To Platero in the Heaven of Moguer CXXXVII. The book is one of the most popular works by Jiménez, and unfolds around a writer and his eponymous donkey, Platero ('silvery'). PS I read this as part of Dewey’s Read-a-Thon, but it also counts towards the 1% Well-Read Challenge.Translator's Acknowledgments Platero and I List of Chapters I. Platero and I, also translated as Platero and Me (Spanish: Platero y yo), is a 1914 Spanish prose poem written by Juan Ramón Jiménez. If you thought you couldn’t love a book about a donkey, Platero will prove you wrong. Also, it may be bread alone, like hope, or bread with an illusion….”īut what is missed in the snippet I pulled from the 1001 Books description, and what I’m not giving a clear picture of here either is Platero, and that’s because you are best introduced to him on the pages of this charming novel. It goes with everything: with the oil, the stew, the cheese, and the grapes, giving its flavor of kisses with the wine, the soup, the ham, with itself, bread with bread. It is like a huge mouth that eats a huge loaf of bread.
“At noon, when the sun is at its warmest, the town begins to smoke and to smell of pine wood and warm bread.
It has a fable-like quality, and yet it appears immediately and sharply relevant in terms of its commentary on human nature and its celebration of human pleasures: It is sad to see the virgin blossoms of the orange grove die in the bud.” “Spring has the coquetry to arrive early this year, but she has been obliged to take her tender nakedness, all ashiver, back to the cloudy bed of March. It is the sort of book whose scenes and vignettes could be easily appreciated by children, and yet there is an increased poignancy to read them as an adult, the simple joys and beauties appearing alongside instances of intense brutality and cruelty.Įven the descriptive sentences can combine a startling juxtaposition of emotions, simple language peppered with poetic bursts: (Of course if you haven’t read The Little Prince, the former description will be far more useful.) And as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s story is one of my favourites, you can imagine that I did find Platero and I to be wonderful indeed. Or, you could say, instead, that it’s like The Little Prince, but it has a man with a donkey instead of a boy with a flower. Here’s how it’s summarized in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die: “The text is written in the form of short pieces (some would see them as prose poems), while the story summons up a joyful world of children, the boisterous life of animals in the fields, a frieze of peasants ranging from the entertaining to the mischievous, and some unforgettable landscapes described with adjectives of almost Fauvist colors.” When I saw that Platero and I was listed in both 1001 Children’s Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up and 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, I thought I must really have been missing something wonderful.
Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Platero and I (1914)
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