By Zihan Zhang
In his debut novel Declaración de las canciones oscuras (2019), the Mexican poet and critic Luis Felipe Fabre tells a story of the translation of relics of St. John of the Cross ( Juan de la Cruz), the great sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite mystic and friar. It is a historical fiction and road novel that is bawdy and poetic, dark yet light, weaving allusions to Greek mythology and articulating literary criticism through the voices of its characters. The novel is now available in English as Recital of the Dark Verses (2023) in Heather Cleary’s exquisite translation that preserves the uniqueness of the novel and simultaneously ensures its readability in English.
This novel skillfully explores the blurred lines between the sacred and the profane. In 1592, half a year after St. John’s death, a bailiff and his two assistants, Ferrán and Diego, are hired to transport the body of St. John from Úbeda to Segovia. The journey of the secret transfer is long and challenging. The exhumed body of St. John in the transport chest emanates aromas, tempting people to steal his sacred remains. During their adventure, the trio encounters various perils related to the theft of the relic, including the fervent townsfolk from Úbeda who kidnap the trio in an attempt to take the saint’s body, sinister shepherds who feign hospitality, and a disguised thief pretending to be blind. Fabre pays homage to the great Spanish mystic poet by weaving St. John’s verses from “On a Dark Night,” “Love’s Living Flame,” and “Spiritual Canticle” into the novel’s structure, seamlessly intertwining the poetry with the plot.
In this novel, the blurred boundary between the sacred and the profane revolves around the body. People’s religious fervor is materialized in their desire for the body of St. John. It is a body that is both sacred and profane, attesting to the mortality of human beings while claiming a more transcendental status than common folk. For example, when exhumed, the sores on St. John’s legs and feet still bleed and exude water – a stark reminder of the very humanness of this body. Yet it is also beyond an average corpse: his supposedly repugnant bodily fluid is taken by many as the “celestial perfume” and “the scent of saintliness,” stirring in the townsfolk in Úbeda a strange yearning.
The theme of the body persists as the trio travels and encounters a band of shepherds intent on deceiving them. Among them is a mute shepherdess called Philomela, a character borrowed from Greek mythology. In the myth, Philomela’s sister’s husband, Tereus, rapes her and mutilates her tongue to hide his crime. Similarly, Philomela the shepherdess suffers a violent loss of her tongue from being accused of heresy or witchcraft. Forced by another shepherd, Fabio, to perform an impossible song in front of the three guests, she becomes an object of curiosity and is shamed for her muteness. As Fabre puts it, “the mute was mute twice over” (88). Simultaneously, Diego develops feelings for Philomela. During a kiss, Philomela reenacts the violence inflicted upon her, sinking her teeth in Diego’s tongue so forcefully that it bleeds. This dramatic act of revenge merges the brutality of violence with the purity of love. It is a carnal revenge, where the victim becomes mute and helpless inside Philomela’s mouth. Yet, it is also portrayed as an ineffable experience of ultimate union with her lover. Fabre vividly illustrates Diego’s pain and gradual loss of consciousness in the following passage:
And so it was that in order to rid himself of Philomela, Diego needed to rid himself of himself: to rid himself of Philomela he needed to rid himself of his tongue and thereby become Philomela, himself… he felt himself fade, and yet in this blackness he believed he heard a voice or the ghost of a voice sing or hum or whisper, wordless, “Oh night! You that united Beloved with his lover yon.” (90)
Here, Diego tries to break free from Philomela’s mouth but in vain, for he becomes one with her. To disentangle from Philomela is to be rid of his tongue or himself, or to become Philomela. This seemingly muddled and repetitive language not only mirrors the unconscious state of Diego but also aligns with the overarching linguistic style of the novel: unstrained, boundless, and overflowing. When Diego almost loses consciousness, he recalls St. John’s verse from “On a Dark Night,” which narrates the journey of a soul to reach a mystical union with God. This union described in John’s sensual verses is characteristic of the medieval and early modern mystics: a passive surrender of oneself to God’s love, erasing the concept of self entirely.1 See, for example, the Spanish Carmelite mystic Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) and the Italian mystic Cartherine of Genoa (1447-1510).
