Juan de la Cruz Dark Night   Introduction & Notes by Michael Smith

Juan de la Cruz was born Juan de Yepes in 1542 at Fontiveros (Hontiveros) near Ávila. Some years after Juan's father died (1543?), his mother moved with the family to Arevalo and later to Medina del Campo. Juan attended school at the Colegio de los niños de la Doctrina between 1552 and 1556, and then he went with his patron, Don Antonio Álvarez de Toledo, to a hospital with the intention of taking holy orders. Between 1554 and 1563 Juan's education was in the hands of the Jesuits at their college in Medina. After three years' study in Salamanca, he was thinking of joining the Carthusian Order, but on meeting St Teresa he was persuaded by her to join the Discalced Reform. After a further year's study in Salamanca, Juan moved to the Reformed House at Duruelo. In 1571 he went to Alcalá de Henares as Rector of the College of the Reform, and there he directed the Carmelite nuns. From 1572 to 1577 he was confessor to the nuns at Ávila where St Teresa had established the Mother House.

In 1576 Juan was abducted by the Calced friars and imprisoned by them at Medina del Campo, but he was soon released through the intervention of the Papal Nuncio, Ormaneto. In 1577, however, he was again abducted by the Calced who held him prisoner at the Calced Carmelite priory in Toledo. It was while he was imprisoned there, suffering the most terrible deprivations and even torture, that Juan de la Cruz composed some of his finest poetry. After nine months, he escaped. From 1579 to 1582 he was Rector of the Carmelite college at Baeza; from 1582 he was Prior at Granada; in 1585 he was Prior at Segovia, the central House of the Reform, where he was badly treated by the Discalced Vicar-General, P. Doria. In 1591 the Madrid Chapter-General deprived him of his offices and at first decided to send him to Mexico. This decision was then rescinded and effectively Juan de la Cruz was banished to Ubeda in the province of Andalusia. There he died in 1591.

Such are the bare facts of saint-poet's life. What is not told by these facts is the extraordinary personality of the man: his rigorous intellect, his indomitable courage and his rare ability to understand and get on with all who encountered him, except those who were motivated by jealousy or entrenched in the power-politics of a religious order at an unsettled period in the history of the Catholic Church. On January 25, 1675, he was beatified by Clement X and canonised on December 26, 1726 by Benedict XIII. On August 2, 1926 he was declared Doctor of the Church Universal by Pius XI.

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The American poet and translator, Willis Barnstone, has written of Juan de la Cruz's Noche oscura: 'I think it is the most complete poem in the Spanish language'; and with Noche oscura in mind, and that other great poem, Cántico espiritual, Gerald Brennan has no hesitation in describing Juan de la Cruz as 'one of the greatest poets of any country.' In reading Noche oscura, then, what we are encountering is one of the acknowledged great masterpieces of Spanish and indeed world lyric poetry.

The main problem facing the translator of Juan de la Cruz's poem is how to preserve the balance between the potential eroticism of the allegory's imagery and the mystical experience which is the poem's raison d'être. The tendency of translators in our own age of unbelief has been to treat the poem as a love poem, albeit a sublime one. In this interpretation, the poem is presented as a descriptive evocation of sexual ecstasy. Arthur Symons' version most clearly demonstrates this reading of the poem. Here is how Symons translates the first stanza:

Upon an obscure night
Fevered with love in love's anxiety
(O hapless-happy plight!)
I went, none seeing me,
Forth from my house where all things quiet be.

The phrase 'Fevered with love' here gives the game away; and in the penultimate stanza we are not surprised to find the soul's union with God presented in patently sexual imagery:

When the first air
Blew from the tower and waved His locks aside,
His hand, with gentle care,
Did wound me in the side,
And in my body all my senses died.

In the last stanza, the use of the word 'shame' confirms what Symons has been imagining:

All things I then forgot,
My cheek on Him who for my coming came;
All ceased, and I was not,
Leaving my cares and shame
Among the lilies, and forgetting them.

It is scarcely going too far to say that the only hint of religious experience in Symons' version is the capitalising of the deity's pronouns. Substitute those capital aitches with lower-case aitches and the poem reads as a richly suggestive erotic poems. And this it most certainly is not.

Roy Campbell's version is only slightly less erotic. Here is Campbell's version of the third last stanza:

Within my flowering breast
Which only for himself entire I save
He sank into his rest
And all my gifts I gave
Lulled by the airs with which the cedars wave.

In comparison with the Campbell and Symons versions, Willis Barnstone's version preserves a better balance of the potentially erotic elements and the religious. But even Barnstone cannot resist the temptation to exploit the imagery for erotic associations. Here for instance is his rendering of stanza five:

  O night, my guide!
O night more friendly than the dawn!
  O tender night that tied
  lover and the loved one,
loved one in the lover fused as one!

The last line of this stanza inevitably forces erotic associations on the mature reader. And in stanza six, Barnstone again plays up the erotic with the phrase 'fondled him with love'.

