Customer Reviews (2)

I'D LIKE SOME MORE
When I started getting into Spanish poetry the only real place I could go to read poets such as Juan Jimenez was my university library. You can't mark in library books though, well, I guess you can if you don't get caught, so I started combing bookstores for copies of my favorites. Besides Lorca, the great Spanish poets were non-existent on the bookshelves. Light and Shadows is an example of making do with a book even though it is a horrible representation of the poet Jimenez. The poems are great, I just needed more of them.

Jimenez is a poet who falls into the old cliche of the poet as a seeker of truth, the poet as a revealer who strips away the false surfaces of things and gets to the spiritual truth. In one poem, he says that he wishes poems, "like the sky, would yield at every moment all things" and that his greatest achievement would be to write a "naked book". He wants to get to the basic essence of all things. In one poem, "To Dante", he gives the ulitmate compliment to his fellow poet by writing "Your sonnet is like/ a nude and chaste woman/ who set me on her lap/ embracing me with her celestial arms". He is struggling for purity of mind, of emotion in all his poems.

Jimenez is no epic writer. He writes efficent short lyrical poetry for the most part. He is a great nature poet too, echoing more than once the feel and style of Japanese and Chinese haiku and epigrams. He is also a sensualist along the lines of John Keats. When he combines his nature and sense strains he is particularly effective.

The best work in this book is a series of prose poems taken from a diary he wrote while he was visiting New York City in which he comments on the vibe of the city and its hypocritic literati. There are too few of these entries included in this book. In fact, there's too few of everything. If his entire collected works weighed a ton, this representation would weigh an ounce.

That brings me to the problem of this book. In the prologue, the editor says that he is producing this book because not enough of Jimenez's work is available to the english reading public. Originally, he had produced a pamphlet of 14 poems. After reading this book, the problem still remains. This book is really nothing more than a pamphlet in my mind. It contains 47 pages of poetry and and the other 20 pages are excerpts from Platero and I, a prose piece about a boy and his donkey. Personally, the inclusion of Platero is needless. I wanted more poems.

The poems that are in here are quite good but there's just simply not enough of them. Jimenez wrote poems for 50 years and this is the best you can do, include the equivalent of maybe 2 poems for every year of his life? Looking on Amazon, I see much more promising editions of his work, so maybe they will be more satisfying than this teaser of a book. Demand more than this.

If you read poetry, read this
It is a great shame that so few people nowadays read poetry.I suspect that it was the way it was taught in most high school English classes that has turned off everyone except diehards like myself. There is a subtle joyabout Jimenez, a way of seeing the magical in the simplest experience thatsets him apart.Read this man.There is a reason why he won the NobelPrize.He deserved it, which, sadly, is not something you can say aboutmany of the recipients. ... Read more

Book Description
Selections from a classic of world literature present a picture of life in the town of Moguer, in Andalusia, Spain. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

ok
it wasnt the real book as i expected i guess it was just a part of the book so i didnt get what i wanted

Platero y yo/Platero and I
The quality of the product is very good. The selection of the poems rather limited. Beautiful poems (i.e., "Angelus", "La flor del camino") were left out from the original selection. In general, I am please with the product.

One concern that I would like to express regarding the "one click" purchase option is that one should be able to choose his/her preferred mailing options. I was in no rush to receive this book and end up paying a shipping over 50% of the product price. No options to edit or preview before finalizing your purchase. I am afraid will avoid the "one click" experience in the future.

Dar'bon, the mild anti-hero and Platero
A very sweet book and touching story.Not for the cynical. Read and try to imagine various friends and family members in the roles of these characters, as my friend did to me, calling me Dar'bon, as to my propensity at the time for burping and such, and while reading, laugh and celebrate a provincial, simple and endearing story of a simple lifestyle rich with meaning.Classic!

The Complete Platero
This translation of Platero and I is the only "complete" translation into English of the Spanish Classic. It is also the most Spanish! This refers to the paperback edition.

The Return to Simplicity
This is a beautiful little book by a Nobel Prize Winner of Literature that is too often neglected, Juan Ramon Jimenez.

Only Jimenez could make the blood of a leach in a stream of water into beautiful imagery.Children read this book as part of their curriculum in Argentina, however, this book can be equally enjoyed and appreciated by adults.

The story is a simple one: it is a first person (semi-autobiographical) account of a poet and his donkey in the mountains of Spain, appreciating, almost Zen-like, the simple beauties of life.The elements, children playing, leaches bleeding in a pool, everything seems beautiful in this book, and the descriptions are exquisite.

This is probably the best introduction to Jimenez, a book not to be missed! ... Read more

Book Description
Written while in exile in the United States, “Time” and “Space” were originally intended to appear together in a single volume. Not until 1986, however, did they appear so in Spanish— and not until 1988 were they published together in English. By presenting them together, Jiménez had wanted them to convey the same continuity of emotion, the same philosophical intensity, that he had experienced while writing them. “All My Life,” he wrote in his introduction, “I have toyed with the idea of writing a continuous poem...with no concrete theme, sustained only by its own surprise, its rhythm, its discoveries, its light, its successive joys; that is, its intrinsic elements, its essence.” That continuous poem is Time and Space the last book Jiménez wrote. Presented here in a bilingual edition, Time and Space will take readers of both English and Spanish on the longest and most sustained ride on the crest of poetry they will ever enjoy.

“The greatest poem in this Century...” —Octavio Paz

Antonio T. de Nicolás, translator and editor of Time and Space is also widely known for his highly acclaimed translation of the Juan Ramón Jiménez classic, Platero and I, as well as many other works in Spanish. His first book of poetry, Remembering the God to Come, is also being published by iUniverse.com. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

No better long poem in the 20th Century!
Octavio Paz, another Noble Prize Winner called this poem:
" The greatest poem of this Century (20th)..." ... Read more