“The Spring That Feeds the Torrent: Poems” by St. John of the Cross

St. John of the Cross (1542-1591) was a Catholic priest, a mystic, a friar, a prisoner, a friend of St. Teresa of Avila, and a poet. It is poetry, in fact, that he’s best remembered for – mystical, almost ecstatic meditations with, by, and for God. 

He was born Juan de Yepes y Alvarez near the town of Avila in Spain. He came from an impoverished family, with his father disowned and his mother from the lower class. His early years were marked by family deaths – his father and an older brother. His mother took him and his surviving brother on several journeys to find work. Eventually, Juan entered a school for poor children and later studied humanities under a relatively new order called the Jesuits. 

 

In 1563, he joined the Carmelite order. He was ordained a priest in 1567 and that year met Teresa of Avila, a reformer seeking to return the Carmelites to its original rule. A few years later, he experienced his vision of Christ on the cross and drew a picture of what he’d seen (which would eventually inspire Salvador Dali). The Carmelites were not happy with the reforms of Teresa and John, and in late 1577 he was arrested (essentially kidnapped), taken to Toledo, tried before a court of friars, and sentenced to imprisonment in extremely harsh conditions. He escaped, despite being in poor health. The pope would eventually approve a division of the Carmelites into “old” and “reformed.” John became one of the key leaders of the reformed Carmelites. He died in 1591, was beatified in 1675, and canonized in 1726.

 

His poetry, much of which was written during his imprisonment on paper smuggled in by a guard, is something of a personal odyssey, the sinner in search of God. Rhina Espaillat, translator of The Spring That Feeds the Torrent: Poems by St. John of the Cross, explains: “The theme is the need of the living presence of God, and the lengths to which the soul bereft of that company will go in order to find Him.”

 

Rhina Espaillat

Espaillat is ideally suited for the translation from the original Spanish into English. She is well known for her English-to-Spanish translations of the poetry of Robert Frost and Richard Wilbur and her own poetry chapbooks, essays, and short stories. She’s won many international awards for her work, including the T.S. Eliot Prize in Poetry, the Richard Wilbur Award, the Howard Nemerov Prize, and the May Sarton Award, among others.

 

She says she first read the poems of St. John of the Cross in childhood, and the poems stuck. It’s easy to see why. St. John of the Cross may be a mystic, but, at least in translation, he was a mystic who wrote in very accessible language. His best- known poem is “The Dark Night of the Soul,” describing the soul’s search for light. Here are the first three stanzas of that eight-stanza poem, as translated by Espaillat:

 

One darkest night I went,

Aflame with love’s devouring eager burning—

O delirious event!—

No witnesses discerning,

The house now still from which my steps were turning.

 

Hidden by darkness, bent

on flight, disguised, down secret steps sojourning—

O delirious event!—

Hidden by dark, and yearning,

The house now still from which my steps were turning;

 

In that most blissful night,

in secrecy, since none had seen my going,

nor did I pause for sight,

nor had I light, for showing

the route, but that which in my heart was glowing.

 

The Spring That Feeds the Torrent opens a window, and a door, both a time of religious upheaval and an individual’s search for God. These poems open into the heart of St. John of the Cross, and the humility and simplicity of what we find there is appealing in any age.

 

Top illustration: St. John of the Cross, painting by Francisco de Zurbaran (1598-1664). 

 

Some Monday Readings

 

The Weirdness of Ambrose Bierce: From “Owl Creek Bridge” to Horror and Satire – Anthony Aycock at Reactor Magazine. 

 

What’s My Point? Consider the Pencil – Joel Miller at Miller’s Bok Review.

 

The Prophets: Allan Bloom – Thomas Chatterton Williams at The Free Press.

 

The War on Citizenship – Michael Lind at Tablet Magazine.

 

Puzzle – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

"Lovers at the Museum" by Isabel Allende

A night watchman at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, makes a startling discovery – a young man and woman are asleep in one of the galleries. They’re discovered in front of a metal sculpture entitled “Rising Sea” by the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui. The young man is naked; the young woman is wearing an elaborate bridal gown.  

