Juan Ramon Jiménez

Ramón Jiménez was born in Moguer, near Huelva, in Andalusia, Spain, on 24 December 1881. He studied law at the University of Seville, but he declined to put this training to use.

Strongly influenced by the poet Rubén Darío, he published his first two books at the age of eighteen, in 1900. The death of his father in this same year affected him deeply, and the resulting depression led to his being sent first to France, where he had an affair with his doctor's wife, and then to a sanatorium in Madrid staffed by novitiate nuns, where he lived from 1901 to 1903. In 1911 and 1912, he wrote many erotic poems depicting romps with numerous females in numerous locales. Some of them alluded to sex with novitiates who were nurses. Eventually, apparently, their mother superior discovered the activity and expelled him, although it will probably never be known for certain whether the depictions of sex with novitiates were truth or fantasy. In 1913, he met and fell in love with Zenobia Camprubí, a noted translator of the Indian writer, Rabindranath Tagore. Shortly thereafter, he published a book of mildly erotic poems and made plans to publish the franker ones. But he abandoned his intention when Zenobia reacted with disgust and ire to the first erotic book. The other poems were to remain secret until 2007, when about a hundred of them were published under the title, Libros de amor (Books of love). In the description by the book's editor, "without abandoning his profound lyricism and transcendence, Juan Ramón here reflects a very explicit eroticism and sexuality which were alien to the time and concretely to Spanish lyric poetry".

He celebrated his home region in his prose-poem about a writer and his donkey, called Platero y Yo (1914). In 1916 he and Zenobia got married in the United States. Zenobia became his indispensable companion and collaborator.

Upon the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he and Zenobia went into exile in Cuba, the United States, and Puerto Rico, where he settled in 1946. Ramón Jiménez was hospitalized for eight months due to another deep depression. Later he became a Professor of Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Maryland at College Park.


Although primarily a poet, Ramón Jiménez achieved popularity in the United States with the translation of his prose work Platero y yo (1917; "Platero and I"), the story of a man and his donkey. He also collaborated with his wife in the translation of the Irish playwright John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea (1920). His poetic output during his life was immense. Among his better-known works are Sonetos espirituales (Spiritual Sonnets); Piedra y cielo (Stones and Sky); Poesía en prosa y verso (Poetry in Prose and Verse); Voces de mi copla (Voices of My Song) and Animal de fondo (Animal at Bottom).

His literary influence on Puerto Rican writers is felt deeply in the works of island writers Giannina Braschi, René Marqués, and Manuel Ramos Otero.


In 1956, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature; three days later, his wife died of vaginal cancer. Ramón Jiménez never quite recuperated from this loss. He died two years afterwards, on 29 May 1958, in the same clinic where his wife had died. Both are buried in Spain.

A collection of 300 poems written between 1903 and 1953, was translated to English by Eloise Roach and published in 1962.