Here's your Daily Poem from the Poetry Chaikhana --
 | Who Knows What is Going On By Juan Ramon Jimenez English version by Robert Bly
Who knows what is going on on the other side of each hour?
 / Photo by SUNION / |
| ============ Thought for the Day: Even our masks reveal us. ============ | Here's your Daily Music selection --  Jordi Savall Istanbul |
Hi Omss -
Who knows what is going on on the other side of each hour?
Isn't that just a wonderful opening line? It's one of those profound, enigmatic statements that can trip you up full stop, making the rest of the poem an afterthought.
But what is the poet saying? I think he's encouraging us to not bring our assumptions to each experience in life. We have to encounter each experience, each hour, as it is, not as we expect it to be. This is why he turns our expectations on their head with lines like:
This rose was poison.
That sword gave life.
Every single thing holds its secret and is pregnant with surprise...
How many times the brilliant cloud piling up far off
was already a golden body full of thunder!
To approach life without the false certainty of what each experience holds requires a supreme humility. It requires us to cherish the unexpected possibilities of each encounter more deeply than our own accumulating history. It requires a silence of mind, a sense of wonder, and a restoration of our inherent innocence. But, when we truly learn to live this way, magic happens! We open ourselves and, in turn, the common things we encounter open themselves to us, revealing a hidden worlds within...
I was thinking of the greatness of what was human,
and found myself in the divine.
--
Juan Ramon Jimenez was the son of a banker. He grew up in Moguer, a beautiful region of Spain that deeply imprinted itself on the poet. Jimenez studied painting at the University of Seville before abandoning his schoolwork to dedicate himself completely to writing.
In the early 1900s, Jimenez composed several collections of poetry, and he also translated the work of Hindu poet Rabindranath Tagore into Spanish (with Zenobia Camprubi, who later became his wife). Later in his career he also became an influential literary critic. (Despite his great poetic work, in the US Jimenez first gained notoriety for his novel Platero y yo/Platero and I.)
When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he was sent by the Republican faction to the US as an honorary cultural attache. When the fascist forces under Franco took control of Spain, Jimenez and his wife became exiles and settled in Puerto Rico and Cuba.
Themes of nature, depths, immensity, death, darkness, secret life, and transcendence appear in many of his poems. The spirituality reflected in his poetry is deeply personal, mystical, and transformative.
In 1956, Juan Ramon Jimenez was awarded the Nobel Prize. He died two years later in Puerto Rico.
Have a beautiful day!
Ivan
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Ivan M. Granger's original poetry, stories and commentaries are Copyright © 2002 - 2011 by Ivan M. Granger.
All other material is copyrighted by the respective authors, translators and/or publishers.
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