Fifty Spanish Poems

By Juan Ramón Jiménez

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1951.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520349971

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JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ

FIFTY SPANISH POEMS

JUAN RAMÓN

JIMÉNEZ

Fifty

Spanish Poems

With English translations

by

J. B. TREND

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES

1951

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN FOR THE DOLPHIN BOOK CO., LTD., OXFORD

BY ROBERT STOCKWELL LTD., LONDON, S.B.I.

This lunar beauty

Has no history is complete and early.

W. H. AUDEN

A trained, a choice, an exquisite appreciation of the most simple and universal relations of life … A rose in a moonlit garden, the shadow of trees on the turf, almond bloomy scent of pine, the wine-cup and the guitar; these and the pathos of life and death, the long embrace, the hand stretched out in vain, the moment that glides for ever away, with its freight of music and light, into the shadow and hush of the haunted past, all that we have, all that eludes us, a bird on the wing, a perfume escaped on the gale—to all these things we are trained tc respond, and the response is what we call literature.

G. LOWES DICKINSON

INDEX

ELEJÍAS

1. LA VERDECILLA

POEMAS MÁJICOS Y DOLIENTES

2. LA CASTIGADA

3. MAR DEL SUR

4. ESTAMPA DE INVIERNO: NIEVE

ARTE MENOR

5. ISLA

POEMAS AGRESTES

6. CATEDRAL DEL PUEBLO

LABERINTO

7. COMO EN UN RÍO QUIETO

APARTAMIENTO

8. PASIÓN DE TORMENTA

LA FRENTE PENSATIVA

9. QUIÉN SABE DEL REVÉS …

10. LEVEDAD

EL SILENCIO DE ORO

11. VOZ INMENSA

12. LUZ ÚLTIMA

IDILIOS

13. LA ESPADA

SONETOS ESPIRITUALES

14. NADA

15. A UNA JOVEN DIANA

16. A MI ALMA

ESTÍO

17. LA HORA FALSA

18. ë NADA MÁS?

DIARIO DE UN POETA RECIÉN CASADO

19. ¡QUÉ CERCA YA DEL ALMA!

20. NOCTURNO

21. CIELO

22. NOCTURNO

23. HUMO Y ORO

24. REMORDIMIENTO

25. CONVEXIDADES

26. ROSA DEL MAR

27. PARTIDA

28. NOCTURNO

ETERNIDADES

29. INTELIJENCIA

30. VINO, PRIMERO, PURA

31. AURORA

32. A DANTE

PIEDRA Y CIELO

33. EL POEMA, 2

34. ¡ QUÉ INMENSA DESGARRADURA!

35. EL RECUERDO, 4

36. EL RECUERDO, 5

37. A LA VEJEZ AMADA

38. CUESTA ARRIBA

39. MARES

40. EPITAFIO IDEAL DE UN MARINERO

41. EL BARCO ENTRA …

42. MARIPOSA DE LUZ

POESÍA (EN VERSO)

43. ANTE LA SOMBRA VIRJEN

44. AURORA DE TRASMUROS

BELLEZA (EN VERSO)

45. FIGURACIONES

46. LA PAZ

47. BALCÓN DE OTOÑO

LA ESTACIÓN TOTAL

48. PACTO PRIMERO

49. ROSA DE SOMBRA

PIEDRA Y CIELO

50. QUISIERA QUE MI LIBRO …

EL TIGRE (William Blake)

JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ

POETRY in Spanish has always attracted minds which are alert — and imaginative. Some readers, even, were first drawn to the language by its poetry. Yet contemporary poetry in Spanish only began to attract general attention with the Civil War of 1936-39, and the murder of Federico Garcia Lorca. The result has been a tendency to take Lorca for the only Spanish poet of his time, though actually he was a younger member of a brilliant school and a flourishing modern tradition, represented in other fields by the well-known names of Falla, Casals and Picasso. In Spanish poetry to-day, the central figure is Juan Ramón Jiménez.

The poets, like the musicians and the painters, have been scattered by the Civil War and the persecution which followed it. Antonio Machado died of pneumonia in the Pyrenees, escaping in midwinter from Barcelona; Miguel Hernandez died of consumption in prison. The rest are exiles in North or South America, and one of the best collections of contemporary Spanish poetry appeared in Chile in 1943 under the name of Poets in exile, Poetas en el destierro. Among the things destroyed by the military revolt was a poetic revival, more intense than any known in Spain for three hundred years.

All the poets of that school, and all the writers who were their friends, were descended from the Spanish and Spanish-American modernistas of 1898; but they had grown out of the original modernismo and were reacting against it. For modernismo, in spite of its name (or because of it), had dated; and by 1928 there was little of it left beyond its effect on the technique of writing Spanish verse. This poetry could not fail to be affected by the symbolists. One of the chief symbols had been the swan—the swan of Baudelaire and Verlaine and Yeats; but Juan Ramon Jiménez once remarked that the swan on dry land is a goose: El cisne en tierra es ganso; and in the end it was a Mexican poet, Enrique González Martinez, who—remembering Verlaine and what he had said about rhetoric—called on all Spanish-speaking poets to wring the swan’s neck, though he did so in a sonnet of those alexandrines which owed their form to Ruben Dario, the chief poet in Spanish of the swan whose neck he was wringing.

All the tendencies of modernismo—the new things the poets were saying and the new forms in which they were saying them—were to be found in the poetry of Ruben Dario, who was born in the Central American republic of Nicaragua, but eventually became the most cosmopolitan poet who had ever written