The Complete Perfectionist
- Book Review,
by CHRISTOPHER MAURER
From Library Journal
Jimenez (1881-1958) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956 and influenced such writers as Federico Garcia Lorca and Jorge Guillen. He is recognized as one of the greatest Spanish poets of the 20th century, and Spanish children grow up learning his sayings. Maurer has selected and translated some of Jimenez's famous sayings, arranging them here around the theme of what makes up a good work (e.g., instinct, memory, and revision). He also furnishes an enthusiastic introduction and conclusion, as well as introductions to each section. Jimenez worked in a cork-lined room and tore up his newly published books to make improvements. He viewed work as a means of self-definition and social renewal. On "Revision," for example, he says, "In the papers in my wastebasket, what beauties of rhythm and color! What a restless, dull kaleidoscope!" Readers and writers who want an introduction to the poet might find this work of interest, and comprehensive collections of Spanish literature might want to include it.?Nancy P. Shires, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
The Nobel Prize^-winning Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenez sought perfection in his work. His was no stale and static perfection, however, but an organic one that permitted deviations from regularity, and the pursuit of it was an ever-changing quest for the right action at the right time. For much of his life, Jimenez recorded his thoughts about this quest in aphorisms that redoubtable translator Maurer (his version of the seventeenth-century Jesuit Baltasar Gracian's Art of Worldly Wisdom [1992] was something of a best-seller) here gathers and categorizes. Maurer also provides ample context for Jimenez's maxims, so that we begin to know Jimenez as a person and a poet as well as a philosopher. The aphorisms are marvelous nuggets of wisdom--"Treat the least significant things you do as though they were permanent, and they will endure," for example, and "When a noise breaks into your silence, make it immediately a natural part of your silence." Jimenez redefines perfectionism by embracing a marvelously natural type of perfection. Patricia Monaghan
Book Description
Perfection is an ideal that makes life worth living--the internal applause as you hit the perfect note, write the perfect piece, reach the goal you once thought unattainable. Yet many of us abandon that pursuit and settle for less than what we secretly want: perfect work, perfect love, perfect selves. Few have courted perfection like Nobel Prize winner Juan Ramn Jimnez, who felt both fear and exhilaration before his own high standards and negotiated shrewdly with his own personal best. Drawing upon Juan Ramn's aphorisms, Christopher Maurer meditates upon his struggle and gives us a guide to the pursuit of life's ultimate pleasure: the dream of doing perfect work. Juan Ramn's relentless quest for the perfect poem leads here to an inspiring new vision of how to reach perfection in any endeavor.Juan Ramn analyzes the most radical elements of perfection: how to create and revise, reconcile noise and silence, listen to dream and instinct, learn from nature, seize the moment, and calm the fear of death. The Complete Perfectionist provides advice and encouragement for anyone for whom mere excellence is not enough.
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Spanish
From the Publisher
"This is a gorgeous little book."
--Robert Bly
From the Inside Flap
Perfection is an ideal that makes life worth living--the internal applause as you hit the perfect note, write the perfect piece, reach the goal you once thought unattainable. Yet many of us abandon that pursuit and settle for less than what we secretly want: perfect work, perfect love, perfect selves.
Few have courted perfection like Nobel Prize winner Juan Ram¾n JimÚnez, who felt both fear and exhilaration before his own high standards and negotiated shrewdly with his own personal best.
Drawing upon Juan Ram¾n's aphorisms, Christopher Maurer meditates upon his struggle and gives us a guide to the pursuit of life's ultimate pleasure: the dream of doing perfect work. Juan Ram¾n's relentless quest for the perfect poem leads here to an inspiring new vision of how to reach perfection in any endeavor.
Juan Ram¾n analyzes the most radical elements of perfection: how to create and revise, reconcile noise and silence, listen to dream and instinct, learn from nature, seize the moment, and calm the fear of death.
The Complete Perfectionist provides advice and encouragement for anyone for whom mere excellence is not enough.
About the Author
Juan Ram¾n JimÚnez (1881-1958), one of the greatest Spanish poets of the twentieth century, wrote innumerable books of lyrical verse, fine prose poems, aphorisms, and critical essays. Juan Ram¾n lived in Madrid until the Spanish Civil War, and died in exile in Puerto Rico, after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Christopher Maurer has written widely on Spanish literature, from Baltasar Gracißn (author of the New York Times bestsellers The Art of Worldly Wisdom and A Pocket Mirror for Heroes) to Federico GarcÝa Lorca. He is chairman of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Vanderbilt University.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Complete Perfectionist was written for those who know what it is to dream of perfect writing and perfect work. It is a book of suggestions and hints rather than of instruction or advice. Like any teacher, Juan Ram¾n liked to give advice, but in his aphorisms he often draws back from doing so: "Let no one take advice from this book; the only thing that matters is one's own experience." Because not everyone has much experience, "the only useful advice would be that given by the young to the old." Juan Ram¾n was, after all, an individualist, intent upon his own perfection, and these pages show him in dialogue more often with himself than with the reader. There are many, many "lessons" about work in this book, but they do not always come to us directly, in the second person. The you is often him, not us. Juan Ram¾n wondered whether art can "instruct" at all:
"Art is not actively didactic, no. But it is clear that the perfect fruit of the cultivated spirit--a spirit intent only upon its own perfection--can educate others through example."
