Juan Ramón Jiménez

Juan Ramón Jiménez (born Dec. 24, 1881, Moguer, Spain—died May 29, 1958, San Juan, P.R.) was a Spanish poet awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956.

After studying briefly at the University of Salamanca, Jiménez went to Madrid (1900) at the invitation of the poet Rubén Darío. His first two volumes of poetry, Almas de violeta (“Souls of Violet”) and Ninfeas (“Waterlilies”), came out that same year. The two books, printed in violet and green, respectively, so embarrassed Jiménez in his later years by their excessive sentiment that he destroyed every copy he could find. A man of frail constitution, he left Madrid for reasons of health. His published volumes of that period, including Pastorales (1911), Jardines lejanos (1905; “Distant Gardens”), and Elegías puras (1908; “Pure Elegies”), clearly reflect the influence of Darío, with their emphasis on individuality and subjectivity expressed in free verse.

Jiménez returned to Madrid in 1912 and, for the next four years, lived at the Residencia de Estudiantes and worked as an editor of that educational institution’s periodicals. In 1916 he traveled to New York City, where he married Zenobia Camprubí Aymar, the Spanish translator of the Hindu poet Rabindranath Tagore. Shortly after his return to Spain, he published Diario de un poeta recién casado (1917; “Diary of a Poet Recently Married”), which was issued in 1948 under the title Diario de un poeta y mar (“Diary of a Poet and the Sea”). That volume marked his transition to what he called “la poesía desnuda” (“naked poetry”), an attempt to strip his poetry of all extraneous matter and to produce it in free verse, without formal metres, of a purer nature. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), he allied himself with the Republican forces, until he voluntarily exiled himself to Puerto Rico, where he spent most of the rest of his life.

Although primarily a poet, Jiménez achieved popularity in the United States with the translation of his prose work Platero y yo (1917; Platero and I), the story of a man and his donkey. He also collaborated with his wife in the translation of the Irish playwright John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1920). His poetic output during his life was immense. Among his better-known works are Sonetos espirituales 1914–1915 (1916; “Spiritual Sonnets, 1914–15”), Piedra y cielo (1919; “Stones and Sky”), Poesía, en verso, 1917–1923 (1923), Poesía en prosa y verso (1932; “Poetry in Prose and Verse”), Voces de mi copla (1945; “Voices of My Song”), and Animal de fondo (1947; “Animal at Bottom”). A collection of 300 poems (1903–53) in English translation by Eloise Roach was published in 1962.