Showing posts with label Juan Ramón Jiménez. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Juan Ramón Jiménez. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 27, 2022

the people waiting






The ship, solid and black,
enters the clear blackness
of the great harbor.
Quiet and cold.

—The people waiting
are still asleep, dreaming,
and warm, far away and still stretched out in this 
dream, perhaps . . .

How real our watch is, beside the dream
of doubt the others had! How sure it is, compared
to their troubled dream about us!
Quiet. Silence.
Silence which in breaking up at dawn
will speak differently.






~ Juan Ramón Jiménez
 from Lorca and Jiménez: Selected Poems
translation by Robert Bly
art by picasso




Saturday, June 8, 2019

nothing








I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.

And nothing
happens! Nothing... Silence... Waves...

-Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?



~ Juan Ramon Jimenez
translated by Robert Bly

Van Gogh reuses a canvas that he’d already painted 
some two and a half years earlier in Nuenen: x-ray photos
 reveal the head of a woman with a cap under Patch of grass.




Friday, June 26, 2015

who knows what is going on





Who knows what is going on on the other side of each hour?

How many times the sunrise was
there, behind a mountain!

How many times the brilliant cloud piling up far off
was already a golden body full of thunder!

This rose was poison.

That sword gave life.

I was thinking of a flowery meadow
at the end of a road,
and found myself in the slough.

I was thinking of the greatness of what was human,
and found myself in the divine.




~ Juan Ramon Jimenez
English version by Robert Bly
with thanks to Poetry Chaikhana


Tuesday, March 2, 2010

I am not I


.





I am not I.

I am this one

walking beside me whom I do not see,

whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
who remains calm and silent while I talk,
and forgives gently, when I hate,
who walks where I am not,
who will remain standing when I die.











~ Juan Ramón Jiménez
translated by Robert Bly
photo by Frantisek Drtikol



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