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tor María Jesús Domínguez Sío
Juan Ramón Jiménez and Zenobia Camprubí, who would become his future wife, met at the end of June in 1913 in the Residencia de Estudiantes, in which both were attending a lecture by Manuel B. Cossío. The love at first sight in that first meeting was immediate in the case of the poet and it marks the beginning of the relationship between the two that would result in the epistolary exchange collected in this book.

Short after meeting Zenobia, Juan Ramón started to cherish the idea of dedicating an edition to the love story that would bring them together for the rest of their lifes with the letters exchanged by the couple during their years of wooing and engagement, ever since their first encounter in 1913 until they got married in 1916, accompanied by the poems inspired by their relationship. A book that the poet intended to title with a Shakespearean name: Monumento al amor, but that never saw the light.

Nevertheless, Juan Ramón kept saving the letters that the couple sent to each other during their years of convivence, that are, as well, included in this volume. It represents, hence, the first publication in which the correspondence between Juan Ramón and Zenobia is exhaustively and completely edited; composed by 727 letters that in its majority had remained unpublished and that will shed new light on the life, feelings, opinions, interests, works and all kind of everyday details of their protagonists.

The book also recollects 55 poems (several unpublished) written by Juan Ramón, who at all times maintained the idea of incorporating a section with the poetic compositions inspired by Zenobia, just like the title hints (“Epistolario y lira”) and is deduced by the indications that he left annotated in several sketches. Rather than revealing the details and journey of their protagonists’ relationship ever since the difficult years of courtship until the end of his painful married life, the reading of this letters, because of their domestic and big familiar condition, allows us readers to discover first-hand the peculiar personalities of Juan Ramón and Zenobia: the role that she played in the creative process of her husband; her human quality, that leads Zenobia to begin several philanthropic and business initiatives, always supported by Juan Ramón; the passion of the couple for children; the influence that they both had and what they thought about people and the situations they were surrounded with in the different moments of their biography; how they lived the move to Madrid and then to Miami, Washington, Maryland and Puerto Rico, or how they were affected by Juan Ramón’s unhealthy nature and the diverse sicknesses of both of them throughout their lifes that resulted in several hospital admissions, like Zenobia’s in Boston from which she writes to her husband a letter that finishes this collection, dated on September the 12th 1956. Thirteen days after, Juan Ramón receives from the Swedish Academy a telegram that announces that he has been awarded with the Nobel Prize, and in the following three days Zenobia passes away in Puerto Rico: the two most successful and, at the same time, saddest moments the poet lived.

PAPERBACK. 14 x 21,5 cm.
1424 pp. Illustrations: 48
ISBN: 978-84-939988-9-9