How, then, to apply these aphorisms to one's own life and work? Each chapter of this book takes up a necessary element of perfect work. But within each chapter, the aphorisms--and occasionally, short poems--go off in their own directions, without following a rigid line of reasoning.
Juan Ram¾n's writing on dream and reverie throws some light on how to read this book. Part of reading lies in rational analysis. But good reading, like good work, means listening to the odd associations that arise from reverie. What is not said--what is suggested in the white space between each aphorism--matters as much as the aphorism itself: "Between idea and idea, a dream!" These aphorisms do not need to be taken by force, at one sitting: they can be returned to and read somewhat randomly and dreamily.
Dream
Dreams tempt us with their wealth. They are our imaginative endowment, the mind's unspent capital. Most of us are content to live on the interest. But many books that promise to awaken our "creativity" argue for the usefulness of dreaming. In a few easy steps, they say, we can "incubate" our dreams and learn to decipher, remember, and apply them better. We can select a problem and pose it to our dreams as a question: "How can I become more confident? "
Juan Ram¾n encourages us to do the opposite: rejoice that dreaming cannot be turned into a "productive" form of labor, of problem solving. He would agree with the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard that in dreams we are removed from ourselves:
"The night dream does not belong to us. It is not our possession. With regard to us, it is an abductor, the most disconcerting of abductors: it abducts our being from us. [In the deepest dreams] we are returned to an ante-subjective state. We become elusive to ourselves..."
Nor does Juan Ram¾n wish to "apply" his dreams to his work. He is doubtful he can capture the language of dreams in his writing, and although he speaks often of the pleasures of dreaming, few of his poems are the narration of actual dreams. He does not believe, as some psychologists do, in translating the language of dreams into that of reality, and he knows that there are dream strata "below our lives and above our deaths" that neither the psychologist nor the poet will ever get at. Following a long tradition of Spanish poets--the best known is Calder¾n de la Barca--he affirms that, when the play of life is over, what is "lived" is indistinguishable from what is "dreamt." Idealists like Juan Ram¾n can never easily decide which of these two halves of our lives is the "real" one. Some of his poems make us feel that we are flying at night, upside-down, unable to know whether those lights are coming from the stars or from an earthly city. He believes fervently in the restorative, healing power of dreams: they are the "madness" that keeps us sane; the poetry that chastens our reality; something unbalanced that gives equilibrium to the working day. They purify what happened the day before.
[Daydream]
I want to look at things, but only see through them.
Sometimes my daydreams follow one another so quickly and abundantly that I think I am bleeding to death.
There is a me who is sleeping
--buzzing fly of an idea!--
and there is a me who is staying awake
so I won't go to sleep.
Prolong your reverie past sunset into the night.
Riches of night, how many secrets taken from you, how many yet to take, though none of them is your secret or mine, night!
What unspeakable pleasure, to plunge my hand deep into you, stirring your stars!
Luminous touch of other hands searching for your treasures!
I can pluck more from dream than from life, for dream is like a better life, whose roses I would like to plant in my reality.
...In our dreams, memory makes us "sane with blackness," and this seems a natural state for us; more natural, at least, than to be "crazy with light."
Let us dream whatever we want, for when life and dream are gone, a thing lived is no different from a thing dreamt.
Dreams trap me like cobwebs in bloom. I must break free of them, because if I didn't, the nuances of things would drive me crazy.
I sing my dreams to sleep like a mother singing to her crying children.
Not to dream? But dream is the prelude, the mainspring of action; and the best, most beautiful action is the one dreamt of!
Yes, let us learn from our sleep and our dreams to look at life. That is enough.
Thought that can't climb over the fence of night...leave it in the henhouse of evening.
Dream toward the spirit, never toward reality, for reality will spring from your heart.
I dreamt I was dead and that, dead, I was dreaming that I was coming back to life and could not. And I dreamed that that dream would be eternal.
What a shame to awaken now, just as I was finding in the life of dream what I had lost in the dream of life.
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