“La fotografía es la misma muerte”: Ruina, espectro y testimonio de Antonio Machado en Guerra en España de Juan Ramón Jiménez

Abstract

From 1936 to 1954 poet, editor, translator, critic, and Nobel laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez (Spain, 1881 – Puerto Rico, 1958) assembled an archive of heterogeneous texts and documents produced by him and others: photographs, journal entries, newspaper clippings, letters, poems, lectures, interviews, and aphorisms. Published in Spain in 1985 as Guerra en España, this corpus was Jiménez’s transatlantic testimony of his pro-Republican activities during the Spanish Civil War and his long exile in the US and Latin America. This paper argues that this unfinished cross-generic project also contains a visionary, poetic testimony to life after death. Guided by the memory of Antonio Machado, the towering Republican poet who died in exile in 1939, Jiménez’s visionary poetics can be read as an autobiographical montage of epitaphic ruins that bears witness to a symbolic near-death experience in times of crisis while it also safeguards his own works against reductive political uses. Although scholars have recently granted Jiménez increasing importance in twentieth-century Spanish intellectual history, they highlight historical reference and archival documentation over Jiménez’s poetic testimony. As such, they fail to acknowledge the ways in which socio-political determinations shape the peculiar form of memory that is inscribed in Guerra en España.