Is saintly sexy? Yes, if Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s famous Italian Baroque sculpture The Ecstasy of St. Teresa is to be believed. Depicted in white marble, the young nun swoons with her head flung back, eyes half-closed, mouth open, as an angel aims a golden-tipped arrow at her heart. Completing it in 1652, Bernini tried to remain faithful to Teresa’s own description of her heaven-sent rapture: “It seemed to me that this angel plunged the dart several times into my heart and that it reached deep within me. When he drew it out, I thought he was carrying off with him the deepest part of me; and he left me all on fire with great love of God. The pain was so great that it made me moan.”

The sculpture is housed in the Cornaro Chapel of Rome’s Santa Maria della Vittoria Church, the middle section of an altarpiece. The walls on either side feature busts, also in white marble, of the Cornaro men scrutinizing the scene from theater boxes, as if watching a performance. They lend a shocking, voyeuristic element to what was, in reality, a middle-aged abbess’s shattering experience of divinity. One wonders: What would the saint make of her male spectators? 

Aside from being a visionary, Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) was a tireless religious reformer, the first woman of only four to be named a Doctor of the Church, and a prolific writer. The Life of Teresa of Jesus, The Interior Castle, and The Way of Perfection were written, in part, to explicate her mystical experiences to the Inquisition, who investigated her five times (no charges resulted). She also wrote poetry, like her Carmelite protégé St. John of the Cross. But unlike John’s highly symbolic verses on apophatic theology (also known as the “via negativa” or “negative way”), Teresa’s were written in plain language, intended to be readily understood. This openness and generosity guides Dana Delibovi’s sensitive new free-verse translation—the first by a woman of the saint’s poetry—Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Teresa of Ávila.

In the introduction, Delibovi—a poet herself—discusses Teresa’s insistence on vernacular language to elucidate spiritual concepts and transcendent experiences:

The mystical and the practical, as different as they may seem, are united in Teresa’s life and work. Moreover, for Teresa both the mystical and the practical are concrete, tangible experiences.... She prefers words and images that are experiential rather than conceptual, a preference congruent to the expressions of concrete mystical and practical experience that motivate her poetry.

Delibovi’s straightforward, but still lyrical, translation of “At the Vows of Isabel de Los Ángeles” makes that paradoxical unity accessible:

Place my love within storms

and my gift inside the wound;

put my life within death,

and my favor, in contempt.

Her free-verse adaptation gives energy to the regular ABBA enclosed rhyme structure of the original:

Entre borrascas mi amor,

Y mi regalo en la herida,

Esté en la muerte mi vida,

Y en desprecios mi favor.

As Delibovi also notes in the introduction, these are the words of a “visionary with her feet on the ground.” Shoeless feet, to boot: Teresa founded seventeen Discalced Carmelite convents in twenty years (“discalced” from the Latin “without shoes,” reflecting her intention to restore the order to its original austerity). It’s difficult to imagine how this woman got so much done, considering she suffered from mysterious ailments, including perhaps epilepsy. I emailed Delibovi to ask how Teresa’s attempts to function despite illness (and transpiercing) informed her life and writing.

“We really don’t know the exact illness(es) Teresa suffered,” she wrote back.

Cathleen Medwick, in her wonderful biography Teresa of Ávila: The Progress of a Soul (Random House, 2001), describes the saint as having multiple maladies commensurate with a seizure disorder. My feeling is that she was just a person with a lot of illnesses, who wanted to become strong enough to work.

She succeeded. The strength of her poetry comes from how its structures buttress her language and imagery. Her use of the popular medieval Spanish poetic form villancico gives her work a backbone. Found in Spanish Christmas carols (villancicos navideños), the form is characterized by a two-line refrain called an estribillo at the end of each stanza. In “Follow the Kings,” Delibovi switches out the original title, “En la festividad de los Santos Reyes,” for the first line of the more descriptive estribillo. The translation itself is direct, hearty:

Let’s all go together

to see the Messiah,

to see the fulfillment

of prophesies.

Yes, in our time now,

the star has come—

Follow the Kings,

my flock.

 

*

 

Vamos todas juntas

A ver el Mesías,

Pues vemos cumplidas

Y las profecías.

Pues en nuestros días,

Es ya llegada—

Vaya con los Reyes

La mi manada

In these poems, shepherds present at the birth of Jesus banter with each other in down-to-earth parlance about what they are witnessing. In the section preface to these works, Delibovi notes that Teresa’s seven poems about the Nativity posed the biggest translation challenge because of the saint’s insistence on vernacular. But Delibovi has expertly rendered these ordinary voices from long ago into (as she notes in that preface) “theology made accessible to all of God’s people”—as Teresa herself intended. Her intuitive skills can be seen most vividly in “About Those Words, ‘My Beloved Is Mine,’” wherein Teresa describes the experience that Bernini later portrayed:

When the sweet Hunter

shot me and left me wounded,

when my soul lay panting

in those tender arms...

 

He pierced me with an arrow

smeared with the poison of love,

and my soul succumbed

to be one with its Creator. 

Aside from the metaphorical portrayal of Christ as a hunter, the rest of the description is realistic, visceral, no holds barred. Alternating stanzas end with lines that echo the Song of Solomon: “My love belongs to me, and I to him.” The title of the poem (the same in Spanish and English) feels like an aside made directly to readers about how those words specifically refer to Teresa and her love. 

There is an amusing hagiographic account of the saint getting caught in a downpour—or a muddy river, depending on the teller—and complaining to God about her misfortune. God answers, “But this is how I treat all my friends,” to which his faithful but exasperated interlocutor claps back, “That’s why you have so few.”

I asked Delibovi if that sprightly, no-nonsense quality might be the correct prism through which to read and understand Teresa’s poetry, rather than the moonlit mists of transcendent sensuality. “I cautiously suggest that Teresa has something to teach us about how our sexuality sublimates into our spirituality,” she answered. “Not in a reductionist analysis that spirituality is ‘really just’ sexuality, but in the sense that, as life goes on, the impulse of love (eros) may turn more and more toward love of the divine.”

This fresh, contemporary translation is likewise not a reductionist analysis, but a devotional offering that makes the saint’s words into believable, even teachable moments. Reading these poems makes me think that if Teresa could give us her opinion about those Cornaro men ogling her, it might be, “At least I’m making theology accessible.” 

Sweet Hunter
The Complete Poems of St. Teresa of Ávila (Bilingual Edition)
Translated by Dana Delibovi
Monkfish Publishing
$22.99 | 160 pp.