The Beast of Burden and the Joyful Man of Words: Juan Ramón Jiménez's Platero and I

Like the Alices and Huckleberry Finn, to recall two companion anomalies not otherwise often associated with it (much less with each other), Juan Ramón Jiménez's full-hearted prose poem meditation Platero and I stands among the very few acknowledged masterpieces both of children's literature and of literature as a whole1. In the poet's native Spain, where school children read it, university students reread it and scholars continue to discuss its merits, Platero is a national classic, perhaps second only to Don Quixote in the popular estimate. It has, since its publication more than sixty years ago, also circulated in hundreds of editions throughout the Spanish speaking world. Nor has interest in the book remained limited to readers, young or old, of Hispanic culture. Platero has been translated into French, German, Italian (three versions), Portuguese, Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, Basque and Hebrew—many though by no means all of these editions intended mainly for the young. When two English language renderings appeared in the mid-fifties (as a consequence of Jiménez's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1956), they shared the curious cultural distinction of being favorably reviewed for adults in such serious-minded popular magazines as The New Republic and The New Yorker while also turning up on the New York Public Library's annual list of recommended "juveniles"—an auspicious enough North American welcome, which was to be followed in 1978 by still another English language translation. All the stranger, then, that as far as one can tell, Platero and I is hardly known among English speaking readers today, except to poets and other devoted toilers-in-literature, to high school and college students of Spanish who attempt it in the original as those learning French tackle The Little Prince, and (probably least of all) to older children.

Jiménez (1881-1958) had not, by his own account, written Platero as a children's book but as the second of a three-part poetic work, Ballads of Spring. In 1913 the Spanish publisher La Lectura, having heard about the project, invited him—a poet by then greatly admired in his own country—to submit portions of the manuscript to the house's Biblioteca Juventud (Youth Library), to which he agreed. An abridged Platero appeared at Christmas the following year; the full text was first brought out by Callejain 1917.

A variety of circumstances, in addition to the publication of La Lectura's "short" Platero, may also have contributed to the book's becoming widely known—and in some instances dismissed by critics—as children's reading. At the time Jimenez was finishing it, he had just met his future wife, Zenobia Camprubi Aymar, who did herself take a serious interest in children's literature. Together they translated Rabindranath Tagore's vignettes about childhood, The Crescent Moon; throughout their life together the couple were known for their love of the young. Several years after Platero appeared, Jiménez also published Spanish renderings of some of Blake's Songs of Experience, including "The Tyger"—and so on. Yet Jiménez himself insisted, in comments that reveal his fierce respect for the young, "I have never written anything for children"—this, in a prologue reprinted in some editions of the book—"because I believe that the child can read what the man reads, with certain exceptions that come to everyone's mind. . . ."²

There are of course other substantive reasons relating directly to Platero's contents that account both for the warm response many children have given it and—what is not necessarily the same thing—for the conviction of many adults that the book is for children only; we will come to these matters presently.

Jimenez began work on Platero in 1907 while staying at his merchant family's home in Moguer, a backwater village in Andalusia, the Spanish province that, Hugh Thomas has observed, furnished many of the stock images often "mistakenly regarded as typically Spanish—the flamenco and gypsy dancing, the picturesque donkey, the rose in...