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# Russian translations of Robert Southwell's poems and his Christmas poem “The Burning Babe”
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/u-menia-est-naivnoe-no-vpolne-ispolnimoe-zhelanie-chtoby-nakonets-to-izdali-khoroshie-nastoiashchie-perevody-angliiskogo-poeta-i-sviatogo-roberta-sautvella-na-russkii-iazyk/
- Published: 2020-12-29T09:56:35.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T19:04:33.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Faith, Books, Observations, People

I have a naive but perfectly achievable wish: that good, true translations of the English poet and saint Robert Southwell might at last be published in Russian. It is hard to find an author who describes the Christian universe so eloquently and uplifts the spirit so, or who conveys metaphysical ideas with such inspiration. The first thing that struck me in Southwell's poetry, long ago, was an analogy quite unthinkable for the sixteenth century: the human mind as the creator of the universe, and the human soul as a divine power, the very thing that makes man a likeness of God. But the most vivid and metaphorical of all seem to me the Christmas poems of the Jesuit poet, and my favourite among them, somehow the guiding star of my whole life, is the poem “The Burning Babe”. Anyone who stands alone on a frosty night before the cold and the adversities of this world needs suddenly to feel a warmth that sets the heart aflame. And ideally, of course, to see in the sky that wondrous, wholly guiltless burning Babe, his breast laid open in flame, extinguishing with his tears the blaze of defiled human souls.