Jiménez is a Spanish poet who was born in the southern town of Moguer in 1881 and died in Puerto Rico in 1958.
He published his first two books – Ninfeas and Almas de violeta – in 1900. When the Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936, Jiménez fled Spain and lived in exile in the United States, Cuba and Puerto Rico. It was in that final stop where, in the final years of his life, he received the news that he had been awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Jiménez was a prolific poet who wrote several dozen books; never satisfied, he constantly went back over his previous works, either discarding all of what he had previously written or salvaging just a few poems.
His principal works are Poesías escogidas, Segunda antología poética, Canción and Tercera antología.
The prose portraits that would later form part of his book Españoles de tres mundos began to be published in newspapers and magazines in the years immediately prior to his exile.
Another prose book of his – one to which a great part of his fame is owed – is Platero y yo (1917), in which he combines fantasy and realism in telling the story of a wandering poet and his faithful donkey.
Along with Cervantes’ Don Quijote, it is the Spanish-language book that has been translated into the most foreign languages.
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