The Twelve Indescribable Hours of Divine Love
Letter Twenty (Twingiste Brief)
Notes on the Text
If you intend to quote or cite this translation - particularly for assessed coursework - you need to be aware of how this differs from the conventional translation. The conventional rendition into English is entitled “The Twelve Unspeakable Hours of Love”. When I first posted a text here, in 2001, I followed that standard, but I was never really happy with it, because it doesn’t, for me, convey the whole concept. You can read my philosophy in hte notes to Beatrijs of Nazareth's "Seven Ways", so I won't repeat it here, but in hte case of this text there were three other problems:
First, I looked at ‘unspeakable’. The original word is 'onghenoemde' (onbenoembare and other variations in modern Dutch), which is "something too big or too complex to have a name". So 'unspeakable' would be a good translation if it didn't carry a lot of baggage - in the English vernacular, it's almost always negative. 'Unnameable' or 'unknowable' are a little better, but in the end I settled on 'indescribable' because that can equally well be positive or negative.
Then I looked at 'love'. The word used by Hadewijch is 'Minne', and she uses it in various ways in different texts: possibly her ideas changed over time. Sometimes it's an actual being - Lady Love, because Minne is a feminine noun - and sometimes it's an abstract concept somewhat like union with the divine. Occasionally she describes it in terms very much like physical union, which can be read as profoundly erotic, as with, say, Canticles (Song of Songs, Song of Solomon). 'Holy Love', as in my translation of Beatrijs’ work, would be a good term, but I settled on 'Divine Love; because although they're similar, I don't see the two writers' concepts as being identical. As to how abstract Hadewijch’s 'Minne' is in this letter, I leave that decision to the reader.
Finally, I tackled ‘hours’. The standard translation has each segment start "In the n'th unspeakable hour...', and I suspect that's because doing anything else poses a problem. But not all the sections actually start that way. Hadewijch sometimes uses the explicit '[u]ur[en]', but at other times she uses 'period[en]'. This cannot be sloppy writing, so I wanted to differentiate. The options for time periods other than 'uuren' are the literal 'period', or 'time'. or 'stage'. In fact 'stage' is probably more accurate, but as you'll see I went for 'time'. The decider for me was what is conventionally the 'second hour'. The standard rendition is something like "In the second unspeakable hour ... the soul ... has barely moved from the first to the second hour.". My version runs "During another indescribable [time/stage] Divine Love kills the soul ... having only just arrived in the second hour from the first." Hadewijch uses the 'first hour' at the end to convey the concept of 'stage', so I've translated 'period' as 'time', unless only 'stage' makes sense; the reader should bear in mind that my choice was mostly arbitrary.
It was tempting to replace 'God' with 'the divine', but Hadwijch is explicit in this case, so I left those references. However, I think it probable that she means the divine element of what I have translated as 'Divine Love'.
I've had a lot of help from varuious people in the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK and the US and I thank them all. Any errors are, of course, my own, and if you disagree with any of the text, feel free to email me and complain. Thanks for reading this. Now you can close this window or tab to get back to the text.