The Name Drawn from the Names

By Juan Ramón Jiménez 1881–1958 Juan Ramon Jimenez

Translated By Robert Bly

If I have created a world for you, in your place,

god, you had to come to it confident,

and you have come to it, to my refuge,

because my whole world was nothing but my hope.

I have been saving up my hope

in language, in a spoken name, a written name;

I had given a name to everything,

and you have taken the place

of all these names.

Now I can hold back my movement

inside the coal of my continual living and being,

as the flame reins itself back inside the red coal,

surrounded by air that is all blue fire;

now I am my own sea that has been suddenly stopped somewhere,

the sea I used to speak of, but not heavy,

stiffened into waves of an awareness filled with light,

and all of them moving upward, upward.

All the names that I gave

to the universe that I created again for you

are now all turning into one name, into one

god.

The god who, in the end, is always

the god created and recreated and recreated

through grace and never through force.

The God. The name drawn from the names.

Source: Lorca and Jimenez: Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 1973)

Biography

A prolific Spanish poet, editor, and critic, Juan Ramón Jiménez won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1956. He was born in Moguer i Andalusia, an area that he depicted in Platero y Yo (Platero and I, 1914) a collection of prose poems about a man and his donkey. Jiménez’s other books of poetry include Elejías puras (Pure Elegies, 1908), La soledad sonora (Sonorous Solitude, 1911), Poesía (Poetry, 1923), and Belleza (Beauty, . . .

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