Salmos (Coleccion Estructuras y Procesos) (Spanish Edition) [Paperback]

Ernesto Cardenal (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: Spanish

Product Details

• Paperback: 78 pages
• Publisher: Editorial Trotta (August 2000)
• Language: Spanish
• ISBN-10: 8481642339
• ISBN-13: 978-8481642339
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.1 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,601,716 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars MONK/PRIEST'S TRANSLATION FROM THE VULGATE FIFTY YEARS AGO NOW REPRINTED MORE FRESH AND IMPORTANT THAN EVER, June 12, 2007

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C. Scanlon "least helpful reviewer" (among us humans) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Salmos (Coleccion Estructuras y Procesos) (Spanish Edition) (Paperback)

The Reverend Father Ernesto Cardenal, now octogenarian, ever priest and poet, receives the heavy grace of beaming brightly his wonderful eyes in every crucial place for our Catholic Church, from Gethsemane to Cuernavaca to Solentiname to Managua.

A novice some fifty years ago under Father Thomas Merton in Gethsemane, the traditional and true Trappist monastery in Kentucky, Father Cardenal prayed, following the original Rule of Saint Benedict, each Psalm each week in the Vulgate Latin translation of the great Saint Jerome, and often several Psalms much more frequently, seven times a day.

Father Cardenal composed an excellent new introduction to this new reprinting (in the Coleccion Estructuras y Procesos: Serie Religion published by Editorial Trotta in 1998) of his translations directly from the lyrical and faithful Vulgate Latin into his native Nicaraguan, following very closely the meter and meaning of the Vulgate.

I myself following a similar rhythm of chant covering all of the Psalms some thirty years ago, began a long lost notebook of translations form the irrresistable Vulgate into American English. I wish I had that notebook yet. The Psalm six was especially if personally evocative, as I recall.

Here we have a trained and talented and true poet, inspired by the poet Father Merton, writing in his own idiom freely after Gethsemane, a translation of here 26 psalms well selected from the corpus of 150. He follows faithfully the sound and fury of the Vulgate, signifying everything, and making them true for our world of a half century ago, a world of socio-economic injustice, recovering from World War II and Auschwitz and Hiroshima and entering a time of purposeful though insane nuclear terror. Father Ernesto crystallizes and offers up in prayerful sacrifice all of our contemporary anxieties. He makes the Psalms ours to pray. In fact, when he later returned to Gethsemane on a visit to Father Merton and shared these Psalms, Father Thomas told him these are the Psalms as we ought to pray them.

Some might call such hermeneutics materialist when it is all the opposite. Father Cardenal brings our material into the spiritual dimension of all salvation history of yearning, with Job, with the Prophets, with the People of God. In fact any separation of Creation and salvation into a dualist spiritual/materialist dichotomy has long been declared heresy by our Church. The Mystical Body of Christ is REAL and here and now, and suffering, and praying and seeking the Pilgrim path to peace with justice on the road to the Kingdom which is here among us. This truth has been repeated in our Church from the earlist rejection of the Gnostic heresies through now in the latest Papal encyclical, The Sacrament of Charity: Sacramentum Caritatis particularly in sections 88 through 92.

Kindly permit me therefore some brief and poor translations of Father Cardenal's wonderful work, knowing it can do him no justice, while I urge you to examine the original (inclduing the Vulgate as it was, not as it has been renewed!)

Psalm 136 (137)

By the rivers of Babylon, we sit and we cry, remembering Sion. Looking at the skyscrapers of Babylon and the lights reflected in the river, the lights of the night clubs and bars of Babylon and hearing their music, we cry.

From the willows on the river bank we hang our zithers, from the weeping willows and we cry.

And those who brought us captive demand we sing a "vernacular" song, a "folksong" of Sion. How can we sing on strange earth the canticles of Sion?

May my tongue dry out and may I get cancer in my mouth if I do not remember you, Jerusalem!

(Father Ernesto courageously and aptly completes the translation of this psalm, whose final violent image I do not now dare relate)

Psalm 129 (130)

Out of the depths I cry to you, Lord!

I cry at night in the prison

and in the concentration camp

In the torture chamber

In the hour of shadows

Hear my voice/ my SOS

If you kept record of sins Lord who would grant immunity?

But you forgive sins

You are not implacable

like them in their Investigation!

I trust in the Lord and not in leaders

Not in the slogans

I trust in the Lord and not in their broadcasts

My soul waits for the Lord

More than sentinels wait for the dawn

More than how those who count in prison the nocturnal hours.

While we are imprisoned they have parties

But the Lord is the Liberation

The Liberty of Israel

Pray this book today. Permit this humble book to pray with and for you in all of your anxieties and woes and lamentations and loneliness and joys. Do not be dismayed by he who within an hour of the posting of this trepidatious review has already posted "unhelpful" votes without any help nor indication as to what additional information could make it more helpful. Forgive my poor yet sincere and prayerful and Catholic writing.