“I will be thy nourishment,
Thy host and thy cook.
My flesh was well roasted
On the cross for love of thee.
Shalt eat and drink with Me.”
The translator is terrified and changes these astonishing flights
into pale circumlocutions. The wild and simple air, the vast and
savage love of the original work, most frequently disappear in a wise,
correct, copious, and monotonous conventual phraseology; the fidelity
to the meaning remaining all the while exact. It was fragments of this
translation which Ernest Hello translated in his turn, or rather, he
gathered together in chapters arranged by himself, phrases taken from
different portions of the work, and disfigured by a double translation.
He thus formed a kind of anthology, admirable in its way, almost
entirely consecutive; but in which, in spite of careful searching, I
have been unable to find more than three or four passages reproduced in
their entirety.
As for the present translation, its one merit is its literal
exactitude. I might perhaps have been able to make it, if not more
elegant, at least more readable, and to improve the work a little from
the point of view of theological and metaphysical terminology. But
it seemed to me less dangerous and more loyal to confine myself to
an almost blind word-for-word translation. I have also resisted the
inevitable temptation to introduce unfaithful splendours, for the mind
of the old monk is constantly touching upon strange beauties, which
his discretion does not awake, and all his paths are peopled with
lovely sleeping dreams, whose slumber his humility does not venture to
disturb.