Review

Eternidades / Eternities Review
Marco Antolin / Issue 19.1 /

Eternidades (“Eternities”) by Juan Ramón Jiménez, Translated with an Introduction and Notes by A. F. Moritz

Eternity is only in the present. Who
“has” the present, has eternity.[1]

Devastated by the tragic death of his wife Zenobia Camprubí, the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez did not personally attend the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, 1956, when he was meant to receive the prestigious literary award. Instead, he sent a personal representative to read, in addition to his recognition speech, a brief banquet message on his behalf: “My wife Zenobia is the true winner of this Prize. Her companionship, her help, her inspiration made, for forty years, my work possible. Today, without her, I am desolate and helpless.”[2] Prior to this message, a Swedish Academy member had praised Jiménez for “the depth and richness of a rare poetic imagination,”[3] when presenting him with the prize.

Four decades before receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, Jiménez had written the poems dedicated to Zenobia in the collection published in 1918, Eternidades. The book, widely regarded as one of the foundational works of modern Spanish literature, cemented his reputation as an iconic figure of pure poetry. It is presently available in a bilingual edition titled Eternities by A. F. Moritz, a poet himself (Poet Laureate of Toronto in 2019) and the author of several published translations. Brilliantly formatted by The Bitter Oleander Press, the collection features 137 poetic pieces, an extensive introduction, notes on the translation, and an appendix with eleven extra poems that had been destined for Eternities or were related to it. Moritz states that his translation is from an edition published in 2007 by Professor Emilio Ríos that compares all the previous published versions by Jiménez in various anthologies alongside others found in Jiménez’s papers.[4]

Jiménez has a unique way of organizing the poems in this book. They operate in two levels: as standalone pieces responding to their immediate neighbors and as an overarching single sequence. Some are designated with titles, whereas others remain untitled. Some consist of several stanzas; others are no longer than four lines in length. Moritz reminds us, in the notes on the translation and text, that he has followed Jiménez’s unusual and significant usage practices with punctuation marks and “similar techniques invented by Jiménez to organize the book as a whole, rather than an individual poem.” [5]

…………….

Born in Moguer, the historic town in southern Spain where Christopher Columbus swore his oath, Jiménez was drawn to poetry at an early age, writing highly intimate, melancholic poetry heavily influenced by German Romanticism and French Symbolism. Before he reached the age of 20, prominent Spanish modernistas (as they called themselves) invited him to Madrid, sparking a period of writing shaped by their mentorship. This creative stage was rendered in classical meters and heavily embellished diction characteristic of Modernism, led in Spain by Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. After a journey to the United States in 1916, his verse evolved into a new stylistic phase, a more austere expression and minimalist style stripped of ornamentation, which he termed “poesía desnuda” (“naked poetry”). Jiménez’s poetic evolution from his early romantic, melancholic tones to modernist adornment, and then, to the pursuit of a pure, essential poetry is chronicled in Poem 5, “Poetry,” which starts:

SHE came, first, pure,
dressed in innocence:
and I loved her as a boy loves.

Then she was putting on
fashions it’s hard to describe;
and not knowing, I began to hate her.

She arrived at being a queen,
splendid in treasures…
What senseless rage of resentment![6]

Poetry, as a literary form, is represented through a woman who entered his life during his early years and whom he loved with a sincerity that was untouched by the world. Over time, he grew frustrated because she started “putting on / fashions” and ostentatious clothes, “splendid in treasures,”[7] symbolizing the period in his poetry dominated by ornamentation. His enthusiasm will turn toward resentment finding the excessive embellishments false. However, when she started “to undress,” the speaker renewed his connection to her, recovering the profound and untethered sincerity of the first bond: “I believed in her again.”[8] In the concluding stanza, he achieves his idea of stripped-down poetry that is honest, direct, and unvarnished:

And she dropped the shift
and showed herself naked, all …
O passion of my life, naked
poetry, mine forever![9]

