The Poet and the Sea

4.2/5 ( ratings)

“This is a very valuable book! Dozens of poems are here that have never been translated into English before, and I think Berg and Maloney have done beautifully transferring Juan Ramon's enthusiastic calm from Spanish to English. Terrific.”—Robert Bly

“As he observes metaphysical somersaults of sea and land, Juan Ramón is the master of replete simplicity. 'A steel sea' pops up on a 'hard flat field/of exhausted mines/in a devastation of ruin.' Or, like Emily Dickinson’s 'hope falls down a hill,' Jiménez has, 'Hope, a seagull,/ alights here and there.' The utter nakedness of his verse touched virtually all modern Spanish poetry, directly engendering, for example, Rafael Alberti’s masterful sea book, Sailor on Land, and 'I walk the streets of the sea.' In The Poet and the Sea, a delicious book perfectly rendered by Mary Berg and Dennis Maloney, Juan Ramón has made essential pacts of intimacy with the great waters of the world. The seas grow in trickery and gravity in endless dramas as two figures emerge: a blind yet live sea and a poet who sees through the sea. The sea is a changing mirror of the poet who has imposed his vision on the whims of his companion sea.”—Willis Barnstone

This bilingual collection traces Juan Ramon Jimenez’s relationship with the sea, a major theme in his work, from his seminal book Diary of a Poet Recently Married alongside other poems from his body of work.

Seas

   I feel my boat
has struck something large
there, in the depths of the sea!

    And then nothing
happens! Nothing…Silence… Waves…

   Nothing happens? Or has everything happened And are we now, calm, in someplace new?

Juan Ramon Jimenez was a member of the Generation of 1898, which ushered in a renaissance in Spanish poetry. In 1956 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Translators Marg Berg and Dennis Maloney have previously collaborated on Antonio Machado’s book The Landscape of Castile.