uit: Lorca and Jiménez. Selected Poems. Chosen, Translated, and with a Preface by Robert Bly, Boston 1997 (Beacon Press)
JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ
UNDER THE WATER
I
No matter which poems of Juan Ramón Jiménez I had chosen, the collection would never be a heavy book, like a book of Neruda or Trakl. A single poem of Trakl’s would make a heavy book. Forty poems of Jiménez will be light as a feather. Juan Ramón Jiménez’ vision of poetry is very different from that of Neruda or Trakl. Neruda and Trakl take all their weight as men, and put that into their poems. Their love goes out as a form of occult energy into boulders, river, barges, crumbling walls, dining rooms, women’s clothes. When they step back they leave the energy there. Their poems, lie there separate from them, massive, full of grief. To Jiménez writing a poem means something entirely different. For him a poem has ecstasy: that is the difference between poetry and prose. Living as a poet means feeling that ecstasy every day of your life, every hour if possible. A poem flies out of the poet like, a spark. Whatever the poet writes down will be touched with ecstasy – the poem will therefore be light, not light in the sense of light verse that avoids seriousness, but light as a spark or as an angel is light. With one or two fewer words the poem would leap straight up into the sky.
The heavy poems of Trakl lie brooding in alleys or on mountain tops, and when the reader walks up to them they hardly notice him: they feel too great a sorrow. Jiménez’ poems on the other hand are nervous and alert and when we come near, they see us, they are more interested in us than in themselves—they try to show us the road, back to the original ecstasy. The poems are signposts pointing the reader back to the poet, that toward the life from which the ecstasy came. Juan Jiménez said that he lived his life in such a way as to most poetry possible out of it, and he loved solitude, private gardens, cloisters, silent women with large eyes.
Jiménez’ poems ask the question: what sort of life shall we live so as to feel poetry, ecstasy? His emphasis on how the poet lived, rather than on rhythm or technique, is precisely why so much poetry flowed from him into the young poets. In his life he embodied as Yeats did some truth about poetry that everyone, but especially poetry professors, try to ignore and do ignore.
II
We can understand the subject matter of Jiménez’ poems if we understand that it is in solitude a man’s emotions become very clear to him. Jiménez does not write of polities or religious doctrines, of the mistakes of others, not of his own troubles or even his own opinions, but only of solitude, and the strange experiences and the strange joy that come to a man in solitude. His books usually consist of emotion after emotion called out with great force and delicacy, and it must be said that his short, precise poems make our tradition of the long egotistic ode look rather absurd. Seeing the beauty of a sunset, for instance, he does not, with many stanzas, complicated syntax, and involved thoughts, write a long elaborate ode on immortality-he simply says:
Serene last evening,
short as a life,
end of all that was loved,
I want to be eternal!
Translated by Carlos Francisco de Zea
This is what he calls “naked poetry.” It is poetry near the emotion. He has a wonderful poem in which he says that, in his youth, when poetry first carne to him, she carne to him like a very young girl, naked, and he loved her. Then, later, she began to put on ornaments and become very elaborate, and he began to hate her, without knowing why. Then, years later, she began to trust him, and now, at last is a young girl, naked, again-“naked poetry, that I have loved my whole life!”
III
Jiménez, as a poet, was bom in the great and joyful reviving of Spanish poetry about 1905, led by Antonio Machado, Unamuno, and himself, who all dreamed of a new blossoming of Spain. Jiménez was not robust. He was delicate, neurasthenie, and slipped off into insanity more than once. Yet his devotion to poetry was healthy and rigorous. He was more generous to younger poets than Yeats was; he spent years editing poetry magazines and starting publishing ventures to get poets in print, endless afternoons poring over young poets’ manuscripts. His delight and Machado’s stubbornness prepared the way for the great generation of ’28: Lorca, Aleixandre, Salinas, Guillén. They all knew it. Lorca’ s early poems are imitations of Juan Ramón, as they always called him. Juan Ramón threw up light and airy houses made out of willows, and in so many different designs that all the coming Spanish poets found themselves living in one or another of his willow houses before they moved out to their own house. Jiménez even anticipated Lorca’s mature work. Juan Ramón Jiménez came to the United States in 1916 to marry Zenobia Camprubí, who was the sister of a man who owned a Spanish-language newspaper in New York. Jiménez lived in New York and Boston for a few months, and wrote Diary of a Poet Recently Married, a book about the United States still not well known here. Thirteen years before Lorca het met the “King of Harlem” walking up Fifth Avenue; he describes the meeting in his prose poem “Deep Night,” translated in this collection. The crippled Negro whom he calls “king of the city” is clearly the same Negro of whom Lorca said:
Tú, gran rey prisonero, con un traje de conserje!
