Amazon.com: The Poems of St. John of the Cross: (Dual English/Spanish): Saint John of the Cross, Kenneth Krabbenhoft, Ferris Cook: Books

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The Poems of St. John of the Cross, translated by Ken Krabbenhoft, burn with the ecstatic fury of the Psalms and sail in the radiant peace of the poet Rumi.

St. John of the Cross was born in Spain in 1542 and was imprisoned in 1577 for his devotion to the teachings of St. Teresa of Avila. During his imprisonment, he wrote most of the poems that have earned him the reputation as the greatest poet of the Christian mystical tradition. The poems, presented here in a beautifully printed, lightly illustrated Spanish/English edition, often blur the line between romantic and religious love, in the tradition of Song of Songs. "On a Dark Night," for example, begins with a lover whose gender is not identified, stealing out of a house, down a secret ladder, following "my only light and guide / the light that burned in my heart," to find "the one I knew would come, / where surely no one would find us." The poem ends with a breathtaking image of spiritual and sensual contentment: "On the ramparts / while I sat ruffling his hair / the air struck my neck / with its gentle hand, / leaving my senses suspended. / I stayed; I surrendered, / resting my face on my Beloved. / Nothing mattered. / I left my cares / forgotten among the lilies." These are poems to read aloud to a lover, poems to read silently before God, poems that quiver before the world's beauty and thankfully seek to describe something beyond it--a God whose undeniable intimacy with humanity always edges toward the ineffable. --Michael Joseph Gross

From Library Journal
St. John of the Cross, a 16th-century mystic, wrote a small body of poems, many of them while he was imprisoned for his involvement in St. Teresa of Avila's monastic reform movement. A friendly jailer gave him pen and paper, and with these he composed some of the most ecstatically spiritual poems of the Christian tradition. St. John's central theme is union, though he wrote from utter solitude. His expressions of spiritual union with God are surprisingly sexual; it's often difficult not to interpret them as secular love poems. There are many excellent translations available that endeavor to capture the intensity and passion of the original. Krabbenhoft's translations are flat and literal in comparison with those of Willis Barnstone (1968) and John Frederick Nims (1979). Nims, for example, translates the last line of "Canciones Dei" as "how delicately I'm caught afire with love!" while Krabbenhoft renders it "how soothingly do you woo me!" Spanish texts are included, and Ferris Cook's tender illustrations are based on 16th-century Spanish paintings.AJudy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward
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The Poems of St. John of the Cross: (Dual English/Spanish) (Hardcover)

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