Turning to older, more sensibly restrained versions, there still remains a problem with the second last stanza, which has been frequently misconstrued in English, even by such distinguished hispanists as E. Allison Peers. The Spanish original is

  El aire de la almena
cuando yo sus cabellos esparcía,
  con su mano serena
  en mi cuello hería,
y todos mis sentidos suspendía.

The subject of hería ('stroked') is el aire ('air', 'breeze'), not the amado ('lover') of stanza five. David Lewis's version, reprinted in Benedict Zimmerman's 1924 edition of Noche oscura, translates the stanza as follows:

As His hair floated in the breeze
That from the turret blew,
He struck me on the neck
With His gentle hand,
And all sensation left me.

Allison Peers similarly renders the stanza:

When from the turret's height,
Scattering his locks, the breezes play'd around,
He dealt me love's sweet wound,
And with the joyful pain thereof I swoon'd.

Now while it is understandable that Symons and Campbell, given their own poetry, should make the lover (amado) the understood subject of hería, it is surely odd that Lewis/Zimmerman and Peers should have been tempted into the same error. Is it possible, I wonder, that even these level-headed scholars were carried away by the imagery of the allegory, and thereby slipped into the error of making amado the agent of hería, conferring on the verb an erotic burden not justified by the Spanish original? And all this bring us back to the question of the 'right' balance to be struck between the counterparts of the poem's allegory.

Perhaps the best way to see the problem in English is to take an English poem that poses the same technical problem. Many of Henry Vaughan's poems, and in particular, his 'Peace', have always seemed to me to require a special kind of reading to be fair to them. Here is the text of 'Peace':

My soul, there is a country
  Far beyond the stars,
Where stands a winged sentry
  All skilful in the wars:
There, above noise and danger,
  Sweet Peace sits crown'd with smiles,
And One born in a manger
  Commands the beauteous files.
He is thy gracious Friend,
  And – O my soul awake! –
Did in pure love descend,
  To die here for thy sake.
If thou canst get by thither,
  There grows the flower of Peace,
The Rose that cannot wither,
  Thy fortress, and thy ease.
Leave then thy foolish ranges;
  For none can thee secure,
But One, who never changes,
  Thy God, thy life, thy cure.

The principal images of the poem – 'winged sentry', 'the beauteous files', 'The Rose that cannot wither', 'Thy fortress' – are not intended by Vaughan to be visualised or concretised in any way. To attempt to do so would produce imagistic monstrosities and wreak havoc with the poem's aesthetic structure. It is not, however, that Vaughan was incapable of creating highly concrete images; rather, the nature of the experience which is his concern, requires precisely a formality of image, in other words, a symbol, like the formalised, religious images in stained glass: images that lie somewhere between the visual and the conceptual. To function aesthetically as intended, poems that employ this kind of imagery or symbolism demand that the reader allow the conceptual or symbolic meaning to predominate over its visual realisation. To put this more succinctly: when in the prayer 'Hail, Mary' we encounter the metaphorical phrase 'Blessed is the fruit of thy womb', there can be no question of activating any visual imagery of 'fruit' and even less so of 'womb': the concept, reinforced by a lengthy tradition of usage, strictly contains the visual possibilities of the symbol.

To turn to my translation of Noche oscura, I may state frankly here that I worked on the assumption that the poem's symbol of the nocturnal tryst should never remotely suggest sexual intercourse. I have understood the symbol in its traditional religious sense, having its primary source in the Canticle. Josef Pieper in his Über die Liebe quotes several thinkers who have been of the view that love, properly speaking, should only be applied to the longing, not to its fulfilment, and that in its fulfilment it undergoes such a radical transformation that the word becomes inapplicable. Whatever one may think about general truth of this, which is not directly attributable to Pieper, it is a concept of love that seems to me to be of some help in coming to terms with the romantic connotations of Juan de la Cruz's language.

For the mystic, the crucial difficulty is how to express experience that seems immediately betrayed by any attempt to express it. Although of a different order, intuitive experience poses a similar problem: the mind, functioning intuitively, moves so fast that it arrives at its insight without conscious memory of its journey there, thus creating the problem of how to explain and justify the insight to others. The mystic attempts to express the normally inexpressible, and is as convinced of its reality as of anything in the world of commonsense.

The experience of Noche oscura has been subjected to many different kinds of interpretation, from the psychological to the sociological, depending on the interpreter's ideology. Apart from those who share the poet's religious faith, the non-religious have read the poem and acclaimed it a poetic masterpiece. For my part, I have responded, as a translator, to the poem's romantic imagery essentially within the poem's religious context. I have kept in mind the Canticle. The latitude I have permitted myself extends to the literary conventions of amour courtois, which eschew sensual grossness. The nocturnal tryst of 'Noche oscura' is that of the soul with God, and, in a broader sense, the poem expresses a human yearning for union with what is entirely of its own nature.