Inside Job

Translating St. Teresa’s “Soul, Seek Yourself”

by Dana Delibovi

It was the Spring 2019, a tender, fragrant time in here the Mississippi Valley. I sat quietly at my desk. I had just retired from four decades in advertising. I had long-harbored a retirement plan to improve my Spanish, the language I had studied in high school. Sitting there, I thought I might start by translating. Online, I stumbled on the poems St. Teresa of Ávila on the fantastic site, Cuidad Seva. Teresa was a writer whose prose I liked when I was young, but I had no idea she wrote poetry, too. I was drawn to Teresa’s poem “Alma buscarte has en mí”—“Soul, Seek Yourself in Me.” And what at first seemed accidental came to feel intuitive. Translating a poem dedicated to soul-searching, I discovered that to translate is to search the soul.

Searching for St. Teresa

Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) was a seeker, within herself and within her culture. as well. In a time and place of unmitigated patriarchy—Siglo de Oro Spain—she led a reform of the Carmelite religious order and founded 14 new convents, traveling around Spain with the impunity of men and collaborating with a younger male cleric, St. John of the Cross. She wrote and published three books of philosophy and theology, a memoir (La vida), and a slew of essays, poems, meditations, and letters—all in her famously conversational style. Through it all, she admitted to mystical visions, some of them with erotic metaphors, much to the discomfort of the Spanish Inquisition, which investigated Teresa at least five times.

In many cases, women who write come to Teresa as much from personal as from literary interest. This is certainly true of accomplished writers Julia Kristeva, Ester Borrego Gutiérrez, Kathleen Medwick, Barbara Mujica, Mirabai Starr, Tessa Bielecki, and Jodi Bilinkoff, who confess a love for the saint that is human and jealous, occurring apart from any religious faith. This is vividly captured by Kristeva, in her book Teresa My Love [Therese Mon Amour]: “I’m not sharing my saint with anyone. I’m keeping her all to myself. She will be the roommate of my submarine nights, her name is Teresa of Ávila.” A personal need for Teresa’s example and ideas also drove me, years ago, to her prose. I first studied Teresa’s theories of personhood and self-knowledge in a college philosophy class. But I really dug into her work about 15 years later, at a time in my life when I was casting about for the spiritual guidance I had firmly rejected as an undergraduate.

As a result, translating Teresa’s poems felt to me like a natural, organic process. While I was in the midst of my project, a friend asked me why I was translating Teresa’s work. I couldn’t give a reason, except to say I wanted to improve my Spanish, started translating, and kept on going. I had no special training and was years away from any kind of academic network. All I had was more time—not only had I retired, but my kids were headed to college. The translations arose as one way to fill my time.

Now, five years since I began, with the sharp focus of hindsight, I believe there was more to it. I think I began to translate to facilitate introspection in the period of drift that accompanies retirement and an empty nest. Teresa’s writing in both prose and poetry emphasizes a spiritual practice of meditation and prayer that’s really and “inside job”: the soul journeys inward, entering itself to find the divinity within. It is certainly possible to see Teresa’s work as a template for the secular idea of self-discovery, in which the consciousness that defines the self is the very thing that understands the self by turning inward.

Searching Within

If there is one poem that captures Teresa’s thinking on the soul’s search within itself, it is the one that grabbed me early: “Soul, Seek Yourself in Me.” This poem—written with delightful immodesty in the voice of God—charts the soul’s contortions as it travels into itself. For Teresa, the journey inward leads to discovery of oneself and God, whose presence, she believed, is immanent within each soul. Her view is summarized in the poem’s refrain, “Soul, seek yourself in me/and through me, seek me in yourself.”

Each of the poem’s stanzas unpacks a different aspect of the soul’s search for itself, and simultaneously, God. The process described is spiritual “chicken and egg”: To find God, you have to find yourself; to find yourself, you have to find God:

This poem is important to soul-searchers for another reason. It creates a verse synopsis of Teresa’s philosophical masterwork, “Las moradas o castillo interior [Interior Castle].” Not many writers can claim that they developed a poem into a book, or vice versa.

While it is impossible to date “Soul, Seek Yourself in Me,” we can date Interior Castle to 1577, and have epistolary evidence that Teresa was engaged in writing poetry at the same time. In Interior Castle, Teresa sets forth her core principle with this metaphor, as translated by E. Allison Peers: “I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in Heaven there are many mansions.” The remainder of the book describes the journey of the searching soul into itself, through seven, ever more recessed “mansions” or rooms. Moving though the rooms, the soul discovers precepts of Teresa’s philosophy, such as the pivotal role of humility and detachment in a good life, meaning of the “love they neighbor as thyself,” personal identity, and the intellectual and intuitive love of God—this last precept akin to the more fully formed concepts of two philosophers who came on Teresa’s heels: Descartes (1596–1650) and Spinoza (1632–1677).

In the seventh and last room, the seeker finds God’s abode, the place where God lives within us. Teresa put thus concept in God’s mouth , in the penultimate stanza of “Soul, Seek Yourself in Me.”

