Word: platero
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...PLATERO AND I (159 pp.)-Juan Ramón Jiménez, translated by William and Mary Roberts-Duschnes...
...PLATERO AND I (218 pp.)-Juan Ramón Jiménez, translated by Eloïse Roach-University of Texas...
Tenuous Transition. More than a quarter of a century ago, Eloïse Roach fell in love with Poet Jiménez' best-loved book, Platero and I, determined to translate it. Many experts in Spanish literature (including Jiménez himself and his late wife), thought that the book's 138 prose poems were too delicate to make the transition to English. But in 1935 Teacher Roach traveled to Madrid and begged the shy, ailing Jiménez to look at the beginning she had made. Sitting on a couch together, the poet and his wife began...
...Platero? He "is a small donkey, a soft, hairy donkey: so soft to the touch that he might be said to be made of cotton, with no bones. Only the jet mirrors of his eyes are hard like two black crystal scarabs." He is the constant companion of Poet Jiménez as he walks along the streets of his Andalusian town of Moguer and revels in the beauties of the dramatic Spanish landscape that surrounds it. Sickly and reserved, Jiménez talks to Platero, pours out his poetic cries of delight and despair as he witnesses the beauties...
...form, the book follows the cycle of the year, and Jiménez is at his best when he evokes the look, the sound, the colors of each passing season. Before he finishes, he has sketched for Platero and the reader a charming and shrewd picture of Spanish life that has the delicacy of a pure lyric, the relentless candor of a reel of film. At the end, Platero is dead, victim of some poisonous root, and it is plain that Jiménez has lost a friend no human can replace...