Dark Night
Poems and Selected Prose
John of the Cross author Martha Sprackland translator Dr Colin Thompson editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd
Published:21st May '26
Should be back in stock very soon
The major devotional work by one of the greatest Christian mystics and Spanish poets
The profound, hugely influential exploration of spiritual growth and transformation, from one of the great Spanish mystics and poets
‘Oh living flame of love,
how tenderly you scorch me’
The poetry of the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, St John of the Cross, has inspired and consoled for hundreds of years, influencing writers from James Joyce to Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill to T. S. Eliot. This new edition of his essential works, in a sensitive and luminous translation by Martha Sprackland, gathers John of the Cross’s complete poems and a selection of his prose, including from his extended commentary on the poem ‘Dark Night’. In his immediate, sensual writing, we see a soul searching for meaning and union with the divine: both meek and bold, deserving and undeserving, oscillating between light and dark, soaring and falling, desperation and salvation. Dark Night gives us a picture of faith at once confronting and inspiriting, and of the power of words as a means of spiritual transcendence.
Translated by Martha Sprackland, with an Introduction by Colin Thompson
Sprackland’s new translation is both provocative and timely … In her consciously poeticising yet conscientious versions, the works themselves retain all the strangeness and burn that attracted TS Eliot and Salvador Dalí, Thomas Merton and Pope John Paul II -- Fiona Sampson * Guardian *
Sprackland's ear is particularly alive to movement and music ... the result is a St John of the Cross who feels neither embalmed nor modernised, but newly legible. This translation doesn't simply carry the poems across languages; it reanimates them -- Leo Boix * Poetry Book Society Bulletin *
[A] vibrant, moving and exciting translation ... [Sprackland's] St. John surpasses earlier efforts ... This is the ideal book for those coming for the first time to St John’s works, but it is much more than that. It will make an excellent travelling companion for the spiritual journey, in which the fire and music of the poetry and the short challenging words of the spiritual aphorisms mutually illuminate and enrich each other -- Earl Collins, Diocese of Chichester * Irish Theological Quarterly *
Dark Night is a real achievement. The poetry is sleek and stylish, the endnotes are erudite yet approachable, to say nothing of the well-handled selections from John’s prose commentaries. With clarity and colour, Sprackland’s brilliant new translations drop us headlong into John’s mysterious world * The Little Review *
ISBN: 9780241699294
Dimensions: 198mm x 128mm x 15mm
Weight: 168g
224 pages