(Your great imprisoned king, dressed as a janitor!)
Anyone who knows the work of Guillén, Salinas or Alberti will also see Juan Ramón Jiménez in their poems, seated quietly on the sandy bottom, clearly visible through the sunlit water like a magie water creature.
IV
By 1940, most of the poets of that magnificent blossoming of poetry were either dead or in exile. With Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas, Emilio Prados, Manuel Altolaguirie and Luis Cernuda, Jiménez went into exile. He lived for a while in Chevy Chase, Maryland, then in Puerto Rico. The American literary community ignored him, and not a book of hls had ever been published in the United States at the time he received the Nobel Prize.
His love for bis wife was one of the greatest devotions of his life and he wrote many of his poems for her. When he received the Nobel Prize in 1956, his wife was on her deathbed; he told reporters to go away, that he would not go to Stockholm, that his wife should have had the Nobel Prize, and that he was no longer interested. After his wife died, he did not write another poem and died a few months later, in the spring of 1958.
V
Jiménez and Rubén Dario, the Nicaraguan, gave a great gift to Spanish poetry: an emphasis on pleasure. Herbert Marcuse in his Eros and Civilization talks of how many Americans are crippled because of the puritanical adherence to duty, to the reality principle. They are crippled because they are addicted to boring sobriety, harshness, duty, “responsibilities of life,” business. They think it is their duty to accept boredom in polities, to stay inside on a moonlit night, and to be miserable, selling or teaching, doing what they don’t want to do. If they avoid delight, they feel more mature. Americans are crippled because they give up, perhaps at ten or fifteen, all hope of being happy. Juan Ramón Jiménez is aware of all this-only the Spanish temperament is as puritanical as the American. His work pulls the psyche toward pleasure. His poems are an elaborate defense of the pleasure principle. He sees the humor and drama of making such a defense to day. He talks to the full moon:
The basil is not asleep,
the ant is busy.
Are you going around naked
in the house?
ROBERT BLY
“VINO, PRIMERO, PURA”
Vino, primero, pura,
vestida de inocencia.
Y la amé como un niño.
Luego se fue vistiendo
de no sé qué ropajes.
Y la fui odiando, sin saberlo.
Llegó a ser una reina,
fastuosa de tesoros . . .
¡Qué iracundia de yel y sin sentido!
… Mas se fue desnudando.
Y yo Ie sonreía.
Se quedó con la túnica
de su inocencia antigua.
Creí de nuevo en ella.
Y se quitó la túnica,
y apareció desnuda toda …
¡Oh pasión de mi vida, poesía
desnuda, mía para siempre!
“AT FIRST SHE CAME TO ME PURE”
At first she carne to me pure,
dressed only in her innocence;
and I loved her as we love a child.
Then she began putting on
clothes she picked up somewhere;
and I hated her, without knowing it.
She gradually became a queen,
the jewelry was blinding . . .
What bitterness and rage! . . .
She started going back toward nakedness.
And I smiled.
Soon she was back to the single shift
of her old innocence.
I believed in her a second time.
Then she took off the cloth
and was entirely naked …
Naked poetry, always mine,
that I have loved my whole life!
“INTELIJENCIA, DAME”
¡Intelijencia, dame
el nombre exacto de las cosas!
… Que mi palabra sea
la cosa misma,
creada por mi alma nuevamente.
Que por mí vayan todos
los que no las conocen, a las cosas;
que por mí vayan todos
los que ya las olvidan, a las cosas;
que por mí vayan todos
los mismos que las aman, a las cosas . . .
¡Intelijencia, dame
el nombre exacto, y tuyo,
y suyo, y mío, de las cosas!