Linking physical intimacy with creative expression, Moritz is successful at preserving the interactive dialogue within the poem in which the speaker talks, argues, or thinks quietly to their own mind or heart suggesting that true beauty and truth require stripping away artifice: “O passion of my life, naked / poetry, mine forever.” In addition, Moritz’s use of punctuation as well as precise grammatical and syntactical decisions show his mastery of the source and target language. The inclusion of a comma after the word “naked,” in the last stanza, which is not present in the source language: (“y apareció desnuda toda…”) “and showed herself naked, all…” captures the sense of accomplishment experienced by the author after reaching a satisfactory means of expression that fits his poetic search.

The dialogic feature is a common denominator in the entire collection, but the poems lack thematic or narrative continuity, functioning as distinct entities, gradually converging toward a reckonable center of gravity to form a cohesive picture or to build a unified vision. As Moritz explains, “the poems have a radial interconnection, rather than a linear, narrative, or logical one. Better said, perhaps, they are constellated. They unite as dispersed points within an area (an orbit or ambit, to use words that Jiménez loved) and with a gradually locatable center of gravity- points that make up a picture and a story.”[10]

One of these centers of gravity, which at the same time has been a recurring theme in Jiménez’s literary work, is the artist’s quest to meticulously craft every word to perfection, transforming the work into a self-reflective exploration of personal doubt and the human condition. Instead of an unattainable ideal or a lack of failure, he defines perfection as the passion animating our everyday labor. “I do not believe in perfection. I would believe in “impossible successive perfection,” as in “possible, successive imperfection,” he wrote.[11] As he also expressed in one of his numerous concise thoughts on poetic perfection: “Poetry is further from the seeker than god is from the mystic or truth is from the philosopher,” clarifying why he wrote “god” with a small letter: “It is not irreverence, but neither is it reverence. It isn’t fear; it is -with a small letter- love.”[12]

The poet’s relentless search for the perfect words is confronted in Poem 3, “Instinct to Its Intelligence.” The following lines highlight how natural and spontaneous instinct must be cultivated by conscious intellect to capture the ultimate essence of reality: “INTELLIGENCE, give me / the exact name, and your name, / and its own, and mine, of every thing!”[13] The pursuit of the absolute is equally evident in Poem 36 (untitled): “DON’T run, go slow / there’s nowhere you have to get to but your self!”[14] which suggests that true fulfillment lies not in the haste of the external world, but within our inner selves. Poem 46, “The Earth Was a Rose,” in which Jiménez envisions the sky as a “rose fully opened,” points to his stylistic shift toward a “naked” poetry, the ultimate revelation of his spiritual awakening in search for truth: “and I saw it / by the light of my mind, and I saw it.”[15]

Another center of gravity is the search for escaping the limitations of the temporal self and the pursuit of transcendence not as a distant religious afterlife, but as an awakening to immanent beauty, self-realization, and a higher consciousness. Rather than striving for one static, monumental eternity, Jiménez focuses on a sequence of transcendent, timeless moments (“Eternities”) achieved through the intensity of the present. His visionary nature is best captured in the two-line poem “Epitaph for Myself, Come Alive,” Poem 19: “I DIE in dreams, / I was resurrected in life.”[16] Other examples in which the speaker achieves a timeless moment through the intensity of the present are Poem 87, “The Eternal”: “a moment / surrounds me, / infinite… / The eternal,”[17] and Poem 125, that starts with the line “I AM not I,” an introspective poetic exploration of the duality of human nature in which the speaker contrasts the fallible physical self and the calm inner self. The poem concludes suggesting that our true, authentic essence transcends physical mortality:

The one who stays quiet, serene, while I talk,
the one who pardons, gentle, while I hate,
the one who walks and watches where I am not,
the one who will stay standing when I die.[18]

