|
Preface To The Electronic Edition |
This electronic edition (v 0.9) has been scanned from an
uncopyrighted 1962 Image Books third edition of the Ascent. The entire text and some of the
footnotes have been reproduced. Nearly 1000 footnotes (and parts
of footnotes) describing variations among manuscripts have been
omitted. Page number references in the footnotes have been
changed to chapter and section where possible. This edition has
been proofread once, but additional errors may remain.
Harry Plantinga University of Pittsburgh [email protected]
July 1, 1994.
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 Espanoles (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 Jesus-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 Nino Jesus in Madrid, and of P.
Crisogono de Jesus Sacramentado, together with the Fathers of the
'Convento de la Santa' in Avila.
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 opposed 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.
|