“INTELLIGENCE, GIVE ME”
Intelligence, give me
the exact name of things!
… I want my word to be
the thing itself,
created by my soul a second time.
So that those who do not know them
can go to the things through me,
all those who have forgotten them
can go to’ the things through me,
all those who love them
can go to the things through me . . .
Intelligence, give me
the exact name, and your name
and theirs and mine, for things!
MARES
¡Siento que el barco mío
ha tropezado, allá en el fondo,
con algo grande!
¡Y nada
sucede! Nada … Quietud … Olas … –
¿Nada sucede; o es que ha sucedido todo,
y estamos ya, tranquilos, en lo nuevo? –
OCEANS
I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing
happens! Nothing … Silence … Waves . . .
-Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?
“COBRE LA RIENDA”
Cobré la rienda,
di la vuelta al caballo
del alba;
me entré, blanco, en la vida.
¡Oh, cómo me miraban,
locas,
las flores de mi sueño,
levantando los brazos a la luna!
“I PULLED ON THE REINS”
I pulled on the reins,
I turned the horse
of the dawn,
and I came in to life, pale.
Oh how they looked at me,
the flowers of my dream,
insane,
lifting their arms to the moon!
A DANTE
Allegro sì, che appena
il conoscìa . . .
-DANTE
Tu soneto, lo mismo
que una mujer desnuda y casta,
sentándome en sus piernas puras,
me abrazó con sus brazos celestiales.
Soñé, después, con él, con ella.
Era una fuente
que dos chorros arqueaba en una taza
primera, la cual, luego, los vertía,
finos, en otras dos . . .
TO DANTE
Allegro sì, che appena
il conoscìa . . .
-DANTE
Your sonnet, just like
some pure and naked woman,
seated me on her chaste knees,
put her heavenly arms around me.
Afterwards, I dreamt of it, and of her.
I saw a fountain
that arched two streams down into a basin,
the first, and then from it two others poured,
more delicate . . .
EL RECUERDO
¡Oh recuerdos secretos,
fuera de los caminos
de todos los recuerdos!
¡Recuerdos, que una noche,
de pronto, resurjís,
como una rosa en un desierto,
como una estrella al mediodía,
-pasión mayor del frío olvido-,
jalones de la vida
mejor de uno,
que casi no se vive!
¡Senda
diariamente árida;
maravilla, de pronto,
de primavera única,
de los recuerdos olvidados!
THE MEMORY
Secret memories
not on the road
of our other memories!
Memories, that one night,
suddenly, come alive,
like a rose in the desert,
like a star at noon,
-the stronger burning in this cold nothingness-
landmarks of the best
life a man has,
which is hardly lived at all!
Path dry
day after day;
then the miracle, suddenly,
an amazing springtime,
memories returned from the past!
DESVELO
Se va la noche, negro toro
-plena carne de luto, de espanto y de misterio-;
que ha bramado terrible, inmensamente,
al temor sudoroso de todos los caídos;
y el día viene, niño fresco,
pidiendo confianza, amor y risa,
-niño que, allá muy lejos,
en los arcanos donde
se encuentran los comienzos con los fines
ha jugado un momento,
por no sé qué pradera
de luz y sombra,
con el toro que huía-.
BEING AWAKE
Night goes away, a black bull-
body heavy with mourning and fear and mystery-
it has been bellowing horribly, monstrously,
in genuine fear of all the dead;
and day arrives, a young child
who wants trust, and love, and jokes,
-a child who somewhere
far away, in the secret places
where what ends meets what is starting,
has been playing a moment
on some meadow or other
of light and darkness
with that bull who is running away …
“EL BARCO ENTRA, OPACO Y NEGRO”
El barco entra, opaco y negro,
en la negrura trasparente
del puerto inmenso.
Paz y frio.
-Los que esperan,
están aún dormidos con su sueño,
tibios en ellos, lejos todavía y yertos dentro de él
de aquí, quizás …
¡Oh vela real nuestra, junto al sueño
de duda de los otros! ¡Seguridad, al lado
del sueño inquieto por nosotros!-
Paz. Silencio.
Silencio que al romperse, con el alba,
hablará de otro modo …
“THE SHIP, SOLID AND BLACK”
The ship, solid and black,
enters the clear blackness
of the great harbor.
