Lorca & Jimenez by Robert Bly

Lorca & Jimenez by Robert Bly

Author:Robert Bly [Bly, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807062128
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 1997-11-15T05:00:00+00:00


This stanza was from one of the most transparent and lively of Juan Ramón’s poems; I had taken two lines from the stanza as an epigraph for a poem I had published in La Verdad, one of those he praised so much:

blue blouse, and against his chest

the chain that works miracles!

The welcome Juan Ramón gave me, which was like the welcome he gave all the poets beginning to appear at that time, though he perhaps showed me preference over the others, was encouraging and warm, and inspired in me a faith and a self-confidence I hadn’t possessed until then. He asked me to let him see more of my things and so the next day I brought him a group of short poems from which he himself made a selection and published in SI, a review of poetry and prose he edited under the pen name of “The Universal Andalusian.”

Those first poems of mine were from Marinero en tierra (Sailor on land) a book that shortly after was given the National Award for Literature, together with Gerardo Diego’s Versos humanos. Offering me further proof of his esteem, Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote me the fine letter I have since published as a preface to my poems.

In Buenos Aires now, from my small balcony overlooking the River Plate, here among my red cardinals and my run-down pots of blackened geraniums, my memory goes northwards up the river, and takes me past the image I have of Juan Ramón in Madrid, lively-eyed in his roof-house of honeysuckles and morning glories, to the picture of the present Juan Ramón, a survivor in America of the immense Spanish catastrophe—living brother of Antonio Machado, who was a genuine piece of the earth sacrificed—like Machado he is a master, a wandering magnificent voice of our country.

RAFAEL ALBERTI

Buenos Aires, 1945

translated by

Hardie St. Martin



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