Juan Ramón Jiménez Book order

“An exquisite book, rich, shimmering, and truly incomparable.” —The New Yorker This lyric portrait of a boy’s companionship with his little donkey, Platero, is the masterpiece of Juan Ramón Jiménez, the Spanish poet awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize for Literature. Poetic, elegiac, it reveals the simple pleasures of life in a in a remote Andalusian village and is a classic work of literature, beloved by adults and children alike.

Written while in exile in the United States, “Time” and “Space” were originally intended to appear together in a single volume. Not until 1986, however, did they appear so in Spanish— and not until 1988 were they published together in English. By presenting them together, Jiménez had wanted them to convey the same continuity of emotion, the same philosophical intensity, that he had experienced while writing them. “All My Life,” he wrote in his introduction, “I have toyed with the idea of writing a continuous poem...with no concrete theme, sustained only by its own surprise, its rhythm, its discoveries, its light, its successive joys; that is, its intrinsic elements, its essence.” That continuous poem is Time and Space the last book Jiménez wrote. Presented here in a bilingual edition, Time and Space will take readers of both English and Spanish on the longest and most sustained ride on the crest of poetry they will ever enjoy. “The greatest poem in this Century...” —Octavio Paz Antonio T. de Nicolás, translator and editor of Time and Space is also widely known for his highly acclaimed translation of the Juan Ramón Jiménez classic, Platero and I , as well as many other works in Spanish. His first book of poetry, Remembering the God to Come , is also being published by iUniverse.com.

The great Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956, was a mystic as will as a poet, and the deep spirituality which infuses so much of his writing makes itself felt with special fervor throughout this remarkable new collection of poems. Composed by Jiménez between the years 1917 to 1920, the works in this grouping vanished mysteriously, only to be rediscovered a half-century later among the author’s private papers. Published in Spain for the first time in 1983, they appear now at last in a bilingual edition, the English lovingly rendered by the scholar and poet Antonio T. de Nicolás, and introduced by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louis Simpson. This is a book of verse for the poet in all of us—it sings of the invisible realities which we carry in our hearts and which carry us through a life filled with symbols, toil and beauty. Juan Ramón Jiménez, an early twentieth century pioneer in the use of free verse and author of over 70 books has been hailed by The New Republic as “not only the dean of Hispanic poets, but the pioneer and the source of all those who wrote in the Spanish tongue after him.” Antonio T. de Nicolás is widely known for his translation of the Jiménez classic, Platero and I , which will also be republished through iUniverse.com.

"The development of my poetry has been and is the development of an encounter with an idea about God," the great Spanish poet and Nobel Prize winner Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote several years before his death. An early twentieth-century pioneer in the use of free verse, Jiménez has always expressed himself through mystery and profundity. Jiménez presents a fervent landscape of primordial imagery in an attempt to restore mystical poetry to its rightful place in literature and art.For anyone not familiar with the writings of this modern master, these austere and radiant poems in God Desired and Desiring, translated by the poet and scholar Antonio de Nicolás and presented alongside the original Spanish, will demonstrate why Jiménez is considered one of the masters of twentieth-century poetry. To what may this writing be compared? Whitman's Song of Myself comes to mind, but it is not with any intention of taking away from Whitman's achievement that I declare a preference for the poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez.