Semantics and Aesthetics. Juan de la Cruz: Poetry and Translation

The Nietzschean notion that the artist perceives as content what nonartists call "form" is argued to be the only valid perspective for the study of language, as the reader of a text must learn to seek what is expressly left unsaid, ie, the contrast between the explicit & the implicit. To show that the commonly used linguistic dichotomies of signifier & signified or expression & content mask false analyses of texts, as they suppose two realities where there is only one, Juan de la Cruz's Spanish poem "La noche oscura" (The Dark Night) is analyzed in the Nietszchean framework; here, despite the poet's comments that the poem is about the purified soul in search of Christ, the text tells only of a female person walking through darkness in search of her lover; the latter is never named, nor does the text explain her fear of a love affair. Adapted from the source document