by Robert Bly
Selected Other Books Edited and Translated by Robert Bly
The Kabir Book: Forty-Four of the Ecstatic Poems of Kabir
Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations
Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems
News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness
The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: A Poetry Anthology (with James Hillman and Michael Meade)
The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy: Sacred Poems from Many Cultures
Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado
Selected Books of Poetry by Robert Bly
Jumping Out of Bed
The Light Around the Body
Loving a Woman in Two Worlds
The Man in the Black Coat Turns
Meditations on the Insatiable Soul
Morning Poems
Selected Poems
Silence in the Snowy Fields
Sleepers Joining Hands
This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood
This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years
What Have I Ever Lost by Dying? Collected Prose Poems
Selected Other Books by Robert Bly
American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity
Iron John: A Book about Men
A Little Book on the Human Shadow (with William Booth)
The Sibling Society
CONTENTS
PREFACE: REREADING LORCA AND JIMÉNEZ by Robert Bly
Selected Poems of
JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ
JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ UNDER THE WATER
From EARLY POEMS
Adolescencia
Adolescence
”Yo estaba junto a mi mesa”
“I Was Sitting”
“Las carretas”
“The Lumber Wagons”
Estampa de invierno
Winter Scene
“Quién sabe”
“Who Knows What Is Going On”
“El recuerdo se va”
“A Remembrance Is Moving”
“El cordero balaba dulcemente”
“The Lamb Was Bleating Softly”
Retorno fugaz
Return for an Instant
From DIARY OF A POET RECENTLY MARRIED
“Qué cerca ya del alma”
“Something So Close”
Noctorno
Night Piece
“Te deshojé, como una rosa”
“I Took off Petal After Petal”
Cementerio
Cemetery
“En subway”
“In the Subway”
Alta noche
Deep Night
Author’s Club
Author’s Club
Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
Un imitador de Billy Sunday
An Imitator of Billy Sunday
Deshora
Wrong Time
“Andan por New York”
“In New York”
Cristales morados y muselinas blancas
Lavender Windowpanes and White Curtains
Remordimiento
Remorse
Noctorno
Night Piece
From LATER POEMS
“Intelijencia, dame”
“Intelligence, Give Me”
Mares
Oceans
“La música”
“Music”
“Cobré la rienda”
“I Pulled on the Reins”
A Dante
To Dante
El recuerdo
The Memory
Desvelo
Being Awake
Ruta
Road
“Yo no soy no”
“I Am Not I”
“El barco entra, opaco y negro”
“The Ship, Solid and Black”
“Tan bien como se encuentra”
“Even Though My Soul”
Blancor
Whiteness
Luna grande
Full Moon
“Vino, primero, pura”
“At First She Came to Me Pure”
Auroras de Moguer
Dawns of Moguer
Aurora de trasmuros
Dawn Outside the City Walls
El nombre conseguido de los nombres
The Name Drawn from the Names
Conciencia plena
Full Consciousness
FIRST GLIMPSE OF JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ by Rafael Alberti
Selected Poems of
FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA
GARCÍA LORCA AND CRETE
From EARLY POEMS
Preguntas
Questions
El niño mudo
The Boy Unable to Speak
Juan Ramón Jiménez
“Juan Ramón Jiménez”
Malagueña
Malaguena
Canción de jinete
Song of the Rider
La guitarra
The Guitar
La soltera en misa
The Unmarried Woman at Mass
La luna asoma
“The Moon Sails Out”
From ROMANCERO GITANO
Reyerta
The Quarrel
Thamar y Amnón
Thamar and Amnón
Preciosa y el aire
Preciosa and the Wind
From POETA EN NUEVA YORK
Vuelta de paseo
Home from a Walk
Iglesia abandonada
Rundown Church
Danza de la muerte
Dance of Death
Ciudad sin sueño
City That Does Not Sleep
La aurora
Sunrise
Muerte
Death
Paisaje con dos tumbas y un perro asirio
Landscape with Two Graves and an Assyrian Hound
Pequeño poema infinito
Little Inifinte Poem
New York
New York
Son de negros en Cuba
Song of the Cuban Blacks
From DIVAN DEL TAMARIT
Casida de la rosa
Casida of the Rose
Casida de las palomas oscuras
Casida of the Shadowy Pigeons
Casida del llanto
Casida of Sobbing
Gacela de la terrible prescencia
Ghazal of the Terrifying Presence
Gacela de la muerte oscura
Ghazal of the Dark Death
REREADING LORCA AND JIMÉNEZ
I first read Jiménez in the early 1960s, which was, in the United States, a time with more innocence and hopefulness than we feel now, and a time when we expected more from poetry. Many readers fell in love with a Tao Yuan Ming poem they came across in an odd anthology, and people carried M. D. Herter-Norton’s translations of Rilke as if the book were a letter from their lover. These longings for subtlety grew sharper in contrast to the Cold War brutalities. In a response to Lorca, James Wright wrote about butterflies. A longing for what could never be achieved had not yet been dismissed.
