cover image The Complete Perfectionist

The Complete Perfectionist

Juan Ramon Jimenez. Broadway Business, $21 (192pp) ISBN 978-0-385-48022-2

Fastidious, prolific, hypochondriacal Andalusian poet Jim nez (1881-1958), who won a Nobel Prize in 1956, was an obsessive perfectionist, a mentor to Federico Garc!a Lorca and Jorge Guillen, translator of Blake and Tagore, a self-exiled enemy of fascism who spent his last two decades in New York, Havana, Florida and Puerto Rico, indifferent to worldly success. This elegantly translated selection of his aphorisms, vignettes, prayers and poems, organized around such themes as self, nature, writing and memory, is a profound meditation on the quest for perfection in art, work and daily life. An idealist who believed that one person's striving for absolute perfection can lead to profound social change, Jim nez saw work as an essential means of self-definition and social renewalDa process that involves the harnessing of dream, instinct and reverie to practical intelligence. Maurer (The Art of Worldly Wisdom), a Vanderbilt University professor of Spanish, has fashioned a gem of a book, a fertile source of insights for perfection-seekers in many fields. (Mar.)