Alan Bancroft is well known for his accomplished verse translation of, and commentary on, poems of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. Here he embarks on a similar project with regard to another Carmelite nun born in the late nineteenth century, Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity – Elizabet Catez, of Dijon in Burgundy. Familiar with the distinctive prose of Abbot Marmion, OSB – now Blessed Columba Marmion, beatified by John Paul II in 2000 – Alan Bancroft shows how strikingly the writing of the celebrated Benedictine and the young French Carmelite (though independently produced) interlock.
Here are now and vivid translations of the twenty poems by Elizabeth that where published in the Souvenirs soon after death in 1906. Accompanying each poems is a selected passages from Abbot Marmion, also newly translated. Elizabeth Catez, beatified in 1984, loved God with an astonishing intensity. These translations – of poem mainly unpublished before in English – together with a discerning introduction present to the reader an out-of-the-ordinary person indeed. She (like Abbot Marmion) answers in a direct manner a central question facing us all: ‘What is our existence for?’