"The beautiful elegiac text of Juan Ramón Jiménez"

The beautiful elegiac text of Juan Ramón Jiménez

Machado’s death inspires Juan Ramón to write one of the most beautiful elegiac texts in Spanish…and one of the most profound biographical sketches that we have of the Sevillian poet. Juan Ramón Jiménez knows how much his late friend had been burdened by the reality of death since childhood; “death was as much a part of his way of being as life was, two halves joined within him through poetry”, and he was touched upon learning that Machado crossed the border from Spain into France along with thousands of other Spanish refugees, “collectively humble and wretched, the pursued leader of the pack”. “All night with the high moon”, continues Juan Ramón, “the moon that comes from Spain and brings Spain with her mountains and her Antonio Machado reflected in her melancholic mirror. The moon: sad blue and green diamond reflected in the purple, felt, and crescent-shaped palm tree. An image seen from my little door. I am truly in exile. The ballad "Iris de la noche" ("Evening Rainbow") has been in the back of my half awakened mind, one of the most honored of Antonio Machado and one of the most beautiful I have read in my life”. (…)

Lorca is murdered by the fascists in Granada at the beginning of the war. And now, with the fratricidal war coming to an end, Machado dies of a broken heart in his exile in Colliure. Such deep pain! What an outrage!

Juan Ramón’s critiques of other writers, before, during, and after the Civil War, were sometimes harsh. He always insisted that he only spoke the truth as he saw it and understood it, never intending to hurt anyone. This was due to the unavoidable necessity to be true to himself; a poet living through, in, and for poetry. The author of Platero y yo believed that the authentic poet was one whose “voice was from the heart”, not “from the head”. He felt that Jorge Guillén and Pedro Salinas wrote with “voices from the head”, and he said so openly (which does not mean that they were being insulted). He could not stand José Bergamín; and he said so. He looked down on León Felipe; and he said so. Even Pablo Neruda was not a favorite of his in the beginning. But Juan Ramón was among those who knew how to change. He did so in the case of Neruda, and he told him so in a 1942 letter which the Chilean poet was emotionally moved by and responded to when in Mexico.

The Jiménez, with the United States now at war, live in Washington, where the poet has offered his services to the State Department. Once in a while newspaper clippings arrive from Franco’s Spain describing insidious attacks. On February 3, 1945 he published in Madrid’s El Español a biographical sketch of a friend of his, the ex vice president of the United States, Henry A. Wallace. It enrages Gaspar Gómez de la Serna, who in Informaciones accuses the poet of living beyond the social realities of his country, of having a language with no meaning, of being a “pure super poet”. “Apparently, he has insulated his room with cork”, ends the deliberated attack, “and he keeps shutting out the tragic noise of the street. But this isolation, which is not at all splendid, rather looks like the cold peace of tombs. Rest in peace don Juan Ramón!”. Juan Ramón Jiménez of course saves the clipping, so as to use it in his future book, Guerra en España.

Juan Ramón is used to being a poet disconnected from any type of social worry, an egoist detached from the troubles of the surrounding world. What Gaspar Gómez de la Serna just said is not an exception to the rule. Nine years earlier in Desterrado (Diario poético), a few days after leaving Spain and while crossing the Atlantic, Jiménez had noted: “My ‘separation’, my ‘sonorous solitude’, my ‘golden silence’ (which I have been reproached for, and for no good reason; people believe that I have placed myself in an ‘ivory tower’, but I have always imagined such a tower in a corner of my house and never being used), I did not learn them from any false aristocracy, but rather from the one true and possible aristocracy”. (…)

The Jiménez move from Washington to the city of Riverdale, so as to be closer to The University of Maryland where Zenobia already has a job position as a Spanish professor. The years go by and the poet grows older. In Riverdale in 1948 he receives an invitation to hold a few conferences in Argentina’s capital, where he has never been. (…)

In Buenos Aires, the magazine España Republicana asks him about the Spanish Civil War, about the fact that almost ten years after its end he has not gone back to Spain, about the rumor that he “fled” the war for selfish reasons. The interview creates a sense of nostalgia for the lost republic. “We continue the conversation”, says the interviewer, “and we have evoked Fernando de los Ríos, the subtle socialist from Granada, who is in the U.S. dying, still holding onto his humanist passion for a free Spain, and the late Azaña; and the great Unamuno, dying with the agony of Spain in the marrow of his bones; and the immense Antonio Machado, whose dying eyes from his definitive exodus on the shores of France looked longingly at the snowy peaks of the distant Pyrenees…, and the poor and brilliant Federico García Lorca, murdered in his hometown.

Yes, so many illustrious deaths, so many friends gone for good. Lorca’s triumphant stay in Argentina from 1933 to 1934 (when the Granada native met Pablo Suero for the first time) is a constant topic of conversation, as if it could be any other way. Juan Ramón now believes that the poet of Romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads), so obsessed with death (with death in general and with his death in particular) had a feeling in July of 1936 that the moment of truth was getting closer, and that, because of that, decided to confront it head on in Granada. Who knows! (…)

The documents published by Ángel Crespo show that Juan Ramón Jiménez was proud, till the end, of the dignity with which he had conducted himself before, during, and after a war that was for him, as it was for millions of his fellow countrymen and women, the shattering of his deepest dreams.

It also shows that he died with the pain of his mother country pierced in his soul. Since 1958, the remains of the poet, who refused to step foot in Franco’s Spain, rest next to Zenobia in the cemetery of his never forgotten and always yearned for Moguer, immortalized in the pages of Platero y yo, the text that had so bothered Dalí and Buñuel.