Juan Ramón Jiménez, on the terrace of his house on Lista Street in Madrid, in 1923. THE COUNTRY
"They are, without being from others, the least mine that is possible."
This is how Juan Ramón Jiménez defined his
Impersonal Poems,
a book that he began to write in 1911, almost at the end of a six-year retreat that he spent in Moguer (Huelva), and that accompanied him until 1954, when he undertook the last reorganization of his works complete, but never published.
Soledad González Ródenas, the great specialist in the work of the Nobel Prize, has produced an edition of
Impersonal Poems
in which it includes 47 unpublished poems and six corrected versions of texts that had appeared in previous compilations.
The book, published in the Vandalia collection of the José Manuel Lara Foundation, is the result of years of research among the hundreds of folders housed in the Sala Zenobia and Juan Ramón Jiménez of the University of Puerto Rico, to which he bequeathed his papers when he died in exile in 1958, and the National Historical Archive of Madrid.
“Almost everything that is conserved in Puerto Rico is uncategorized.
There are hundreds of folders that have not been studied, they were almost entirely scanned between 2006 and 2008, during the Zenobia-Juan Ramón Jiménez Triennium, but even so the archive is a jungle.
From that huge amount of texts Carmen Hernández-Pinzón, her great-niece and representative of the heirs, and González Ródenas have worked for years to organize the papers and have located these 53 poems, ”explained Rosa García Gutiérrez, director of the Juan Ramón Jiménez Chair at the University of Huelva, this Thursday at the Infanta Elena Library in Seville.
González Ródenas, who has not attended the presentation due to the mobility restrictions imposed during the pandemic, assures that most of these verses are composed between 1911 and 1923 and that although he never published
Impersonal Poems, he
had the book thought and structured in five sections titled
Preludes, Verses a, por, para…, Iconolojías, Al
encausto
and
Dejos.
"They are texts from a time of transition between modernist aesthetics and so-called naked poetry," writes the editor, who has published seven other works by the poet from Moguer.
“Juan Ramón Jiménez infects his students with his moral values, his honesty, his neatness and his taste for a job well done.
For this reason, the publisher has presented the five sections into which the author of
Platero and I
had divided the book, including in them several of the unpublished that appeared with a specific reference to those chapters ”, explained Ignacio Garmendia, critic and editor of the José Manuel Lara Foundation.
While 25 of the unpublished that lack that information are collected in a sect section
, Miscellaneous,
and another 24 that are unfinished appear in
Drafts.
Among the unpublished are
Ritmo de tren:
“The fresh green of flat vineyards.
The moon is hay over the mauve sky.
(Awake without an orient.) September morning.
/ Cool and sunny.
(They watched me sleep free. I opened my eyes and saw them laugh.) The moon is now life.
Harvest morning.
/ Fruit in the heart, fruit on the ground.
Nothing anymore, as always before, wait.
It's all realities.
Morning of the lover. "
or this extract from
Mediterranean Marina
: “Blacks, the great ships that magnify the hour / on the red sunset cut their bulk / between the confusion of the sky and the bay… / The tar opens its jaws to melancholy / that persists in me world of pleasures ... / An organ laughs and cries, and the women / of Venus, already painted, come out to the balconies / like shadow flowers ... Hearts smell ... "
Juan Ramón Jiménez never published
Impersonal Poems
, but he did include some of his verses in
Poesías escojidas
(1917) and in the later and widely spread
Second Poetic Anthology
(1922).
After his death, two editions have appeared, one by Francisco Garfias in 1964 and another by Francisco Silvera within
Obras de Juan Ramón Jiménez.
Chosen poetry II (1909-1913)
, but without the 53 unpublished items now collected in the Vandalia collection.
“Juan Ramón said that she had given birth poetically three times and that
Impersonal Poems
was her second birth.
A book in which he seeks an ethical and moral dimension of the poetic exercise.
A work in which he is clearing his future path and in which a style other than his poetic voice is distinguished.
'An alien line but mine', as he recognized ”, said Rosa García Gutiérrez.
"The inexhaustible Juan Ramón Jiménez never ceases to amaze us and this is a particularly unique book, within a work that is all unique," he concludes.