It is important to note that all these centers of gravity are interconnected using symbols (the sea, the dawn star, the moon, hearts, roses) that act as non-verbal carriers of emotion for the poet’s inner consciousness. Jiménez’s work is deeply rooted in symbolism, and in Eternities, he elevates central everyday images into metaphysical signs that capture the desire for spiritual perfection, the search for absolute truth, or a boundless love that transcends mortal limitations. The sea, for example, functions as a circle of being, eternally changing: “My soul: envy of the sea.”[19] (“Universe,” Poem 84). The heart, in Poem 43 “Satisfaction,” acts as a portal between mortal limits and the infinite: “YOUR heart and mine / are two opened roses / a rainbow joins.”[20] The lovers’ hearts, which are indistinguishable from the universe itself, yearn to keep the purity of their love in an eternal state:

Your heart and yours
are two burning worlds
the milky way unites.

Your heart and mine
are two waves fused
in the gaze of the eternal.[21]

Moritz warns us how the reader will experience Jimenez’s writing, especially the short poems constantly expanding or contradicting each other as they move through different emotional states. The dawn star is an outcry of love awakening in Poem 6, “Joy,” but on the contrary, in Poem 7, “Light,” it has an evasive connotation. The moon is a bridge between the physical act and the metaphysical, guiding the poet’s quest to immortalize beauty beyond mortal decay, in Poem 49, “To the Absent”: “WHEN your hands were moon, / in the greenhouse sky they gathered / your eyes, divine violets.”[22] At the same time, it also represents the intangible, peaceful, calm bond of love, perceived by the speaker “as the invisible water, between the moon / of the sky / and the moon of the stream”[23] (Poem 58, “Blackwater Pond.”) Another recurring symbol is the rose, which in “The Sky’s One Rose” (Poem 15) is a “DIAMOND flower of dream”[24] that symbolizes an attempt to capture divine beauty. However, the rose serves as a metaphor for absolute beauty and unconditional, transcendental love in Poem 65 (which shares its title with Poem 15):

(IT doesn’t matter! Every dawn
I keep one droplet of my dreams,
diamond of my rose, dew,
in an eternal star
… which hides.) [25]

Moritz successfully recreates the spirit and rhythm of the original by prioritizing musicality and emotional resonance over exact vocabulary. For example, the line: “Calla. Aspira el azul, / responde el oro”[26] in Poem 78, “The Silences,” is translated as: “Be still. Inhale the azure, answer the gold.”[27] Moritz replicates phonetic effects by choosing a target-language word, “azure” with a similar auditory impact (“azul” in Spanish) without shifting the literal meaning or sounding awkward. Another example is in “World Kiss” (Poem 70), which symbolizes the author’s lifelong quest for poetic perfection. The second stanza has three lines: “(I’ll run through the shadows / so that not even the oblivion / of the sky can enter).”[28] In Spanish, the verb is in the dependent clause in the second line, but in Moritz’s translation is in the third line. With this syntactical restructuring, Moritz successfully captures the original pulse and feeling of the original lines.

The impulse for a pure poetry has had many articulations that go back to Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, W.B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, among others. However, Jiménez’s poetic concept of “naked poetry” as a metaphor for stripping poetry down to its essentials is what inspired editors Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey when titling their influential 1969 anthology Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry in Open Forms. The book highlighted nineteen major American writers whose work stripped away artifice and strict traditional meters. Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, W.D. Snodgrass, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Gary Snider are some of the writers featured in the anthology who rejected traditional rhyme and metrical structures, reflecting a broader movement toward open-form poetry. The book was later followed by a companion anthology, The New Naked Poetry, in 1976.

