Studies in the Translations of Juan Ramon and Zenobia Jimenez

The translations by Juan Ramón Jiménez, first resident of the Caribbean to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, have been neglected, likely because many of them were published under the name of his wife, Zenobia Camprubí Aymar, along with many of his poems. Close analysis of the style, along with personal letters and diaries, reveals his significant participation in these works. The translations were a crucial source of psychological and financial support during the long exile from Spain after the Civil War. Other elements in the process were the Nobel-winners Rabindranath Tagore, William Butler Yeats, and André Gide. Intertextual incorporations from Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Rubén Darío, and Ezra Pound are noteworthy, as Juan Ramón and Zenobia maneuvered between the Symbolist and Imagist poetic movements, experimenting with different theories of translation, from Dryden to Jakobson. As Jiménez constantly revised his own work, hitherto unpublished annotations prove important to understanding this journey.

Charlotte Ward is a professor at the University of Puerto Rico. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in English and comparative literature of the medieval period. Her publications include Ezra Pound, Forked Branches: Translations of Medieval Poems (1985), Pound's Translations of Arnaut Daniel (1991), as well as many articles. Grants from Swiss Universities, Phi Beta Kappa, Rotary International, Wellesley College Workman, Newnham College Cambridge, Sir John Williams University of Wales, the Radcliffe Institute, the Medieval Academy of America, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Andrew W. Mellon have supported her research.

Author's Note - Acknowledgments - Introduction - Juan Ramón before Zenobia: Translation and Imitation of French Symbolist Literature - Translation as Courtship: The Shakespearean Sonnets - A Turning Point in Life and Art: Diario de un poeta recién casado - Grappling with Anglo-Irish: Synge's Riders to the Sea - Tagore in Spanish: A Legacy of Three Nobel Laureates - Tagore's Plays by Other Translators as Adapted in Spanish - New Genres Introduced to India: Short Stories and Aphorisms - The Outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and Exile - Posthumous Translations - Conclusion - Bibliography - Index.