Lorca’s poetry, as we know, revealed the coming agonies of the Spanish Civil War and the existing agony of industrialism, and his poems written in New York in 1929 are still the greatest poems ever written about our horrendous national city. He said:
There is a wire stretched from the Sphinx to a safety deposit box that passes through the heart of all poor children.
In these lines we are looking straight at what was later to be called welfare reform. The poetry he wrote in A Poet in New York is rough and prophetic, more than any poetry we have now, but the inner delicacy out of which the poetry came is even more distant from our contemporary spiritual mood, which is so diminished by pop culture.
Lorca could be speaking to many contemporary professors and poets when he says,
The leaves of the roses fall in the mud.
Oh sweet John of God!
What do you see in these magnificent petals?
Your heart is tiny!
Medieval Arabic poetry infuses Lorca’s images, but his spiritual father was Juan Ramón Jiménez. Jiménez’s love of silence, his love of perfection, was famous in Madrid. To keep his solitude, he would answer his own house telephone, “Juan Ramón is not at home today.” He said:
True music is the music of silence, the silent but well-heard music of thought in the head, passion in the body, reverie in the soul.
Translated by
Christopher Maurer
He wrote:
Who knows what is going on on the other side of each hour? . . .
I was thinking of a flowery meadow
at the end of a road,
and found myself in the slough.
I was thinking of the greatness of what was human,
and found myself in the divine.
If we read Lorca and Jiménez carefully, we can sense the subtle nature of the soul-ground out of which prophetic poetry rises. It is a ground cultivated in silence behind garden walls, shrewdly protected, loving the perfections of high art, an art that fights for the values of reverie, the feminine, and the spirit. Juan Ramón reminds us of our sadness:
Mob of beings and things!
—A true sadness, because you are really deep
in the soul, as they say, not in time at all!
—ROBERT BLY
Selected Poems of
JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ
JUAN RAMON JIMENEZ 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 is, back toward the life from which the ecstasy came. Juan Ramón Jiménez said that he lived his life in such a way as to get the 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 politics 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 came to him, she came 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 born 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, neurasthenic, 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 he 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 magic 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 Altolaguirre 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 his had ever been published in the United States at the time he received the Nobel Prize.
His love for his 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 Darío, the Nicaraguan, gave a great gift to Spanish poetry: an emphasis on pleasure. Herbert Marcuse in hi
s 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 politics, 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 today. 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
Roots and wings. But let the wing grow roots and the roots fly.
—JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ
from
Early Poems
Rimas de Sombra (1902)
Arias Tristes (1903)
Pastorales (1905)
Poemas Májicos y Dolientes (1909)
La Frente Pensativa (1912)
El Corazón en la Mano (1912)
Pureza (1912)
Sonetos Espirituales (1915)
ADOLESCENCIA
En el balcón, un instante
nos quedamos los dos solos.
Desde la dulce mañana
de aquel día, éramos novios.
—El paisaje soñoliento
dormía sus vagos tonos,
bajo el cielo gris y rosa
del crepúsculo de otoño—.
Le dije que iba a besarla;
bajó, serena, los ojos
y me ofreció sus mejillas,
como quien pierde un tesoro.
—Caían las hojas muertas,
en el jardín silencioso,
y en el aire erraba aún
un perfume de heliotropos—.
No se atrevía a mirarme;
le dije que éramos novios,
. . . y las lágrimas rodaron
de sus ojos melancólicos.
ADOLESCENCE