Quiet and cold.
-The people waiting
are still asleep, dreaming,
and warm, far away and still stretched out in this
dream, perhaps …
How real our watch is, beside the dream
of doubt the others had! How sure it is, compared
to their troubled dream about us!
Quiet. Silence.
Silence which in breaking up at dawn
will speak differently.
“TAN BIEN COMO SE ENCUENTRA”
¡Tan bien como se encuentra
mi alma en mi cuerpo
-como una idea única
en su verso perfecto-,
y que tenga que irse y que dejar
el cuerpo-como el verso de un retórico
vano y yerto!
“EVEN THOUGH MY SOUL”
Even though my soul fits so wonderfully
inside my body-
like a clear idea
in a line perfect for it-
nevertheless it bas to abandon the body
eventually, leaving it like some academic’s line
hollow and stiff!
BLANCOR
Olor de nardo,
mujer desnuda
por los oscuros corredores.
WHITENESS
Fragrance of spikenard,
a naked woman
in the dark corridors.
LUNA GRANDE
La puerta está abierta;
el grillo, cantando.
¿Andas tú desnuda
por el campo?
Como un agua eterna,
por todo entra y sale.
¿Andas tú desnuda
por el aire?
La albahaca no duerme,
la hormiga trabaja.
¿Andas tú desnuda
por la casa?
FULL MOON
The door is open,
the cricket singing.
Are you going around naked
in the fields?
Like an immortal water,
going in and out of everything.
Are you going around naked
in the air?
The basil is not asleep,
the ant is busy.
Are you going around naked
in the house?
AURORAS DE MOGUER
¡Los álamos de plata,
saliendo de la bruma!
¡El viento solitario
por la marisma oscura,
moviendo -terremoto
irreal- la difusa
Huelva lejana y rosa!
¡Sobre el mar, por La Rábida,
en la gris perla húmeda
del cielo, aún con la noche
fría tras su alba cruda
-¡horizonte de pinos!-,
fría tras su alba blanca,
la deslumbrada luna!
DAWNS OF MOGUER
The silver poplars
rising out of the fog!
The lonesome wind there
moving over the dark
marsh-an earthquake
that is not real-and Huelva
stretched out, f ar away, rose-colored!
Above the sea, toward La Rábida,
in the moist pearl-gray
of the sky, with the night
still cold behind its crude dawn-
a horizon of pines-
the baffled moon!
EL NOMBRE CONSEGUIDO DE LOS NOMBRE
Si yo, por ti, he creado un mundo para ti,
dios, tú tenías seguro que venir a él,
y tú has venido a él, a mi seguro,
porque mi mundo todo era mi esperanza.
Yo he acumulado mi esperanza
en lengua, en nombre hablado, en nombre escrito;
a todo yo Ie había puesto nombre
y tú has tornado el puesto
de toda esta nombradía.
Ahora puedo yo detener ya mi movimiento,
como la llama se detiene en ascua roja
con resplandor de aire inflamado azul,
en el ascua de mi perpetuo estar y ser;
ahora yo soy ya mi mar paralizado,
el mar que yo decía, mas no duro,
paralizado en olas de conciencia en luz
y vivas hacia arriba todas, hacia arriba.
Todos Jos nombres que yo puse
al universo que por ti me recreaba yo,
se me están convirtiendo en uno y en un
dios.
El dios que es siempre al fin,
el dios creado y recreado y recreado
por gracia y sin esfuerzo.
El Dios. El nombre conseguido de los nombres.
THE NAME DRAWN FROM THE NAMES
If I have created a world for you, in your place,
god, you had to come to it confident,
and you have come to it, to my refuge,
because my whole world was nothing but my hope.
I have been saving up my hope
in language, in a spoken name, a written name;
I had given a name to everything,
and you have taken the place
of all these names.
Now I can hold back my movement
inside the coal of my continual living and being,
as the flame reins itself back inside the red coal,
surrounded by air that is all blue fire;
now I am my own sea that has been suddenly
stopped somewhere,
the sea I used to speak of, but not heavy,
stiffened into waves of an awareness filled with light,
and all of them moving upward, upward.