Soul—in Translation

The text of Teresa’s poem encouraged me to search my soul, to seek meaning within myself now that the outward-directed days of career and child-rearing had come to a close. I began to notice that how far I was from believing I was “crafted in love” and dear to the divine; instead, I was lonely and believed myself a nuisance to others. I began to see that my thoughts were often a bolted door, that I could be rigid and unwilling to experiment. I wanted to change, and found even more things to change once I had translated all 31 of Teresa’s poems.

But the content of the poetry was not my only impetus. The very process of translation proved to be an act of soul-searching  in its own right. I couldn’t translate a line without checking my motives. Was I translating in a certain way to disguise my ignorance of history or to compensate for my weakness in Spanish? To put the question morally: Was I lying to myself, and preparing to lie to any readers I might have? Was I respecting the original or engaging in cultural appropriation? The act converting literature in another’s language to one’s own, no matter how you slice it, may always be transgressive to some degree. But to the full extent possible, was I being fair to Teresa and her culture? Was I working in humility, as a steward of her poems, and not stealing her work to make myself look good?

The soul-searching inspired by translation prompted me to search for other translators’ experience. The poet and translator Richard Howard said, when translating, “you learn something about the person that you’re working with in an almost plastic, physical way that you can almost never learn about your friends.” I sensed that kind of intimacy as I worked with Teresa’s poetry; in time, Teresa was a felt presence in my life. I also noticed it’s a two-way street: you also learn things about yourself in a “plastic, physical way.” Some of these things were mundane. I found out I love the sound of the word “delight” so much, I had to stay my hand from using it for every variant of happiness in the poetry . Some were academic—turns out that hymn meter is stuck in my ears like Gorilla Glue.  And some are rich and emotional. Teresa’s conversational tone sounds like my grandmother. Translating it has brought up so many wise and funny things she said, and her rebellious brand of Catholicism—a reminder that a great soul doesn’t always play by the rules.

Walter Benjamin, in the essay “The Task of the Translator,” suggests that the translation of poetry differs from wring poetry because it is a more reflective, ideational act. Translators listen within for the “echo of the original” in their own language, seeking the word, the sound, the trope, or the cultural reference from their linguistic world that captures the world of the artist’s original. The goal is not accuracy, not “the sterile equation” of two vocabularies. The goal is to continue the vitality of literary works and to express the kinship of languages and cultures.

Achieving that goal requires translators to dive deep within, something I experienced in working with Teresa’s poems. I had to hear sounds of my thought-stream, puzzle out what language in 21^st century America chimes with the language of 16^th century Spain, chastise myself for taking the easy, literal way. In my translation of “Soul, Seek Yourself in Me,” I struggled mightily when Teresa’s God counsels “En mis entrañas pintada,/Si te perdieres,” which literally means: “In my painted bowels, if you will get lost.” I wanted to capture this in modern English vernacular, but still wanted to preserve the idea that Gods innards are painted, a vivid image lost in some 19^th and 20^th century translations. Finding the translation lead me to reflect on all kinds “insides,” until I finally hit upon the caves of my home state of Missouri. Hence: “If you get lost inside my tinted caverns.”

In a 2022 issue of Cable Street, translator Nandana Dev Sen declared that “translation is a personal journey.” The depth of Dev Sen’s insight is clearer to me than ever. I took a personal journey with Teresa of Ávila’s poetry—an expedition within myself. I translated and searched my soul, where I found loneliness, dishonesty, a love for my grandmother, and the river of sound that is my native language. I want to journey on.

Notes to the text

For further reading on Teresa and the Spanish Inquisition, see Gillian T. W. Ahlgren, Teresa of Ávila and the Politics of Sanctity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 33; Bárbara Mujica, “Skepticism and Mysticism in Early Modern Spain: The Combative Stance of Teresa of Ávila,” in Women in the Discourse of Early Modern Spain, ed. Joan F. Cammarata (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003), 69–71; and Alison Weber, Teresa of Ávila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 79–99.

Quotations from Julia Kristeva, E. Allison Peers, Richard Howard, and Walter Benjamin appear respectively in: Julia Kristeva, Teresa My Love, trans., Lorna Scott Fox (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 7; Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, trans., E. Allison Peers (New York, NY:  Image Books, 1961 ), 28; “Richard Howard,” Poetry Foundation. Available at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/richard-howard. Accessed January 27, 2024; Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans., Harry Zohn, digital edition (Boston, MA: Mariner Books, 2019), 16, 18.

The complete Spanish original and English translation of “Soul, Seek Yourself in Me,” was first published in U.S. Catholic—Teresa of Ávila, “Soul, Seek Yourself in Me/Alma buscarte has en mí,” trans., Dana Delibovi, U.S. Catholic 87, no. 9 (2022), 15. It is also forthcoming in Teresa of Ávila, Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Teresa of Avila, translated and with commentary by Dana Delibovi, Monkfish Book Publishing, 2024.

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