“An exquisite book, rich, shimmering, and truly incomparable.” —The New Yorker This lyric portrait of a boy’s companionship with his little donkey, Platero, is the masterpiece of Juan Ramón Jiménez, the Spanish poet awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize for Literature. Poetic, elegiac, it reveals the simple pleasures of life in a in a remote Andalusian village and is a classic work of literature, beloved by adults and children alike.
A translation into English of the lyrical prose classic "Platero y Yo" by Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, including translator's annotations, preface, and curated images. Based on the complete 1917 Spanish edition.
The great Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956, was a mystic as will as a poet, and the deep spirituality which infuses so much of his writing makes itself felt with special fervor throughout this remarkable new collection of poems. Composed by Jiménez between the years 1917 to 1920, the works in this grouping vanished mysteriously, only to be rediscovered a half-century later among the author's private papers. Published in Spain for the first time in 1983, they appear now at last in a bilingual edition, the English lovingly rendered by the scholar and poet Antonio T. de Nicolás, and introduced by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louis Simpson. This is a book of verse for the poet in all of us it sings of the invisible realities which we carry in our hearts and which carry us through a life filled with symbols, toil and beauty. Juan Ramón Jiménez, an early twentieth century pioneer in the use of free verse and author of over 70 books has been hailed by The New Republic as not only the dean of Hispanic poets, but the pioneer and the source of all those who wrote in the Spanish tongue after him. Antonio T. de Nicolás is widely known for his translation of the Jiménez classic, Platero and I, which will also be republished through iUniverse.com.
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 elements--the wellsprings of any kind of creation--are 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.
The development of my poetry has been and is the development of an encounter with an idea about God, the great Spanish poet and Nobel Prize winner Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote several years before his death. An early twentieth-century pioneer in the use of free verse, Jiménez has always expressed himself through mystery and profundity. The author presents a fervent landscape of primordial imagery in an attempt to restore mystical poetry to its rightful place in literature and art. For anyone not familiar with the writings of this modern master, these austere and radiant poems, translated by the poet and scholar Antonio de Nicolás and presented alongside the original Spanish, will demonstrate why Jiménez is considered one of the masters of twentieth-century poetry. To what may this writing be compared? Whitman's 'Song of Myself' comes to mind, but it is not with any intention of taking away from Whitman's achievement that I declare a preference for the poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez ... Louis Simpson, from the Introduction
This volume of 55 sonnets develops the specific and limited theme of the poet's soul in loving contact with nature and an idealized beloved. The translations faithfully follow Jimenez' original Petrarchan form, and are arranged with Spanish on the left of the page and the translation on the right.