Translations of Jiménez in English had already been included in Lorca and Jimenez: Selected Poems (1997), translated by Robert Bly, and Selected Writings of Juan Ramón Jiménez (1999), translated by H.R. Hays. However, a translation of such a seminal work of Spanish poetry was still lacking. Eternities is a curated masterpiece, truly a cause for celebration, a valuable contribution to translation literature that not only illuminates Jiménez’s intellectual depth and overarching commitment to economy of expression but that also sounds natural and captures the rhythm, musicality, and flow of the original. Moritz’s translation preserves the intimate introspective tone of philosophical enquiry on the nature of beauty and search for knowledge, beauty and transcendence. The dual language edition by A. F. Moritz is a highly commendable translation that will resonate broadly across lovers of poetry and translators alike.

 

Work Cited

  1. Juan Ramón Jiménez. The Complete Perfectionist: A Poetics at Work. Edited and translated by ChristopherMaurer. Swan Isle P, 2011 (56). ↑
  2. Juan Ramón Jiménez – Banquet speech. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach 2026. Thu. 16 Jul 2026. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1956/jimenez/speech/> ↑
  3. Juan Ramón Jiménez – Banquet speech. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach 2026. Thu. 16 Jul 2026. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1956/jimenez/speech/> ↑
  4. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Eternities 1916-1917. Translated with an Introduction and notes by A. E. Moritz (325). ↑
  5. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Eternities 1916-1917. Translated with an Introduction and notes by A. E. Moritz (325). ↑
  6. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Eternities 1916-1917. Translated with an Introduction and notes by A. E. Moritz (33). ↑
  7. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Eternities 1916-1917. Translated with an Introduction and notes by A. E. Moritz (33). ↑
  8. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Eternities 1916-1917. Translated with an Introduction and notes by A. E. Moritz (33). ↑
  9. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Eternities 1916-1917. Translated with an Introduction and notes by A. E. Moritz (33). ↑
  10. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Eternities 1916-1917. Translated with an Introduction and notes by A. E. Moritz (xvi). ↑
  11. Juan Ramón Jiménez. The Complete Perfectionist: A Poetics at Work. Edited and translated by ChristopherMaurer. Swan Isle P, 2011 (145). ↑
  12. Juan Ramón Jiménez. The Complete Perfectionist: A Poetics at Work. Edited and translated by ChristopherMaurer. Swan Isle P, 2011 (71). ↑
  13. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Eternities 1916-1917. Translated with an Introduction and notes by A. E. Moritz (29). ↑
  14. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Eternities 1916-1917. Translated with an Introduction and notes by A. E. Moritz (95). ↑
  15. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Eternities 1916-1917. Translated with an Introduction and notes by A. E. Moritz (115). ↑
  16. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Eternities 1916-1917. Translated with an Introduction and notes by A. E. Moritz (61). ↑
  17. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Eternities 1916-1917. Translated with an Introduction and notes by A. E. Moritz (197). ↑
  18. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Eternities 1916-1917. Translated with an Introduction and notes by A. E. Moritz (273). ↑
  19. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Eternities 1916-1917. Translated with an Introduction and notes by A. E. Moritz (191). ↑
  20. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Eternities 1916-1917. Translated with an Introduction and notes by A. E. Moritz (109). ↑
  21. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Eternities 1916-1917. Translated with an Introduction and notes by A. E. Moritz (109). ↑
  22. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Eternities 1916-1917. Translated with an Introduction and notes by A. E. Moritz (121). ↑
  23. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Eternities 1916-1917. Translated with an Introduction and notes by A. E. Moritz (139). ↑
  24. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Eternities 1916-1917. Translated with an Introduction and notes by A. E. Moritz (53). ↑
  25. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Eternities 1916-1917. Translated with an Introduction and notes by A. E. Moritz (153). ↑
  26. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Eternities 1916-1917. Translated with an Introduction and notes by A. E. Moritz (178). ↑
  27. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Eternities 1916-1917. Translated with an Introduction and notes by A. E. Moritz. (179). ↑
  28. Juan Ramón Jiménez. Eternities 1916-1917. Translated with an Introduction and notes by A. E. Moritz (163). ↑