La fotografía es la misma muerte ruina, espectro y testimonio de Antonio Machado en Guerra en España de Juan Ramón Jiménez Hispanic Review 83.4 Fall 2015

“Photography Is Death Itself: Ruins, Specter, and the Testimony of Antonio Machado in Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Guerra en España.” Between 1936 and 1954, the prolific Spanish poet, editor, critic, and Nobel Prize winner Juan Ramón Jiménez (Spain, 1881-Puerto Rico, 1958) kept an archive of heterogeneous texts and documents produced by him and others. This archive, published under the title Guerra en España, included photographs, journal entries, newspaper clippings, letters, poems, translations, lectures, interviews, and aphorisms. Jiménez intended for this corpus to serve as the transatlantic testimony of his pro-Republican activities during the Spanish Civil War and his long exile in the US and Latin America. I contend that Guerra en España also contains a “visionary,” poetic testimony to life after death. Guided by the memory of Antonio Machado, the towering Spanish poet who died in exile in 1939, Jiménez’s visionary poetics can be seen as a montage of epitaphic ruins that bears witness to a symbolic near-death experience while it also safeguards his own works against unwanted political uses. The interest of Guerra en España as testimony lies in the unresolved tensions between politics and poetry that are foregrounded by the articulation of its heterogeneous materials. These tensions largely explain the importance that scholars have recently and increasingly granted Jiménez in twentieth-century Spanish intellectual history.