“Platero is a small donkey, a soft, hairy donkey: so soft to the touch that he might be said to be made of cotton, with no bones. Only the jet mirrors of his eyes are hard like two black crystal scarabs.”
Source: Platero and I (1917), Ch. 1 : Platero, as translated by Eloïse Roach (1957).
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Juan Ramón Jimenéz 18
Spanish poet 1881–1958Related quotes
Quote of Jean Dubuffet, from 'L'auteur répond à quelques objections', (1946); as cited in Prospectus aux amateurs de tout genre, Jean Dubuffet; Paris: Gallimard, 1946, p. 115
1940's
Idries Shah, The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin (1968), , p. 62
Quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2014). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa., p. 10
“A king without instruction is like a donkey crowned.”
Il Re senza lettere era come un Asino coronato.
Della Prudenza et Dottrina del Re. p. 25.
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 320.
"Verse Chronicle," The Nation (23 February 1946); reprinted as "Bad Poets" in Poetry and the Age (1953)
General sources
Context: Sometimes it is hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle. The good and mediocre books come in from week to week, and I put them aside and read them and think of what to say; but the "worthless" books come in day after day, like the cries and truck sounds from the street, and there is nothing that anyone could think of that is good enough for them. In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people's hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever expressed in any work of art: it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with "This is a poem" scrawled on them in lipstick. After a while one is embarrassed not so much for them as for poetry, which is for these poor poets one more of the openings against which everyone in the end beats his brains out; and one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write — a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize.