” There is more to the poem than its meaning, an experience of language that engages not only the mind but also the body. Espaillat’s preservation of the poetic form is a crucial endeavor that helps maintain some of the resonances of a poem that go beyond the literal meanings of its words. This is particularly important to preserve in the case of such spiritually resonant poems as those found in The Spring that Feeds the Torrent.
A poem is its own statement, its own path-marker through the tangled forests of memory and meaning and love. John of the Cross intuited this, writing to a friend, in a 1578 letter related by Father Iain Matthews in his book, Impact of God: “where words are born of love, it is better to leave them open, so that each person can benefit from them in their own way and at their own spiritual level—this, rather than tying the verse down to a meaning that not everyone could relish.”
Rhina Espaillat is fully bilingual, equally at home in the literary heights of both English and Spanish. Many of the poems collected in The Spring that Feeds the Torrent were featured already in such reputable journals as First Things and The Sewanee Theological Review. At their best, Espaillat’s translations weave a spell—they enchant, to use Gioia’s term. They draw readers into a beguiling space where the bride-soul and bridegroom-Christ dance in patterns of alternate longing and ecstasy.
This enchanted space is particularly vivid in Espaillat’s translation of the most well-known John of the Cross works, especially “The Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom of Christ.” This poem trades in the physicality of the world and the body, as the bride-soul wanders through “trackless woods to where the rivers flow,” and begs nature itself to give her the clues she needs to find her lost beloved.
O forests darkly glooming,
seeded by my beloved’s very hand!
O pasture richly blooming,
you flower-jeweled band!
I beg you, say if he has crossed your land.
The meter preserves the song-like quality of the bride’s quest, and the rhymes of this stanza exemplify Espaillat’s achievement—consistent throughout this poem—of offering readers word-pairs that feel unforced and creative. The language is elevated enough to weave the semi-dreamy pastoral setting effectively, yet relatable enough to be understood intuitively.
In my favorite pair of stanzas in all of The Spring the Feeds the Torrent, the bride-soul sings of Christ as her bridegroom, but also compares him metaphorically to the world that offers itself, invitingly, to her. The litany of images and the naturalness of the English rhyme and meter capture almost completely the experience of reading these lines in Spanish.
My lover is the highlands,
he is the wooded valleys lone and deep,
the far, mysterious islands,
the streams that sing and leap,
whispering winds that court the fields they sweep,the night whose stillness pleases
and ushers morning and the rising sun,
silence whose music eases,
music from silence spun,
and supper that delights when day is done.
The bride-soul is delighted by her lover, and also, relishes the fact that he delights in her when they are finally united. Even the smallest physical detail of the bride-soul—a golden hair twined around her neck like a necklace, a glance from her eye—causes the bridegroom-Christ to be “wounded” and “wholly taken.” This delight in being desired, of the bride luring the bridegroom even through the smallest details of her body, leads readers into a spiritual truth explored by many of John’s poems. The experience of being known, being loved, being desired by a God who gave himself to us, not just spiritually but in an incarnate wholeness, is a crucial element of many people’s conversions. Not only the Incarnation, but the Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Eucharist all turn upon Christ’s divine humanity being given over, bodily, to us, his beloved.
Even the most fluent writer, however, must wrangle with the perilous realities of translation alluded to by Nims. Espaillat’s version of “The Dark Night of the Soul” is, for the most part, fluid and accomplished. The meter and rhyme scheme of the original Spanish are preserved with elegance, in stanzas that situate the reader side-by-side with the poem’s protagonists, the soul and her beloved Christ:
I stayed, all else forgetting,
inclined toward the beloved, face to face;
all motion halted, letting
care vanish with no trace,
forgotten in the lilies of that place.
Many people may be familiar in passing with the concept of the soul’s “dark night,” in which a faithful person begins to perceive God as distant, or even absent, and suffers dryness in prayer, or lack of spiritual consolations. This is only one element of the dark night, however, and the full title of “The Dark Night of the Soul”—preserved in other John of the Cross translations like Nims or Campbell—speaks to the unitive trajectory of the dark night.
The poem’s full title is “The Dark Night: Songs of soul in rapture at having arrived at the height of perfection, which is union with God by the road of spiritual negation.” In Espaillat’s version the full title is eliminated, which does lend the poem a cleaner, more contemporary feel. But there is a bit of insight lost here, especially for readers new to John’s poetry. For St. John of the Cross, the night is not simply a lack of light, but a formative mystery, a protective space where the soul grows. Yes, the soul’s growth might consist in an inexplicable stretching, or perhaps a purification, endured without the light of understanding, but it is always a path that has the potential to lead forwards and upwards. Like the darkness of the womb, the dark night leads towards a birth, towards a unification with One who has been present, albeit mysteriously, all along.
Given the fraught situation of sexuality in the world today, it can be challenging to deal with the sensuality of John’s description of unity between the soul and her beloved. The sixth stanza in “Dark Night,” reads as follows in the original Spanish:
En mi pecho florido,
que entero para él solo se guardaba
allí quedó dormido
y yo le regalaba
y el ventalle de cedros aire daba.
One key word to notice in St. John’s stanza is the verb regalar. The bride-soul refers to her interaction with her beloved-Christ as a gift of herself to him: if translated directly the words seem to mean something best expressed as “I gave myself to him.” The phrase indicates the deeper theological meaning of the physical union the poem obliquely suggests: the soul is united with Christ, and this comes about through an act of self-bestowal.
Espaillat’s version brings in a distinct nuance:
On my new-flowered breast
to him alone and wholly sanctified,
he leaned and lay at rest;
his pleasure was my guide,
and cedars to the wind their scent supplied.