Thus, a parallel emerges: a violent kiss between a mute shepherdess and an assistant mirrors a spiritual union between God and the revered Spanish mystic. The profane becomes sacred, and the sacred is intimately tied to the physical and the profane.
The profane not only parallels the sacred but also offers an interpretation of it. In the few times when Ferrán and Diego discuss the meaning of the friar’s poetry, they conclude that the verses of the friar are akin to his moaning in the manner of a woman with a man. They suggest that the poem serves as evidence not of sainthood but rather “a laxation of vows or perhaps even sodomy” (67). Fabre doesn’t appear inclined to correct this blasphemous view, recognizing that the mystic tradition has consistently embraced the senses, the humanity of God, and physicality, rather than simply a removal from the earthly realm.2See Caroline Walker Bynum’s works Holy Feast and Holy Fast (1987) and Fragmentation and Redemption (1991).
In fact, at one point Fabre offers insights into how one should interpret St. John’s poetry, imparting his literary commentary through the voice of a character, Ana de Jesús. Ana de Jesús, a Carmelite nun and a great friend of John, asks Ferrán and Diego the meaning of the thirty-sixth verse of the “Canticle.” Ferrán and Diego, feeling embarrassed by their inability to grasp the verse, respond hesitantly:
“I know not, Your Reverence.”
“Precisely! Those were his exact words! I know not, Your Reverence, was how Fray Juan replied when I asked him what secret tidings, what sweet explanations, what fond mysteries and truths were in his loving phrases and poems contained. And do you know what he said next?”
“What did he say, Your Reverence?”
“Nothing.” (160-161)
Fabre seems to suggest that the essence of St. John’s mystical theology lies in its ineffability. To read and comprehend St. John’s mystical poetry is not an exercise for the mind but an invitation to employ one’s senses and emotions.
Lastly and importantly, I would like to note that the complexity of the language and ideas of Fabre’s prose would not have been so effectively preserved without Heather Cleary’s skillful translation. As Cleary explains in the introduction of the novel, Fabre’s Spanish prose uses “archaic verb forms and syntax… specifically, the gesture of attaching pronouns to the end of conjugated verbs (11) to give the text a Golden Age flair. These specific tools were not available in English. Consequently, she decided to experiment with word order, an antiquated past tense, and making selective lexical choices to achieve comparable results (11). For instance, consider a sentence portraying the fervor of people of all professions for the saint’s body:
| Fabre’s original: “Llegáronse con sus sierras los carpinteros y con sus tijeras las costureras y con sus alfileres las grandes señores y con sus navajas los barberos llegaron.” (14) | Heather Cleary: “With their saws arrived the carpenters, and with their clippers the seamstresses, and with their needles the noblewomen, and with their razors the barbers did arrive.” (26) |
In Fabre’s original, the preterite tense of llegar ‘to arrive’ appears twice, with the first one in the form, llegáronse, with the enclitic reflexive pronoun, characteristic of Early Modern Spanish, and the second one, llegaron, without the reflexive pronoun, the form used in Modern Spanish. Cleary’s translation preserves the repetition of “arrive” in the preterite tense and the original’s word order where objects come before professions (with…the…). Yet to make the English prose more readable, she disrupts the original word order in the first clause by not placing the first “arrived” in the beginning like Fabre did. Additionally, given that English lacks an archaizing form like llegáronse, Heather employs “did arrive” along with “arrived” to replicate the morphological diversity found in the original text and to impart an archaic feel.
Cleary’s elegant translation not only preserves Fabre’s poetic brilliance but also stands as a work of art in its own right. Recital of the Dark Verses, in its profound exploration of the sacred and the profane, would appeal to a wide audience – from those fascinated by Spanish mysticism and the works of John of the Cross to individuals seeking the simple pleasure of a humorous road novel.
Fabre, Luis Felipe. Recital of the Dark Verses. Translated by Heather Cleary. Deep Vellum Publishing, 2023.
Fabre, Luis Felipe. Declaración de las canciones oscuras. Editorial Sexto Piso, 2021.
Zihan Zhang is an MA student in Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. She is interested in the intersection between religion, literature, and philosophy and and works with texts in Chinese, German, and Spanish.