Diary of a Newlywed Poet

A Bilingual Edition of Diario de un poeta reciencasado

by JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ

With an Introduction by MICHAEL P. PREDMORE

Translation by HUGH A. HARTER

The Diary of a Newlywed Poet narrates the round-trip journey of the poet, who traveled by train and by boat from Madrid to New York City to marry his fiancée Zenobia Camprubí, and then returned with his bride to Spain . He recorded this transatlantic experi ence in an intimate diary, an intense work of highly symbolic poetry, which was to dramatically change the landscape of twentieth-century Hispanic lyric poetry.

The Diary is an extraordinarily innovative and complex work of both prose and poetry. It stands among the first works of prose in the Spanish language to capture the images and urban landscapes of New York City , revealing as well surprising degrees of modernity and social sensitivity. It is equally innovative in its cultivation of free verse, and historically important for introducing, for the first time in Spanish literature, a new mode of poetic composition.

Both the translation of the text into English and the interpretation of the work offered in the introduction are based upon the conviction that no other Hispanic poet of his time had Jiménez's capacity for assimilation and imagi-
native transformation of the great achievements of romantic and symbolist poetry. Through a profound exploration of the workings of his own mind, transformed and conveyed through the symbolic language of the Diary, Jiménez has created a vast mental universe and has been the first Spanish poet to create a new poetic language adequate to capture the private drama and adventure of self-discovery and rebirth. With the Diary, a new mode of poetic composition achieves its maturity in Spanish literature. The individual poem loses its relative autonomy, becomes inextricably dependent upon a larger whole, and acquires meaning only through the coherence of a new semantic system. The private symbolism and the consequent hermeticism characterize this new mode of symbolic creation, designed to express the private inner being of the poetic personality.

Within a brilliant tradition of modern European lyric poetry, Juan Ramón Jiménez stands as a key link in a chain of continuity that extends from Blake to Shelley, to Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Yeats, to García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Jorge Guillén, and Vicente Aleixandre. It is the profound legacy of the great romantic-symbolist poetry that crossed the frontier and took root in Spain , assimilated, transformed, and enriched in the masterpiece of Juan Ramón Jiménez, that led to the remarkable flowering of Spanish lyric poetry in the following generation of outstanding Hispanic poets, and endured in some of these greatest poets well into the twentieth century.

LC 2003067340

ISBN 1-57591-074-8

Printed in the U.S.A.

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