All the names that I gave
to the universe that I created again for you
are now all turning into one name, into one
god.
The god who, in the end, is always
the god created and recreated and recreated
through grace and never through force.
The God. The name drawn from the names.
CONCIENCIA PLENA
Tú me llevas, conciencia plena, deseante dios,
por todo el mundo.
En este mar tercero,
casi oigo tu voz; tu voz del viento
ocupante total del movimiento;
de los colores, de las luces
eternos y marinos.
Tu voz de fuego blanco
en la totalidad del agua, el barco, el cielo,
lineando las rutas con delicia,
grabándome con fúljido mi órbita segura
de cuerpo negro
con el diamante Lúcido en su dentro.
FULL CONSCIOUSNESS
You are carrying me, full consciousness, god that
has desires,
all through the world.
Here, in this third sea,
I almost hear your voice: your voice, the wind,
filling entirely all movements;
eternal colors and eternal lights,
sea colors and sea lights.
Your voice of white fire
in the universe of water, the ship, the sky,
marking out the roads with delight,
engraving for me with a blazing light my firm orbit:
a black body
with the glowing diamond in its center.
FIRST GLIMPSE OF JUAN RAMON JIMENEZ
During those exciting years in Madrid, Juan Ramón Jiménez was, to us, even more than Antonio Machado, the man who had raised poetry to the status of a religion, living exclusively because of poetry and for it, dazzling us with bis example. In 1924, in La Verdad, a literary sheet from Murcia, I published several poems from my Marinero en tierra which had not yet appeared in book form. Someone told me that Juan Ramón had liked them very much. I paid him a visit.
He lived on the top floor of a house in a quiet neighborhood, a sort of penthouse. He received me there, among honeysuckles and morning glories which he himself, with his Andalusian homesickness for gardens, was guiding along the walls, and turning into fountains of leaves. That afternoon the writer Antonio Espina was with him.
Juan Ramón was editor at that time of the literary review Indice and of a publishing house as well with the same name. Two books had just come out: Signario, by Antonio Espina, and Pedro Salinas’ Presagios. In his apartment, holding a copy of Signario, he complained about its typographical imperfections. He had found errata, smudged letters, sloping lines, and over all of this he would lose sleep.
“In Alfonso Reyes’ edition of Góngora’s Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea he let some errata slip by him too: instead of ‘corona’ there is ‘corna’; for ‘entre’, ‘enter’, and so on. Spain had lost its tradition of great printing. Take a look at this English book. [He showed us a modern edition of Keats.] Look at the fine workmanship, and the grace, the delicacy of the type! I’d like to obtain the same results in the Indice books, but that’s obviously asking too much.”
Imaginary wind from the sea!
Street the sailors like-
blue house, and against the his chest
the chain that works miracles!
In those days Juan Ramón’s beard was still black and rough; he had the perfect profile of the Andalusian Arab, and a soft, gloomy voice that sometimes rose into a scratchy falsetto. We talked about writing, and names from his generation came up: Pérez de Ayala, the Machados, Ortega y Gasset . . . During that visit I glimpsed for the first time-later I saw it often, throughout our friendship-the extraordinary Andalusian wit and venom that came out in making fun of people or doing imitations of them. The people I heard him laugh at most-and slander, in his poetic way-were Azorín and Eugenio D’Ors.
“Have you seen the title of Azorín’s last book? El chirrión de los politicos. [The Ox Cart of the Politicians.] ‘The Ox Cart!’ I received a personally signed copy dedicated to me. Naturally, I went myself, in person, to his house to give it back to him. Azorín lives,” he continued, “in one of those houses that reek of the Madrid dish-boiled-meat-and-vegetables mixed with cat piss. He sleeps far far inside a bed whose mosquito netting is decorated with pink ribbons, and he keeps on bis night-table an object he considers to be in the most exquisite taste, a plaster of paris Negro painted black, the kind they use to advertise ‘La Estrella’ coffee, a gift from bis constituents when he was congressman for Monovar. No matter how simple the furnishings are, you can always tell a writer by his home.”
