Our book of the week is our Summer 2026 Translation Choice: Dark Night by John of the Cross, translated by Martha Sprackland, and with an introduction by Colin Thompson.
PBS Selector Leo Boix describes reading John of the Cross as "entering a poetry of extremity: sensuous, nocturnal, and charged with biblical imagery". The poetry of the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic has inspired and consoled for hundreds of years, influencing writers from James Joyce to Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill to T.S. Eliot and Mary Oppen. This new edition of his essential works, in a sensitive and luminous translation by Martha Sprackland, gathers John of the Cross’s complete poems and a selection of his prose, including from his extended commentary on the poem ‘Dark Night’.
"Sprackland’s ear is particularly alive to movement and music ... This translation doesn’t simply carry the poems across languages; it reanimates them." — Leo Boix, PBS Selector
Order Dark Night here, with 25% off for PBS members.