Juan de la Cruz
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 very 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 ind 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