He broke off his friendship with Pérez de Ayala one day during a visit because Pérez de Ayala had showed him a room with various sausages hanging from the ceiling; for that he never forgave his friend. He noticed in José Ortega y Gasset’s home-remember the visitor is Juan Ramón Jiménez, not I-a small Venus de Milo, cast in plaster, on top of a piano, the sort of piece that sells for a few pennies in the square of Cibeles in Madrid. I believe there was also, a brass paperweight that undertook to be Don Quixote, and included a desperate Sancho Panza, shouting at the top of his lungs. These details of decoration gave occasion for biting jibes that Juan Ramón aimed at Ortega, using the details as glimpses into Ortega’s style and work.
His own home was very different. He and his wife, Zenobia Camprubí, had succeeded in keeping it with a taste and an elegance that were truly simple, natural. When Juan Ramón was working, and during this time he would work twenty-four hours of the day, it was impossible to see him; he turned away his visitors, sometimes refusing to let them in himself, The names of visitors would be conveyed to him by telephone from the porter’s lodge. Occasionally the visitor himself would speak:
“This is so and so.”
Juan Ramón would answer in a perfectly natural way, from upstairs: “Juan Ramón Jiménez has left me a message that he is out.”
In that sought-after solitude, he produced, polished, retouched reshuffled his work (or his Work, as he tended to call it) back and forth. In that darkroom of poetry, the poet from the country, the poet of purple and yellow sundowns, of walks with his silver burrow through the narrow streets of Moguer, worked on with the fervor of a mystic, of a solitary, listening to the circulation of his own blood, drawing out the poetry that rose from it. The poet of Arias, Pastorales, Jardines Lejanos became at this time drawing close to the flame of his work, the poet of Piedra y cielo, Poesía Belleza, Unidad.
This stanza was from one of the most transparent and lively of Juan Ramón’s poems; I had taken two lines from the stanza as an epigraph for a poem I had published in La Verdad, one of those he praised so much:
blue blouse, and against his chest
the chain that works miracles!
The welcome Juan Ramón gave me, which was like the welcome he gave all the poets beginning to appear at that time, though he perhaps showed me preference over the others, was encouraging and warm, and inspired in me a faith and a self-confidence I hadn’t possessed until then. He asked me to let him see more of my things and so the next day I brought him a group of short poems from which he himself made a selection and published in SI, a review of poetry and prose he edited under the pen name of “The Universal Andalusian.”
Those first poems of mine were from “Marinero en tierra (Sailor on land) a book that shortly after was given the National Award for Literature, together with Gerardo Diego’s Versos humanos. Offering me further proof of his esteem, Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote me the fine letter I have since published as a preface to my poems.
In Buenos Aires now, from my small balcony overlooking the River Plate, here among my red cardinals and my run-down pots of blackened geraniums, my memory goes northwards up the river, and takes me past the image I have of Juan Ramón in Madrid, lively-eyed in his roof-house of honeysuckles and morning glories, to the picture of the present Juan Ramón, a survivor in America of the immense Spanish catastrophe-living brother of Antonio Machado, who was a genuine piece of the earth sacrificed-like Machado he is a master, a wandering magnificent voice of our country.
RAFAEL ALBERTI
Buenos Aires, 1945
translated by Hardie St. Martin
JUAN RAMON JIMENEZ
En el blanco infinito,
nieve, nardo y salina,
perdió su fantasia.
El color blanco, anda,
sobre una muda alfombra
de plumas de paloma.
Sin ojos ni ademán
inmóvil sufre un sueño.
Pero tiembla por dentro.
En el blanco infinito,
¡qué pura y larga herida
dejó su fantasia!
En el blanco infinito.
Nieve. Nardo. Salina.
Frederico García Lorca
JUAN RAMON JIMENEZ
Into the infinite white,
snow, spice-plants, and salt he took
his imagination, and left it.
The color white is walking
over a silent carpet
made of the feathers of a dove.
With no eyes or gestures
it takes in a dream without moving.
But it trembles inside.
In the infinite white
his imagination left
such a pure and deep wound!
In the infinite white.
Snow. Spice-plants. Salt.
bron: Lorca and Jiménez. Selected Poems. Chosen, Translated, and with a Preface by Robert Bly, Boston 1997 (Beacon Press)
betekenisgeving & levenshorizon 