The words of self-gift implied in “y yo le regalaba” become “his pleasure was my guide.” Espaillat’s line strikes a chord—“pleasure”—that is noticeably absent not only in the Spanish but in the same line as rendered by other translators. David Lewis translates the phrase as “And I cherished him;” Roy Campbell, retaining the sense of self-bestowal present in the original Spanish, offers the line as “And all my gifts I gave.”
Although plausibly implicated in an act of self-bestowal, the word “pleasure” draws a bit of notice in the entire set of translations because it is similarly inserted into the translation of the poem “Songs of the Soul in Intimate Amorous Communion with God.” “Cuán delicadamente me enamoras,” is a line that in literal terms means “you make me fall in love with you so delicately.” It becomes, in Espaillat’s translation, “with what rare lover’s skill I have been pleasured.” In contrast, other translators remain a bit closer to the original Spanish, retaining the note of delicacy: Roy Campbell offers the awkward, yet more literal, phrase, “so daintily in love you make me fall;” E. Allison Peers suggests the phrase “how delicately thou inspirest my love.”
In both of the instances where Espaillat chooses to insert “pleasure” into a line where it was not originally present, her translation departs from Spanish lines that lean toward the deeper meaning of sexual union, toward the delicacy and gentleness of the lovers’ courtship, toward the language of self-gift spoken by the body. The word “pleasure,” for a contemporary English speaker, may nudge the lines towards a more coy description of surface-level, recreational sexuality. While this may be a shortcoming of the reader rather than the translation itself, it is the case that translators must always be sensitive to the resonance that words have in contemporary usage. It is difficult to parse this out completely, because words will always have different resonances for different readers, and bodily pleasure, delight, and joy, are often at play in unitive sexual experiences. Nevertheless, as the poem moves from Spanish into this English, there’s something new lingering in the Espaillat translation that seems to move a bit away from what St. John of the Cross’ original words imply.
The challenge of capturing the theological nuances in St. John of the Cross’ original language is equally evident in the poem “Glosa: Apart and Not Yet a Part.” In its original Spanish rendering, the soul finds herself simultaneously without any support—with nothing familiar or earthly to cling to, and yet, at the same time, experiencing a mysterious, simultaneous support. The Spanish title highlights this simultaneity, this sense of “both-and”—sin arrimo y con arrimo translates to something like “without and yet with support.” In Espaillat’s title, in contrast, both “apart” and “not yet a part” are both expressions of separation. The sense of the Creator constantly creating, ever upholding His creature, even in the midst of doubt and darkness, is lost.
In the same poem, a line that is repeated twice, once in the first stanza, and once in the last, also lends the English translation a sense of separation and annihilation that was not present in the original. John of the Cross’ todo me voy consumiendo is rendered by Espaillat “to be consumed out of being.” Most other translators take the meaning of consumir to be that of a consuming flame. (Campbell translates the line “entirely I am burned away,” and Nims “I burn, I burn away.”)
The other translations gesture towards the refiner’s fire; towards a flame that perfects, destroying sin, but not the sinner. While perhaps unintentional, Espaillat’s phrasing of “to be consumed out of being” has overtones of a spirituality that understands the telos of the spiritual life as a release from the cyclical bonds of being itself, into a vacuous nothingness, perhaps even a non-existence, rather than into the fullness of Being itself.
This is a substantial departure from St. John of the Cross’ theological vision. What is consumed is not the soul itself, but the soul’s inordinate attachments to the things of this world, to all that is not God. In his work Ascent of Mount Carmel, John describes the soul’s path of purification as a narrow way of “nothing”—but this is not the nothingness of non-being; rather, it is the emptying of the intellect, memory, and will of all the things of this world that are at variance with God. Only by doing this can the soul reach the summit of the mountain, in which it experiences beatific unification with the great I AM, with Him who is Being itself.
In St. John’s hand-drawn map of Mount Carmel, he points out that all that was pared away as the soul journeyed in the darkness towards God—the worldly desires for joy, knowledge, consolation, rest—is given back to the perfected soul, unified with God, in infinite bounty. “Now that I least desire them, I have them all without desire,” he writes.
John is careful to explain, in the second book of Ascent of Mount Carmel, that the nature of the union between the purified soul and God is one in which the soul retains its own being. A soul completely purified of attachment to worldly desires is, he says, like a window that has been wiped clean of every bit of smudge and grime. God is the sunlight which shines through the window—while it may appear, in such an instance, that the window has disappeared, and is identical with the sunlight itself, in fact, “[the soul’s] being (even though transformed) is naturally as distinct from God’s as it was before, just as the window, although illumined by the ray, has being distinct from the ray’s.”
While it may not have been Espaillat’s intent to craft lines that seem to sit at variance with John’s overall spiritual vision, the fact remains that words such as “being” are particularly laden with theological import, and therefore must be used with the utmost attention to detail in the context of theologically dense poems such as these.
These few reservations aside, Rhina Espaillat’s translations remain overall attentive renderings of St. John of the Cross that replicate the Spanish poet’s mysticism with admirable fidelity to his original poetic forms. Espaillat reflects in her essay “Bilingual/Bilingüe” that “if we succeed in salvaging anything [in the act of translation], maybe it is most often the music, the formal elements of poetry that do travel from language to language, as the formal music of classic Spanish poetry my father loved followed me into English and draws me, to this day, to poems that are patterned and rich and playful.” The richly patterned poems in The Spring that Feeds the Torrent exhibit just such a musicality, captivating with sound and image, and offering the receptive reader a transfixing road map of possibilities for their own spiritual life.
