Books possess a strange magic. Like Poe’s purloined letter, they hide in plain view, standing on their shelves unregarded for days, weeks, months or years, innocent in their brittle dignity, until a hand, perhaps an idle one, pulls them down. Something special can happen then: something even miraculous. I spend a lot of time, more than I should, wandering through the stacks of the London Library, that strange and vast labyrinth of books, that pungent shadowy temple in which time appears to have set like resin; and it was there, not long ago, when I wasn’t looking for it – because I didn’t know it was there – that I came across Platero and I by Juan Ramón Jiménez. Some books say to us: ‘You need me. You’re going to love me.’ For me, Platero and I proved to be such a book.
Jiménez (1881–1958) was a Spanish poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956. Having fled Spain at the time of the civil war, he spent much of his later life in the United States, where he taught at the University of Maryland and became known as the author of a line used by Ray Bradbury for the epigraph to his science-fiction classic Fahrenheit 451: ‘If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.’
Platero and I, or Platero y yo, subtitled ‘An Andalusian Elegy’, is an early work which achieved much popularity, even legendary status, in the Spanish-speaking world. The edition I picked up in the London Library is an English translation by William and Mary Roberts; of American origin, it was published in Britain in 1914, the year Jiménez won the Nobel Prize. Set against the background of Moguer, the small town in Andalusia where its author grew up, the book is a sequence of short prose pieces, none more than a few hundred words long, in which the speaker evokes his relationship with his donkey Platero. I would call it a collection of prose poems, but that might sound dreary; on the contrary,
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Subscribe now or Sign inBooks possess a strange magic. Like Poe’s purloined letter, they hide in plain view, standing on their shelves unregarded for days, weeks, months or years, innocent in their brittle dignity, until a hand, perhaps an idle one, pulls them down. Something special can happen then: something even miraculous. I spend a lot of time, more than I should, wandering through the stacks of the London Library, that strange and vast labyrinth of books, that pungent shadowy temple in which time appears to have set like resin; and it was there, not long ago, when I wasn’t looking for it – because I didn’t know it was there – that I came across Platero and I by Juan Ramón Jiménez. Some books say to us: ‘You need me. You’re going to love me.’ For me, Platero and I proved to be such a book.
Jiménez (1881–1958) was a Spanish poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956. Having fled Spain at the time of the civil war, he spent much of his later life in the United States, where he taught at the University of Maryland and became known as the author of a line used by Ray Bradbury for the epigraph to his science-fiction classic Fahrenheit 451: ‘If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.’ Platero and I, or Platero y yo, subtitled ‘An Andalusian Elegy’, is an early work which achieved much popularity, even legendary status, in the Spanish-speaking world. The edition I picked up in the London Library is an English translation by William and Mary Roberts; of American origin, it was published in Britain in 1914, the year Jiménez won the Nobel Prize. Set against the background of Moguer, the small town in Andalusia where its author grew up, the book is a sequence of short prose pieces, none more than a few hundred words long, in which the speaker evokes his relationship with his donkey Platero. I would call it a collection of prose poems, but that might sound dreary; on the contrary, Platero and I is always readable, always engaging. Here’s how it begins:The name Platero in Spanish means ‘silversmith’ and is frequently given to grey-coloured donkeys. The relationship between Platero and the ‘I’ of the book is evoked with extraordinary tenderness. This book about a man and his donkey – an animal we humans often grant little dignity – is a love story of heartbreaking beauty and grace, a book about nature and our relationship with it, but also about imagination, the ‘clatter of fancy’ that enlivens our lives. The book’s form is as remarkable as its content. The Roberts translation, of about 160 pages, comprises 105 short chapters and a brief epilogue. Each section is, in a sense, complete in itself, and sections can be read in any order; there could, in theory, be more or less of them, and indeed Jiménez produced two editions of the book, the first in 1914 and a second, expanded edition in 1917. The effect is of a meditative circling around a subject. In some sequences, the speaker tells us about Platero, his deeds, his attributes; in others, he speaks to the donkey, telling Platero of his own concerns; sometimes, he offers general reflections on life, for Platero’s benefit and ours. All this is whimsical, to be sure; sentimental, perhaps; but always moving and frequently profound. One could quote almost anything from the book to illustrate its quality, but the following sequence conveys the mystery and poetry at its heart:Platero is small, downy, smooth – so soft to the touch that one would think he were all cotton, that he had no bones. Only the jet mirrors of his eyes are hard as two beetles of dark crystal.
I let him run loose and he goes off to the meadow; softly, scarcely touching them, he brushes his nose against the tiny flowers of pink, sky-blue and golden yellow. I call him gently: ‘Platero?’ and he comes to me at a gay little trot as though he were laughing, lost in a clatter of fancy.
For the modern reader, there is deep and perhaps factitious nostalgia in this portrait of life in Andalusia a hundred years ago. Yet Jiménez presents Moguer honestly. It is a place of poverty, squalor and brutality. The young have no shoes; the old have no teeth; nor do man and animal exist in simple harmony. One vivid and disturbing sequence shows the gelding of a colt. The narrator concludes:The well! What a deep word, Platero, so dark a green, so cool, so resonant! It seems as if it were the word itself which spun and bored into the dark earth until it struck water.
Look: the fig tree is at once adorning and ruining the curbstone of the well. Inside, within reach, between the mossy bricks a blue flower of pungent scent has opened. Lower down a swallow has her nest. Then, behind a portico of cold shade, there are an emerald palace and a lake which, if its calm is troubled by a stone, grows angry and grumbles. And last of all, the sky . . .
Listen, Platero, if one day I throw myself into this well, it will not be to kill myself, believe me, but to pluck the stars more quickly.
How brilliant, how perfect, is that last sentence. Conventional fiction with its tricks of anticipation and surprise comes to seem both foolish and irrelevant as we read Platero and I. Think of the phrase ‘spoiler alert’, so common in discussions of films, television series and even, nowadays, novels. What kind of work is ‘spoiled’ – used up, made redundant – once its surface narrative is known? A classic story can be told again and again. Shakespeare is never read for the last time; nor is Jane Austen. In Platero and I, we ‘spoil’ nothing by saying that the donkey dies in the end. Early on, the speaker has addressed the subject of Platero’s death:Poor wisp of cloud, only yesterday a bolt of lightning, tempered and firm! He was like a book with its binding torn. It seemed that he no longer touched the earth; that between his hooves and the stones, a new element intruded, leaving him without reason for being, like an uprooted tree or a memory, on that spring morning which was violent, flawless and complete.
In this passage, some thirty pages into the Roberts translation, death is at once seen for what it is, yet at the same time transfigured by love, memory and a sense of the natural cycle, to become, finally, a thing of beauty. So it is that the ending, when it comes, is no ending at all. Platero’s book remains, and he lives on in its pages. This eccentric book is, I suppose, a small masterpiece, but a masterpiece all the same, moving, unique and unforgettable.Do not be troubled, Platero, for I shall bury you at the foot of the great round pine in the orchard at La Piña, of which you are so fond. You will be close to life’s serenity and mirth. The little boys will play and the little girls will sew in their low chairs at your side. You will know the verses which solitude brings me. You will hear the singing of the girls washing in the orange grove and the rattle of the well chain will delight and refresh your eternal peace. The whole year long the linnets, the titmice and the finches, in the enduring happiness of the tree tops, will weave a small roof of music between your tranquil sleep and the changeless blue of the infinite sky above Moguer.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 46 © David Rain 2015
About the contributor
David Rain is an Australian novelist who has lived in London for many years. He is the author of The Heat of the Sun and Volcano Street.