"This is a very valuable book! Dozens of poems are here that have never
been translated into English before, and I think Berg and Maloney have
done beautifully transferring Juan Ramon's enthusiastic calm from
Spanish to English. Terrific."--**Robert Bly
**
"As he observes metaphysical somersaults of sea and land, Juan Ramón is
the master of replete simplicity. 'A steel sea' pops up on a 'hard flat
field/of exhausted mines/in a devastation of ruin.' Or, like Emily
Dickinson's 'hope falls down a hill, ' Jiménez has, 'Hope, a seagull, /
alights here and there.' The utter nakedness of his verse touched
virtually all modern Spanish poetry, directly engendering, for example,
Rafael Alberti's masterful sea book, Sailor on Land, and 'I walk the
streets of the sea.' In The Poet and the Sea, a delicious book perfectly
rendered by Mary Berg and Dennis Maloney, Juan Ramón has made essential
pacts of intimacy with the great waters of the world. The seas grow in
trickery and gravity in endless dramas as two figures emerge: a blind
yet live sea and a poet who sees through the sea. The sea is a changing
mirror of the poet who has imposed his vision on the whims of his
companion sea."--**Willis Barnstone
**
This bilingual collection traces Juan Ramon Jimenez's relationship with
the sea, a major theme in his work, from his seminal book Diary of a
Poet Recently Married alongside other poems from his body of work.
Seas
I feel my boat
has struck something large
there, in the depths of the sea!
And then nothing
happens! Nothing...Silence... Waves...
Nothing happens? Or has everything happened And are we now, calm, in
someplace new?
Juan Ramon Jimenez (1881-1958) was a member of the Generation of
1898, which ushered in a renaissance in Spanish poetry. In 1956 he
received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Translators Marg Berg and Dennis Maloney have previously
collaborated on Antonio Machado's book The Landscape of Castile.
