The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage

...musical. Whether he could ever properly speak Dutch? He often fumbles about anxiously like a blind man and likely knew Catholic dogma only from books, not from personal experience. But Lambert performed pioneering work. He was the first to translate Ruysbroeck’s The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage and two smaller writings, The Sparkling Stone and the Little Book of Supreme Truth original: "Büchlein von der höchsten Wahrheit"; often titled "The Book of Enlightenment" in English, from the original text into German. This distinction cannot be taken away from him.

I had barely completed the first version of The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage when a beautifully bound edition of this work, translated by Friedrich Markus Huebner, was published by Insel-Verlag A prestigious German publishing house known for its high aesthetic standards and "Insel-Bücherei" series. I was already familiar with his translation of a fragment from Ruysbroeck’s The Twelve Beguines A work describing the contemplative life, named after the Beguines, a lay religious community of women in the Low Countries, which had also been published by Insel-Verlag. In the meantime, I had received the edition of Ruysbroeck’s complete works in the original text published by the "Society of Flemish Bibliophiles" original: "Maatschappij der Vlaemsche Bibliophilen"; a scholarly society dedicated to preserving Flemish literature (prepared by the Leuven professor J. B. David [died 1866]) and I had once again acquired Maeterlinck’s Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), a Belgian Symbolist author and Nobel laureate whose French translations helped popularize Ruysbroeck translation of The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, as well as a Dutch translation of this work by Dr. Franz Erens. Now I began my work anew, comparing the individual texts with my own translation. In Huebner’s version, I often found a better word or the occasional better sentence, but also passages that are clearly incorrect, though not to the same degree or in such large numbers as in his Twelve Beguines. It is simply impossible to translate Ruysbroeck correctly if—