Calle de Juan Ramón Jiménez

The street remembers Juan Ramón Jiménez, born in Moguer (Huelva) in 1881 and died in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1958, one of the great voices of twentieth-century Spanish poetry. All his life he pursued what he called “naked poetry”: paring the verse down to its essence. From that pursuit come books like Diario de un poeta recién casado and also his most widely read work, Platero y yo, the Andalusian elegy of a man and his silver-coated donkey that whole generations have recited at school. In 1956 the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature. The joy was short-lived: his wife Zenobia Camprubí, a translator and companion of half a century who had championed his candidacy, died of cancer three days after the prize was announced. The Civil War had driven him into exile in 1936, first to the United States and Cuba, then to Puerto Rico, from which he never returned. His remains and Zenobia’s rest today in the cemetery of Moguer.