Background
Jiménez was born on December 23, 1881 in Moguer, Spain.
( This is a very valuable book! Dozens of poems are here...)
This is a very valuable book! Dozens of poems are here that have never been translated into English before, and I think Berg and Maloney have done beautifully transferring Juan Ramon's enthusiastic calm from Spanish to English. Terrific.Robert Bly As he observes metaphysical somersaults of sea and land, Juan Ramón is the master of replete simplicity. 'A steel sea' pops up on a 'hard flat field/of exhausted mines/in a devastation of ruin.' Or, like Emily Dickinsons 'hope falls down a hill,' Jiménez has, 'Hope, a seagull,/ alights here and there.' The utter nakedness of his verse touched virtually all modern Spanish poetry, directly engendering, for example, Rafael Albertis masterful sea book, Sailor on Land, and 'I walk the streets of the sea.' In The Poet and the Sea, a delicious book perfectly rendered by Mary Berg and Dennis Maloney, Juan Ramón has made essential pacts of intimacy with the great waters of the world. The seas grow in trickery and gravity in endless dramas as two figures emerge: a blind yet live sea and a poet who sees through the sea. The sea is a changing mirror of the poet who has imposed his vision on the whims of his companion sea.Willis Barnstone This bilingual collection traces Juan Ramon Jimenezs relationship with the sea, a major theme in his work, from his seminal book Diary of a Poet Recently Married alongside other poems from his body of work. Seas I feel my boat has struck something large there, in the depths of the sea! And then nothing happens! Nothing Silence Waves Nothing happens? Or has everything happened And are we now, calm, in someplace new? Juan Ramon Jimenez (18811958) was a member of the Generation of 1898, which ushered in a renaissance in Spanish poetry. In 1956 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Translators Marg Berg and Dennis Maloney have previously collaborated on Antonio Machados book The Landscape of Castile.
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( This lyric portrait of lifeand the little donkey, Plat...)
This lyric portrait of lifeand the little donkey, Plateroin a remote Andalusian village is the masterpiece of Juan Ramón Jiménez, the Spanish poet awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize for Literature.
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( Few have written more memorably about the work of poetr...)
Few have written more memorably about the work of poetry and the poetics of work than Juan Ramón Jiménez, winner of a Nobel Prize and discerning teacher of an entire generation of Spanish poets. In this series of aphorisms, Jiménez brings together the elements of perfect work, both in writing and in other realms. Among these elementsthe wellsprings of any kind of creationare instinct and inspiration, memory and forgetting, silence and noise, love and regret. A treasure for poets and writers, The Complete Perfectionist includes helpful commentary by noted translator Christopher Maurer and shows perfection as a process of becoming rather than an end product. In these insightful pages, a poet haunted by perfection reveals his methods of writing and revision, and measures the social and ethical dimensions of el trabajo gustoso, or pleasurable work. This revised and expanded edition includes many aphorisms recently published in Spanish and not previously included.
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(Over one hundred vignettes in Stories of Life and Death c...)
Over one hundred vignettes in Stories of Life and Death create haunting images of the author's favorite subjects: women in love, children coping with tragedy, eccentrics, the emotions of compassion, bitterness, envy and longing. Meet Mercedita Saro, the shy, perfectly-groomed beggar-child of the local drunk, whom Jiménez loves, protects, and treats with sweets, forbidden by her father. And Max, "the blue child," a West Indian boy traveling on the same ship as Jiménez to live with relatives in South America, who covered his black face with white powder "to look whiter to my brothers." See a woman in love, "white tender, bray, submissive, delicate." and the tiny ray of sun awakening a baby, which "has opened in his eyes a magic and flowery garden that holds him bewitched." Feel sadness at the death of a village girl, empathy for the mother of a sailor lost at sea, and compassion for an angry man who gets drunk for the first time. The author creates an impressionistic landscape with subtle nuances of light and shadow, leaving tantalizing ambiguities to be resolved only in the eye of the beholder. As might be assumed from the title bestowed on this work, Jiménez's prose and poetical observations of the world around him, previously encountered in Platero and I, take on a somewhat darker more transcendent hue in this further collection. Gone is the unifying theme of itinerant man and donkey, and the physical boundaries of time and space. Here Jiménez allows his poetic vision to sweep far and wide, distilling and concentrating his art into thumbnail sketches of such disparate characters among many are a beggar-girl, a grape-harvester, an elderly canary and even the moon itself. Prefaced by a scholarly introduction from the translator, this is a fine and sensitive translation which captures gloriously the sheer lyrical beauty of Jiménez's writing. British Bulletin of Publications
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Jiménez was born on December 23, 1881 in Moguer, Spain.
After early training in a Jesuit school, Jiménez was sent to study law in Seville; he chose, however, to study literature, especially romantic poets.
In 1900 Jiménez went to Madrid, carrying an ample collection of his early poems, finally published under the delicate titles Ninfeas and Almas de violeta. At this time he suffered a mental breakdown, spending months in clinics in France and in Madrid. In spite of his condition, Jiménez helped to found and direct the literary journal Helios and continued to write poetry. His expressive titles indicate accurately the type of poetry he was writing: Arias tristes (1903), Jardines lejanos (1905), Pastorales (1905). In 1905 Jiménez returned to Moguer and spent six tranquil years writing the same kind of poetry: Elejlas, Baladas de primavera, La soledad sonora. Even at this stage, however, Jiménez's imagery is focused toward sublimation of human emotions. In his early maturity this tendency toward sublimation becomes pronounced, especially in the fine book Sonetos espirituales (1915). In 1916 Jiménez went to the United States. On this trip the poet composed his important book in the symbolist manner, Diario de un poeta reciencasado, which is an elaborate projection of two basic symbols, the sea and the sky. Back in Madrid, in the following years Jiménez gradually withdrew from participation in the real world to concentrate upon his poetry. He created four major books: Eternidades (1917), Piedra y cielo (1918), Poesía (1923), and Belleza (1923). By this time he was writing a pure poetry of intellectual tone reduced to essential symbol and stripped of all anecdote and verbal music. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Jiménez went again to the United States and began a late career (followed by many other exiles) of teaching and lecturing for brief periods. Although his poetic creation slackened somewhat in the 1930s, in the 1940s he enjoyed a final burst of inspiration. As a result of a boat trip to Argentina, Jiménez, again moved by the symbol of the sea, wrote what he considered his final major work, Dios deseado y deseante (1949). This book projects the resolution of themes Jiménez had been pursuing all his career. His first period was esthetic, his second intellectual; in his final period, a religious one, he expressed his neomystical union with his God. Jiménez also wrote significant prose in his long career. In 1917 he published Platero y yo (Platero and I), a poetic, melancholy, Franciscan book that has become a classic, especially for children. He also wrote Españoles de tres mundos, short and sometimes biting portraits of his contemporaries. In 1956 Jiménez received the Nobel Prize in literature for his lyrical poetry. He died in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on May 29, 1958.
( This is a very valuable book! Dozens of poems are here...)
(Over one hundred vignettes in Stories of Life and Death c...)
( Few have written more memorably about the work of poetr...)
( This lyric portrait of lifeand the little donkey, Plat...)
In 1916 Jiménez married a Spanish-born writer and poet Zenobia Camprubí in the United States. In 1956 his wife died of ovarian cancer.