Inspector Larramendi of the Bilbao police is one the case, except he’s not sure exactly what the case is about. No one knows how the lovers got through the locked doors; the couple say the door was open. They claim they were in the museum throughout the night and never saw a guard. The would-be bride had fled her wedding ceremony, sobbing. She found a young stranger, and the got exceedingly drunk. They both independently claim the museum had suddenly appeared in front of them, like a magician’s trick. 

 

They suspect the museum might be enchanted. Inspector Larramedi, the “Hound of Bilbao,” is inclined to agree. 

 

Isabel Allende

Lovers at the Museum is a new short story by the acclaimed writer Isabel Allende, and the reader will be forgiven for thinking he or she has taken a step into magic realism. This might happen in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Macondo or the Lima of Mario Vargas Llosa (in fact, I was reminded of the telenovelas of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter). The Guggenheim in Bilbao is a real museum, whose architectural style might be called “anti-architecture” or “melted metal.” The sculpture cited in the story is a real metal sculpture, and the inspector can be forgiven for at first thinking it’s a large curtain. 

 

Allende has previously published The House of the Spirits and some 25 other books. Born in Peru, raised in Chile, and now living in California, she founded a charitable foundation after her daughter died in 1996. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014, and the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2018. 

 

Some Monday Readings

 

What’s American Fiction Without the Short Story? – Lincoln Michel at Counter Craft.

 

The Farm Woman Speaks – Gracy Olmstead at Plough Quarterly on the novels of George Eliot.

 

Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative? – Emma Green at The New Yorker.

 

The Prophets: D.A. Henderson – Joe Nocera at The Free Press on how not to fight pandemics.

 

“The Light of the Fireflies” by Paul Pen

On the surface, this appears to be a rather normal family – a father and mother, a grandmother, an adult daughter and son, and a 10-year-old son. They live on an island off the coast of Spain; their home is a no-longer-in-service lighthouse. 

Fairly quickly, however, we come to understand that this family is anything but normal. The three older adults have been horribly burned. The older son is brain-damaged, the result of a fall from the lighthouse stairs when he was a young child. The daughter had just given birth to a son of her own. She wears a mask, ostensibly to hide her disfigurement from fire. The grandmother is blind, an injury from the fire that burned the family. And while the family lives in the lighthouse, their home is the underground part of the lighthouse – and they never go outside. 

The 10-year-old boy, born in the lighthouse, has never been outside his underground home. He has to imagine what “outside” is like. As he’s gotten older, the boy begins to question the family’s situation. Where does their food come from? Who is the “Cricket Man,” the mysterious figure his father says will stuff little boys in his sack and carry them off? Where did his sister’s baby come from? And are the family’s injuries from the fire the real reason they live underground?

A small group of fireflies manages to enter the family’s underground home. The boy captures them in a jar. And they provide the only natural light in the home. The fireflies will eventually help the boy learn that nothing is what appears to be.

Paul Pen

The Light of the Fireflies by Spanish author Paul Pen was a bestseller in Spain and Europe. Pen, a journalist and scriptwriter, is the author of The Warning(made into an American film), Thirteen Stories, and Desert Flower (2017), among other works. Two of his works, including The Light of the Fireflies, have been translated into English by Simon Bruni.

What the boy will learn, and what the novel is ultimately about, is the importance of family and how a family can hold together even in the worst of actions and experiences. The Light of the Fireflies is a haunting work, gradually building questions and suspense to a series shocking revelations and confrontations.

Top photograph by Andrew Bui via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Jaime Manrique’s “Cervantes Street”

It is intriguing to think that at the same time William Shakespeare was writing plays in England, Miguel de Cervantes was writing Don Quixote in Spain. The two of them together transformed Western literature. Cervantes birthed the modern novel, influencing writers from Dickens and Dostoevsky to Garcia Marquez and Milan Kundera.

