"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" ("Platero and I") 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" ("War in Spain").