PUERTO RICO: Sorrowful Laureate

A grief-stricken old man, slumped in a bedside chair in a San Juan hospital room, received word last week that he had won the 1956 Nobel Prize for Literature. The news brought no glimmer of joy to the white-bearded face of Poet Juan Ramon Jimenez. Honor, fame, and money ($38,633) no longer mattered; his wife of 40 years,”the inspiration for my whole work,” as he once called her, was dying of cancer. He stood up and gently patted her hand. Then, reminded that the world expected him to say something for the occasion, he wrote out a statement: “All my gratitude to those who contributed to this undeserved reward. Because of the illness of my wife, the prize saddens me.” This week Senora Jimenez died, aged 69.

Laureate Jimenez, 74, has lived in the Americas for two decades, but by birth, education and citizenship he is Spanish. Illness in his youth made him aloof and hypochondriacal. His cheerful and practical wife Zenobia looked after him maternally, ran a handicrafts shop in Madrid so that he could work at his poetry without having to worry about earning a living. Shortly after their marriage, he wrote a collection of lyrics entitled Diario de un poeta recién casado (Diary of a Newlywed Poet), one of his finest works. That same productive year (1917) he published his most famous book, Platero y Yo (Silvery and I), a series of prose-poems telling of his walks in town and country with an amiable, silver-grey donkey. It is one of the great classics of modern Spanish literature, required reading for schoolchildren all over Latin America.

Jiménez is a man of strong likes and dislikes. He loves gardens and animals; he” detests noise, the letter G (in his poems he always uses J instead) and most modern Spanish-language poetry, especially the work of Chile’s Communist-lining Pablo Neruda. His favorite poet, Jimenez once said, is God. Jimenez’ own poetry is lyrical, impressionistic, polished, nonpolitical. Because of the translation barrier, he is little known outside the Spanish-speaking world, but within it he is widely regarded as the language’s greatest living poet.