Name: Juan Ramon Jiménez
Year Won: 1956
Read: "The Poet and the Sea"
Original Language: Spanish
Reason: "for his lyrical poetry, which in Spanish language constitutes an example of high spirit and artistical purity"
About: "The Poet and the Sea" is a collection of poems. Almost all of them are about the ocean. I have no idea whether Jimenez has written non-ocean based poetry, but that's what's in this collection.
What I liked: The poetry is quite lovely and has a rhythmic cadence almost like crashing waves. The meter is almost meditative.
What I Disliked: It's several hundred pages...of descriptions of the ocean. And they're almost all meditative in nature. (e.g. no angry, furious waves. Which waves can be.) It never changes. Eventually it gets pretty dull. There's only so many times I can read, "Olas, olas, olas" before wondering whether Jimenez had literally anything else to inspire him.
Should it have won a Nobel: If this is the full extent of his range, probably not. It just got really repetitive. But I'm assuming that the translators picked out specifically the ocean related poems for this volume. Maybe? Hopefully? If so, his writing is beautiful and may deserve a Nobel.
Next Up: "The Plague" by Albert Camus
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