A Juan Ramón Jiménez 致胡安 拉蒙 希梅內斯

Another poet to whom Machado paid tribute is Juan Ramón Jiménez( 1881-1958). Jiménez won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1956. He was born on Christmas eve at Moguer, Andalucia in 1881. He was the son of a banker and began writing his first poem at age 7! He attended a Jesuit academy at Cadiz and later entered the U of Sevilla. Like so many other Spanish poets and writers eg. Franciso Giner de los Rios (1939-1915), Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), José Martínez Ruiz (Azorin) (1837-1967) , Pedro Salinas (1891-1951) Valle-Inclán (1866-1936), Dámaso Alonso( 1898-1990) , Vincente Aleixandre (1898-1984), Manuel Altolaguirre (1905-1959), Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) etc. he studied law. But after graduating at the University of Sevilla, he did not become a lawyer. For a time, he was interested in painting which he later abandoned and then devoted himself entirely to literature. He first published two books at the age of 18 but when his father died, he suffered a depression and went to France where he had an affair with his doctor's wife and was then sent to a sanatorium served by novitiate nuns, where for 2 years from 1901, he purportedly had more affairs with some of the novitates in respect of which he later wrote some erotic poems in 1911 and 1912. Upon the discovery of these goings-on, he was expelled. All through his life, he was haunted by the spectre of death.

Shortly after his expulsion, he fell in love with a female translator of the love poems of the famous Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. She was Zenobia Camprubi, a Puerto Rican educated in America and Spain, who later became his wife. He wanted to publish some erotic poems of his own too but abandoned the idea upon Zenobia's objection.  It was not until 2007 that those erotic poems were published under the name of Libros de amor (Books of love) . Between 24 and 31, he published 9 volumes of poetry. e.g Almas de Violet, Ninefeas (1900) Rimas (1902), Arias Tristes (1903), Jardines Lejanos (1904) and Pastorales (1905), Elegias Puras (1908), Baladas de primavera (1910). He is known principally for his poems on love, music and color. He was much imfluenced by Impressionist paintings and music. We find abundant traces of such in his poems. But he is best known for his prose poem Platero and I which chronicles the journey of the narrator from town and countryside, one silent and one vociferous. In his poem collection Belleza (1923), he wrote about beauty. In his later life, he worked principally as a literary critic and as editor of various literary journals in Spain. According to some, his most important poetic works may be the following: Sonetos espirituales 1914-1915 (1916), Piedra y Cielo (1919), Poesía, En Verso (1923), Poesía en prosa y verso 1917-1923 (1932), Voces de mi copla (1945), Animal de fondo (1947), La estacíon total con las canciones de la nueva lux (1946), His critical work includes El Modernismo (1962), Estéticia y ética estética (1967)

For a brief period he was appointed as the hononary cultural attaché of Spain in USA but when the Francoists got control of the government in 1939, he remained abroad and in 1951, he settled in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he became a university lecturer. But the same year he won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1956, his wife died. He never recovered from the blow and died two years later at San Juan.

Here is Mochado's homage to him with my translations:  

A Juan Ramón Jiménez                 To Juan Ramón Jiménez                               致胡安 拉蒙 希梅內斯

( los jardines del poeta)                      (the poet's gardens)                                           (詩人花園)

 

El poeta es jardinero. En sus jardines The poet is a gardener. In his gardens            詩人是園丁。在他花圍

corre sutil la brisa                            blows the gentle breeze                                  淡雅微風在游走

con livianos acordes de violines,         with light cords of violins,                           伴着小提琴之輕絃，

llanto de ruiseñores,                         the weeping of nightingales,                         夜鶯之啜泣，

ecos de voz lejana y clara risa             echoes of distant voice and bright laughter   迥响着年青愛侶

de jóvenes amanates habladores.          of garruslous young lovers.                         喋喋不休的清澈笑声。

Y otros jardines tiene. Allí la fuente     There are other gardens. There the fountain  亦有別的花圍。在哪

le dice: Te conozco y te esperaba.         tells him: I know you and I waited  for you.   噴泉對他說：我認識你亦期待你

Y él, al verse en la onda transparente:   and he, upon the turn of the clear wave:       而他，在那清浪轉身時：

¡Apenas soy aquel que ayer soñaba!     I am hardly that which you dreamt yesterday!我已不是我昔所夢者！

