It remains now to say a word about the different translations of Ruysbroeck’s work. Twenty years ago, Ernest Hello, who, with Villiers de l’Isle Adam and Stéphane Mallarmé, is the greatest French mystic of our time, published a brief volume in which he collected under headings, chosen mostly as his fancy dictated, various passages of our author, translated from a Latin translation written in the sixteenth century by Laurentius Surius, a Carthusian monk of Cologne. This translation of Surius, noble and subtle in its Latinity, gives with strict and admirable care the sense of the original; but with its over-anxiety, its prolixity, and its weakness, it resembles, when we contrast with it the crude colours of the original Flemish, some distant image seen through sullied panes. When his author uses one word, Surius generally employs two or three, and even then, still dissatisfied, he very often paraphrases once more that which he has already translated in full. The hermit utters cries of love so passionate that they are sometimes almost like blasphemies; Surius is frightened as he reads them and sets down something different. There are times when the old hermit looks outside himself, and in speaking of God searches for images drawn from the garden, the kitchen, or from the stars. Surius does not always venture to follow these flights, and he tries to weaken the meaning or flatters himself that he is ennobling it.
“He escapes me like a truant,”
says one of the Flemish Beguines in speaking of Jesus, and others add:—
“Christ and I keep house together,
He is mine, I His;
Night and day His love outwears me;
He my heart hath stolen;
In His mouth He holds me,
What care have I outside!”
Elsewhere God says to man:—