Juan Ramón Jiménez

Juan Ramón Jiménez: The Poet Who Stripped Poetry Bare

In October 1956 the Swedish Academy announced that the Nobel Prize in Literature would go to a seventy-five-year-old Spanish exile living in Puerto Rico, "for his lyrical poetry, which in the Spanish language constitutes an example of high spirit and artistic purity." Two days later his wife Zenobia — his translator, editor, negotiator and the organising force of forty years — died. Juan Ramón Jiménez survived her by less than two years. The prize that crowned him arrived as a kind of cruelty.

Moguer

Jiménez was born in 1881 in Moguer, a small town near Huelva in Andalusia, and he never really left it: the town's white walls, its dust, its fig trees and its donkeys supplied the imagery of his most famous book decades after he had moved away. He began writing poetry as a child. He went to the University of Seville to study law and painting, and abandoned both for literature — the painting mattered more than the law, and it shows in a body of work organised, more consistently than almost any modern poet's, by colour.

Madrid, and the First Books

He was drawn to Madrid at the invitation of Rubén Darío, the Nicaraguan who had founded *modernismo* and who dominated Spanish-language poetry in the aftermath of Spain's 1898 colonial collapse. Darío helped him into print. Jiménez published his first books at eighteen, in 1900, among them *Almas de violeta* — *Souls of Violet*.

These early poems belong to their moment: German Romanticism filtered through French Symbolism, heavily visual, saturated in yellows and greens. Between 1905 and 1912, largely back in Moguer, he produced *Elejías puras* (1908), *La soledad sonora* (1911) and *Poemas mágicos y dolientes* (1911). At the same time he was working as an editor, contributing to the avant-garde magazine *Prometeo* between 1908 and 1912 — the beginning of a second career as tastemaker that eventually mattered nearly as much as the poems.

Platero

*Platero y yo* appeared in 1914 and became, by a wide margin, the book the world knows him for. It is a sequence of short prose poems addressed to a small silver-grey donkey, Platero, moving through the streets and fields of Moguer across a year. It has been read as a children's book, which it partly is, and as an elegy for a vanished Andalusia, which it more accurately is — a work of extreme tenderness with real cruelty and death in it. It is also the hinge of his career: from *Platero* onward the ornamentation of his early manner begins to fall away.

The Honeymoon That Changed Spanish Poetry

In 1916 he married Zenobia Camprubí Aymar, a Spanish-born writer and the Spanish translator of Rabindranath Tagore. She became his essential collaborator, and the transatlantic voyage to marry her produced *Diario de un poeta recién casado* (1917) — *Diary of a Newly Married Poet* — written on and about the sea. The sea broke his line. The book mixes verse and prose, abandons the decorative music of *modernismo*, and is generally taken as the moment modern Spanish poetry turns.

What follows is his great decade: *Sonetos espirituales* (1917), *Eternidades* (1918), *Piedra y cielo* (1919), *Belleza* (1923). The style, as the Nobel biography describes it, becomes "decisive, formally ascetic, and dominated by white" — the yellows and greens of Moguer burned off entirely.

Naked Poetry

This is the programme he called *poesía desnuda*: naked poetry, or pure poetry. Strip the adjective, the ornament, the rhetorical scaffolding, until what remains is the thing itself. "Inner poetry eludes words," he said. "In my first period I used adjectives, later the adjectives became substantives. Literary artistry is constant suffering for the poet; one doubts the exactness of words." That last clause is the whole method: a lifelong distrust of his own medium, expressed by taking things out.

He was a merciless reviser of his own published work, and by the 1920s he stood at the head of the new poetic generation — not as a movement leader but as critic, anthologist and editor of journals, the figure the younger Spanish poets read first and argued with afterwards.

Exile

In 1936 the Spanish Civil War ended that life. Jiménez declined an ambassadorial post, sheltered twelve orphans, and left Spain. He never lived there again. The exile years took him and Zenobia through Cuba, Florida, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico, where they settled permanently in 1951; he taught at the University of Puerto Rico, the University of Miami and the University of Maryland. He published *Españoles de tres mundos* in 1942, a book of prose portraits, and in 1949 *Animal de fondo*, whose deepening religious preoccupation — a god arrived at through the act of writing rather than inherited from a church — is his last major departure. He died in Puerto Rico on 29 May 1958.

Why Juan Is Called a Genius

The cognitive quality at issue is subtraction. Most poets develop by accumulating — more range, more register, more subject. Jiménez developed by removing, running a single sensibility through fifty years of progressive purification until the poems were almost transparent, and then rewriting the earlier ones to match. The Swedish Academy's citation names exactly this: "high spirit and artistic purity." His own account of it is almost clinical — adjectives becoming substantives, a permanent doubt about "the exactness of words." The influence is not in dispute. *Diario de un poeta recién casado* is the pivot on which twentieth-century Spanish poetry turns, and by the 1920s the poets who followed were taking their bearings from him.

The counter-case is real and has two parts. The first is that the purity is airless. A poetry that systematically evacuates the world — no politics, no history, very little other people — can read as narrow beside contemporaries who let more in, and Jiménez's later work asks a reader to care intensely about very small increments of refinement. The second is the man. He was difficult, imperious and quarrelsome; his relations with the younger generation curdled, and his habit of endlessly rewriting his own past has left editors with a genuine mess. Outside Spanish, meanwhile, his reputation is oddly lopsided: the world reads *Platero y yo*, a book about a donkey, and mostly does not read the austere late poems he considered his real work.

Legacy

He remains the bridge figure of modern Spanish poetry — the last major *modernista* and the first to break it, the writer who made the plain line respectable in Spanish. *Platero y yo* has been translated into dozens of languages and is one of the most widely read Spanish books of the twentieth century, taught to children who have no idea its author spent the second half of his life in exile from the country it describes. The Nobel that came in 1956 honoured, in the Academy's words, an example of artistic purity; it also honoured a man who had by then been out of Spain for twenty years and would never go back.