Platero and I
by Juan Ramón Jiménez
Summary
Platero and I has almost no plot in the ordinary sense; it is a sequence of short prose poems addressed directly to Platero, a small silver donkey the narrator keeps as a companion through the streets, fields and seasons of an Andalusian town modeled closely on Jiménez's own birthplace, Moguer. Jiménez describes the animal with the same close attention a poet would give a person, soft enough to seem made of cotton, with eyes like two black crystal beetles, and the book's short chapters follow the pair through market days, town festivals, the turn of the agricultural year and the small, real losses that come with rural life.
Underneath its gentleness the book keeps returning to poverty, cruelty toward animals and the deaths of children and old men, subjects Jiménez treats with the same plain tenderness he gives the donkey, never raising his voice even at the book's saddest moments. The effect is a work that reads very differently depending on who is holding it: Spanish schoolchildren have grown up reciting its shorter chapters for a century, while adult readers tend to notice, on a second visit, how much grief the book carries just beneath its warmth.
Reading it means slowing down to match its own unhurried pace, since each chapter is only a page or two and gains most of its power from accumulation rather than any single dramatic turn. It suits a reader drawn to close observation of ordinary rural life over incident, and it rewards returning to as an adult after meeting it first as a child, since the same donkey and the same town read as a far more melancholy book the second time.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Juan Ramón Jiménez the 1956 Nobel Prize in Literature for his lyrical poetry, which in the Spanish language constitutes an example of high spirit and artistic purity, and Platero and I, first published in a shorter form in 1914 and completed in 1917, is the book that carried his name furthest beyond Spain. The first edition of 1914 carried 63 chapters; the complete 1917 edition from Calleja in Madrid grew to 138, and Jiménez insisted he had not written it for children, even though Spanish schools adopted it.
The prize arrived at the worst possible moment for Jiménez personally. His wife and lifelong collaborator, Zenobia Camprubí, who had translated Tagore with him and managed his affairs for decades, died of ovarian cancer three days after the Nobel announcement reached them in Puerto Rico, where the couple had settled after an exile that began with the Spanish Civil War. Jiménez, grieving, did not travel to Stockholm for the ceremony that December, and he never fully recovered from the loss.