Before Don Quixote, Cervantes can best be described as an aspiring, and aging, writer, known by some for his poetry and by others for one (largely failed) novel, La Galatea. He had been a secretary to a cardinal in Rome, a soldier, wounded in the naval battle of Lepanto against the Turkish fleet, captured by Algerian pirates and held in Algiers for five years before finally being ransomed, and came home to Spain to fail at many careers. Then he wrote Don Quixote, and Western literature changed.

The book was published in two parts, separated by some years and by a rip-off entitled The Second Volume of the Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote de la Mancha. The rip-off was published under the pseudonym Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda; the real identity has never been determined. The second volume by Cervantes was almost certainly a response to the “false Don Quixote” and an attempt to quash it, which it did.

It is this circumstance – the real and the false Don Quixotes – that novelist, essayist and poet Jaime Manrique uses to create the thoughtful, engaging and extraordinarily well-researched Cervantes Street. The novel is about a great work of literature and how it comes to be written, but it is also about passion, jealousy, rivalry, love and Spain, above all about Spain of the Golden Age, in all its supremacy, wonder and brutality, and the brutality of Spain’s Arabic enemies.

Cervantes Street is a kind of fictionalized biography, but it is also more than that. Some of what Manrique writes is speculation, because there are large gaps in what we know about the life of Cervantes. But enough is known, and much more on the history and culture of the era can be accessed and assimilated. And so Manrique succeeds in what every fiction writer hopes to do – he transports the reader to the time and life of its subject.

The novel is told from three viewpoints – Cervantes himself; his school friend Luis Lara; and Lara’s employee in government service and later personal secretary Pascual Paredes. Cervantes is unaware of the rage and jealousy he’s engendered in his friend; Lara is unaware of the disdain his personal secretary hold him in. Swirled together, it is a story of intrigue and suspense.

In a beginning note to readers, Manrique explains that he has “appropriated” certain scenes from various works by Cervantes, including Don Quixote. This was a common practice in the Golden Age; Cervantes himself “appropriated” scenes and materials from his own life and even the work of the “false” Don Quixote. This “appropriation” is not a wholesale borrowing or a kind of “inspired lifting” by Manrique, who shapes the scenes to fit his story.

Cervantes Street is inspired reading, resulting from inspired writing. It tells the story of a great author in his time, and helps us see ourselves in our own time.

Arturo Perez-Reverte’s “Pirates of the Levant”

I will have to admit up front that Arturo Perez-Reverte is one of my favorite authors. Years back, I discovered him accidentally by looking for a novel by mystery write Anne Perry – and Perez-Reverte was right next door (it was a Barnes & Noble, in case you’re interested). The novel I picked up was The Flanders Panel. I bought it and read it, and returned to the bookstore to find everything else I could be the author. Then I went to Amazon to find whatever the bookstore didn’t have.

Then Perez-Reverte began a series about Captain Diego Alatriste and his sidekick, young Inigo Balboa (who is also writing the tales as an old man long after the events). The books are set in 17th century Spain, and they are full of swordfights and romance and palace intrigue and suspense and loads of history about the period.

Pirates of the Levant is the sixth of the Alatriste novels. And it is decidedly different from its predecessors, in that there is no overarching story that frames all of the events and actions. (In The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet, for example, the overarching story is the rivalry between Alatriste and the king of Spain for the attention of the same actress; it tells you a lot about Alatriste that he knows you don’t compete with the king of Spain but stays involved anyway.)

Instead, what Arturo-Perez does in Pirates is to draw a series of stories about Spanish ships patrolling the Mediterranean, fighting pirates and Moors. Alatriste and Balboa are aboard one such galley, and the reader experiences the seagoing life (including that of the galley slaves who man the oars) with the prodigious research the author brings to the each book. The story culminates in a sea battle that looks impossible to win, or even survive.

The point here is what constituted military life at sea during the period. Far from the court intrigues of Madrid, Alatriste and Balboa move from one battle to another, one encounter to another, punctuated by the occasional serious conflict but mostly experiencing a kind of sameness, like life upon the sea is often depicted.

Pirates of the Levant is still a good story, but it is a different kind of story than Perez-Reverte has told before. But it does have all of the richness and historical detail one expects from his fine and entertaining novels.