Which could be taken as a pun, perhaps. The Guardian reports that a Spanish publisher has decided it is time to publish the erotic musings of Juan Ramón Jiménez, which has outraged an order of nuns who’ve asked for his poems to be silenced.
Jiménez, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1956, two years before he died, is believed to have become involved with at least three nuns from the Sisters of the Holy Rosary congregation. The three worked at a nursing home run by the order in Madrid, where the young poet spent two years at the beginning of the last century. He later described the period between 1901 and 1903 when, on doctor’s orders, he was cared for by the nuns, as the “happiest of my life”.
Jiménez, aged 20 when he went into the nursing home, appears to have enjoyed himself too much, however. The mother superior eventually expelled him, but only after packing at least one of her novices off to a convent in Barcelona.
Now a series of poems that he declined to publish during his own lifetime, in order not to shock his future wife, will help to explain why he was so happy. “These poems will be surprising for many people because they are lewd and erotic,” said the editor, José Antonio Expósito. “This is not the normal Juan Ramón.”
But what was Jiménez doing in a nursing home?
Jiménez, whose neurotic fear of sudden death meant he always needed to be near a doctor, stayed as a privileged guest at the nursing home. He had gone there after suddenly leaving a psychiatric hospital in France where he had been staying in the director’s house and appeared to have embarked on a red-blooded affair with his wife - who also features in the poems.
A few lines of verse appear in the story.