The Poet and the Sea
AUTHOR
Juan Ramon Jimenez
TRANSLATORS
Mary Berg and Dennis Maloney
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.
Reviews
“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
Mary G. Berg's recent translations from Spanish include the edited volume Open Your Eyes and Soar: Cuban Women Writing Now (2003) and the novels I've Forgotten Your Name (2004) by the Dominican Martha Rivera; River of Sorrows (2000) by the Argentinean Libertad Demitrópulos; and Ximena at the Crossroads (1998) by the Peruvian Laura Riesco, as well as stories, women's travel accounts, literary criticism, and collections of poetry, most recently Quincunx and The Book of Giulio Camillo by the Cuban Carlota Caulfield (Cuba). She and Dennis Maloney have translated twentieth-century Spanish poetry, including Antonio Machado's There Is No Road (2003), and The Landscape of Castile (bilingual, 2005). She teaches at Harvard Extension and is a Resident Scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, where she writes about Latin American writers, including Clorinda Matto de Turner, Juana Manuela Gorriti, Soledad Acosta de Samper, and contemporary Cubans.
Dennis Maloney is a poet and translator. A number of volumes of his own poetry have been published including The Map Is Not the Territory: Poems & Translations and Just Enough, and Listening to Tao Yuan Ming. A bilingual German/English volume, Empty Cup was published in Germany in 2017. Recent collections include The Things I Notice Now and The Faces of Guan Yin. His poems have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Juan Ramon Jimenez (1881–1958) 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.