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    Invisible Reality
    Invisible Reality
    Invisible Reality
    Ebook171 pages1 hour

    Invisible Reality

    By Juan Ramón Jiménez

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    About this ebook

    The great Spanish poet Juan Ramn Jimnez, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956, was a mystic as will as a poet, and the deep spirituality which infuses so much of his writing makes itself felt with special fervor throughout this remarkable new collection of poems.
    Composed by Jimnez between the years 1917 to 1920, the works in this grouping vanished mysteriously, only to be rediscovered a half-century later among the authors private papers. Published in Spain for the first time in 1983, they appear now at last in a bilingual edition, the English lovingly rendered by the scholar and poet Antonio T. de Nicols, and introduced by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louis Simpson. This is a book of verse for the poet in all of usit sings of the invisible realities which we carry in our hearts and which carry us through a life filled with symbols, toil and beauty.

    Juan Ramn Jimnez, an early twentieth century pioneer in the use of free verse and author of over 70 books has been hailed by The New Republic as not only the dean of Hispanic poets, but the pioneer and the source of all those who wrote in the Spanish tongue after him. Antonio T. de Nicols is widely known for his translation of the Jimnez classic, Platero and I, which will also be republished through iUniverse.com.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateMar 24, 2000
    ISBN9781462087303
    Invisible Reality

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      Book preview

      Invisible Reality - Juan Ramón Jiménez

      Invisible Reality

      All Rights Reserved © 1987, 2000 by Antonio de Nicolás

      No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

      Published by toExcel

      an imprint of iUniverse.com, Inc.

      For information address:

      iUniverse.com, Inc.

      620 North 48th Street

      Suite 201

      Lincoln, NE 68504-3467

      www. iuniverse. com

      Originally published by Paragon House

      ISBN: 0-595-00259-5

      ISBN: 978-1-4620-8730-3 (ebk)

      CONTENTS

      ACKNOWLEDGMENT

      TRANSLATOR’S DEDICATION

      INTRODUCTION

      TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

      LA REALIDAD INVISIBLE

      A LA VEJEZ AMADA

      LA REALIDAD INVISIBLE

      APÉNDICES

      APPENDIX

      Invisible Reality

      (1917-1920,1924)

      Image556.PNG

      LA REALIDAD INVISIBLE

      (1917-1920,1924)

      LA REALIDAD INVISIBLE

      (1917-1920,1924)

      Image563.PNGImage580.PNG

      ACKNOWLEDGMENT

      Louis Simpson helped to make the invisible reality of this book more clearly visible.

      Image580.PNG

      TRANSLATOR’S DEDICATION

      Like two shooting stars

      our wills crossed

      through tunnels of

      flesh

      leaving a trail of

      light in the humans

      we touched

      our passage

      too fast to stay

      within the orbit of

      one single embrace

      condemned to fly

      from door to door

      breaking through

      the house

      flnding no home

      until we came

      face to face

      in the dark sky

      and broke the night

      into a rain of

      light

      that came down on

      the earth

      as the trembling

      seeds of

      a forest of memories.

      Image587.PNG

      INTRODUCTION

      The poetry of God Desired and Desiring bore witness to Juan Ramón Jiménez’s wrestling with God. Invisible Reality is the song of a man who has come through.

      Unique birds sing,

      I know not if on these trees

      or on those of the other shore …

      For many people, especially if they have been brought up in a culture with a strong Puritan component, the idea of spiritual life being rear requires an extraordinary effort—it goes against the grain. The ideal of a soul, eternity, and heaven, requires a trying-to-believe—in short, religion. One thinks of Sundays and long, boring sermons. Poets in this tradition who have spoken of spiritual life have done so against the odds—they have felt obliged to jus- tify the ways of God to men by glorifying God. For this reason Samuel John- son thought that poetry should not be written on religious subjects—it must inevitably belittle the subject. But suppose the poet is not trying to persuade? Suppose he is not concerned with religion, but is expressing his joy in the universe? The heaven Juan Ramón speaks of is not something to be believed in, it is all around us. Like Blake, he sees a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower."

      Reality is not in another, distant place where we shall go when we are dead. We shall not reach Paradise by divesting ourselves of our senses and every- thing we have loved and cherished on earth. The invisible reality is also visible; it has a sky, clouds, leaves, earth, earthquakes, winds, fires, and storms.

      This poetry is the opposite of the way of thinking that divorces earth from heaven and body from soul, that drove Adam and Eve out of Paradise and speaks of the world as a vale of suffering. In Invisible Reality the body is a universe.

      I am the center of my immense world,

      you, the center of yours.

      The bodies of lovers are

      Two universes …

      mutually penetrating

      with a desire for two eternities.

      Jiménez speaks of his debt to Rimbaud. Rimbaud was a visionary, not a symbolist poet—the things he saw with the mind’s eye were as real as things perceived with the other senses. I saw plainly, Rimbaud tells us, a mosque standing in the place of a factory, a school with drums being beaten by angels, carriages on the roads of heaven, a drawing-room at the bottom of a lake. Rimbaud does not intend his visions to have a hidden, ulterior meaning— they are to strike us as realities. And so it is with the poetry of Jiménez:

      The air extends bridges

      from everything to everything else;

      and the heart walks up and down on them in peace …

      These bridges are bridges, not figures of speech. Jiménez inhabits a universe of direct perception. His phrase for this kind of writing is poesía desnuda, or naked poetry.

      Our poets hardly know how to write without using similes and metaphors; if they imagine a thing they must compare it to another thing that has a tangible, physical reality. This is the result of a way of thinking that separates matter from spirit. But poesía desnuda sees the two as one, as in experience we perceive them to be. Who that has ever loved does not know that body and spirit are one? In a poem by Jiménez the soul is a rose in the park— not like a rose, but the thing itself. The unusual proposition brought for- ward in this poetry is that matter is imbued with meaning and we are already living in eternity.

      The idea may be so obvious that we cannot see it—or hard to accept, for it makes a demand upon us—we are required to feel that we are alive. Real life is not a four-star hotel, El Paradiso, to which we shall come after a life- time of denying the joy and beauty of the world and believing certain prop- ositions in spite of the evidence of our senses. Instead, we are required to cooperate here and now in the making of reality,

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