The Complete Perfectionist

Juan Ramon Jimenez

ISBN 10: 0385480229 / ISBN 13: 9780385480222

Published by Broadway Business, 1997

About this Item

A Season in Granada brings together poems, essays and excerpts from letters by the great twentieth-century poet Federico Garcia Lorca, including two sequences of poems and an essay previously unpublished in English. The writings form a dazzling, elegiac celebration of the city of Granada, where Lorca grew up, where he studied, and to which he returned frequently in his life and in his imagination. And where he would die. In Christopher Maurer's words, the twenty poems in the two Suites, Poem of the Fair', and Summer Hours', draw on the structural ideas and whimsical tone of one of Lorca's favourite composers, Claude Debussy. The idea was to capture some phenomenon - the moon, the hours of evening, the ocean, wheatfields, flamenco - in a series of stylized estampas (prints) or moments.' They represent an important addition to the Lorca canon. Published to celebrate the centenary of Lorca's birth, these poems, essays and letters are remarkable for their freshness and vitality, and go right to the heart of his extraordinary and passionate vision. Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) was born near Granada. His works include The Gypsy Ballads (1928), Poem of the Deep Song (1931) and Poet in New York (1940), and the three tragedies, Blood Wedding (1933), Yerma (1934) and The House of Bernarda Alba (1936). An inspiring friend and occasional collaborator of some of the great artists of his time, including Manuel de Falla, Salvador Dali and Pablo Neruda, he was also a mesmerising performer of his own work, a consummate musician and a theatrical innovator of genius. He was murdered in Granada at the height of his fame by Nationalist partisans on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. Christopher Maurer is Head of the Spanish Department at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He has published many editions and translations of Lorca's works, including Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990) and Selected Poems (Penguin, 1995). He is the author, with Maria E. Iglesias, of Shearwater: Dreaming in Clay on the Coast of Mississippi, the story of an unusual southern family of potters, painters and writers (Doubleday, 2000).

Seller Inventory # 00107999831

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Complete Perfectionist
• Publisher: Broadway Business
• Publication Date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385480229
• ISBN 13: 9780385480222
• Binding: Hardback
• Condition: Fair

About this title

Synopsis

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 Ramūn JimÚnez, who felt both fear and exhilaration before his own high standards and negotiated shrewdly with his own personal best.  

Drawing upon Juan Ramūn'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 Ramūn's relentless quest for the perfect poem leads here to an inspiring new vision of how to reach perfection in any endeavor.

Juan Ramūn 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 Ramūn 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 Ramūn 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.