The image of New York in Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Diario de un poeta recién casado

Abstract

There are cities whose urban appearance substantially impacts the poets wandering their streets. Just as Bruges or Venice exemplify the dead city, New York becomes the quintessential modern city at the start of last century. In 1916, Juan Ramon Jiménez travels to New York to marry Zenobia Campubrí and he experiences the modern urban space. Its dizzying and chaotic rhythm of life, the required fast and long commutes, the neon-lit streets and the ethnic and social segregation sharply contrast with his life in Moguer. In Diario de un poeta recién casado he develops a new style to represent the new sensations he experiences. The following pages deal with the short fictions contained in part III and part VI of Diario(“América del Este” and “Recuerdos de América del Este escritos en España”), examining the use of hybridization of genres in short fiction as a resource to represent New York chaos.