Y otros jardines tiene. Los jazmines     And there are other gardens. The jasmin       亦有別的花圍。眾茉莉花

añoran ya verbenas del estío,              long for the verbenas of the estuary,             仍渴望河口的那些華剔娜舞蹈，

y son liras de aroma estos jardines,      and their lyric aroma in such gardens,               與其在這些花園的芳香豎琴，

dulces liras que tañe el viento frío.        sweet lyres which the cold wind strums.       那些被寒風調撥甜曳曳的豎琴。

Y van pasando solitarias horas,            the lonely hours go by,                              寂莫的時光溜過，

y ya las fuentes, a la luna llena,            and already the fountains, to the full moon,  噴泉已向圓月，

suspiran en los mármoles, cantoras,      sigh within the marbles, singers,                 在歌唱的大理石中輕嘆，

y en todo el aire sólo el aqua suena.      and the water dreams of the air, alone.         整個天空唯獨水在壽夢。

In this poem, Mochado gives tribute to one of his fellow poets Juan Ramón Jiménez.  To him, a poet lives in different kinds of garden and the poet may be viewed as the person who sows the seeds, waters the plants and flowers, from time to time gives them fertilizers, prunes their leaves and branches, removes the vermins until they grow exotic flowers of all colors and wonderful shapes and scent the air with their peculiar fragrances. Such gardens are always accompanied by music, the song birds of Nature and the lovers' cries and whispers. 

But to Mochado, a poet may have more than one kind of garden. There may be a garden of the poet's self, his present, his past, his future, his memories and his dreams, where the poet may express his nostagias and his regrets and his hopes. It is the garden of time. The poet may also have a garden where he quietly nurtures hopes of celebrating Nature with songs and dances and may again indulge in the pleasures of rhythms which concretely embodies the incessant urge of life to express itself in movement. In this poem, he talks of the jasmins waiting patiently for the coming of the festivals for rejoicing the arrival of spring at the mouth of the river. This is a complex image. 

For Mochado, life is always associated with time, with the passage and the cycles of time. Time passes, never to return. But to Mochado, there is still hope. Time may repeat itself in cycles. There are the cycles of day and night and of the seasons. There are cycles for the germination, growth, maturity, flowering, fruition and death of plants. There are cycles of birth, development, mating, weakening and death of all kinds of animal life including that of the human being. There are all other kinds of recycling of the earth's resources discovered by our ecologists, all operating within the cycle of time. The cylic nature of time thus allows a measure of hope such that when we are down and out, we may still dream and hope for a better time to come. Here, Mochado talks of the jasmins longing for the verbenas with its dances. He compares the jasmins to singing lyres, strummed by the bitter cold winds of winter. But there is still hope because winter will be followed by springs and summers.  

In this poem Mochado uses a complex image, "verbenas".  According to the Real Academia, "verbena" is an annual herbaceous plant, of the family of  "Verbenáceas", with a stalk of of sixty to eighty centimeter high, straight with branches on top, cracked or split leaves, flowers of different colors, tips of long and thin spines and dry fruit with two or four compartments and as many seeds commonly growing in Spain but it can also mean a popular festival with dances celebrated during the night, in open air and normally in connection with some feast or other. Thus its use has both implications, another example of Machado's use of ambiguity to enrich the meaning of his poem.

Mochado combines here the image of the jasmins yearning for the vebenas with the mouth of the river where the festival occurs. An estuary is a place where a river joins the sea. It is thus a place where one river theoretically joins with all the other rivers of the world which all ultimately end up in the very same body of water which we call the seas or oceans. The sea is also the source of all animal life, including that our distant ancestors. We were all once fishes. The male sperm still retains that form. Our blood is still saline. The image of the estuary thus confers upon the poem the possibility of its connection with something far greater: the source of all Life. The estuary is a window opening out on to the entire world.

In the final part of the poem, Mochado talks again of his favourite themes: time and of water. He talks of the hours going by but as time passes, the fountains are sighing but also singing amidst the marbles and dreaming of something else, the sky. The fountains want to leave where they were, rooted to the ground. They want to rise above themselves. They want to transcend their limitation and reach out for the sky and for the brightness of the full moon. But they are alone: back to his theme of loneliness. Is Mochado suggesting that the fountains are the poets? Or are they what the poets concern themselves with?