“Yesterday I turned sixty years old/ I have been around death,/ as an old man in love and alone.” With these verses, written a decade ago, one of his poems Antonio Jiménez Millán, a poet and indefatigable student of literature, which has just died as a result of the cancer that had been suffering for several years.
Just a month ago he provided his last public appearance in Malaga, within the framework of a tribute days to his Cadiz colleague Rafael Soto Vergés. In it, he demonstrated his fine sensitivity and acuity as a reader, the same one that made him one of the best Spanish disseminators in literature, in addition to being a renowned poet.
Born in Granada in 1954, Jiménez Millán attended the Bachelor of Romanesque at the University of Granada in his hometown, to leave in 1976 to the University of Malaga, where he became a professor of said subject in 2009. The issue of his thesis Doctoral was the concept of commitment in Spanish poetry.
“Antonio had been with fragile and delicate health for a while, but he stayed very well, and even had active participation in various acts recently, so the news of his death has been a sad surprise for all,” he explains to Eldiario. He is another poet, the Malaga Francisco Ruiz Noguera. “Antonio was very dear in Malaga since he arrived at University in the second half of the 70s. We have been colleagues in the faculty and friends for more than 40 years. He was a person not conflicting in personal treatment, a poet of commitment from the beginning, with a very maintained line over time, ”adds Ruiz Noguera.
Example of dignity
“His commitment also avoided falling into the flat language of what was once social poetry, with a more elaborate expression,” Ruiz Noguera continues. “It is an urban poetry, attached to the prose poem following the tradition of avant -garde poetry, which he studied thoroughly. His research line was parallel to his poetic creation. He was a very dear person among his students, has left their mark among several generations of students. It is a great loss. We have gone, but it was not silent, until the last moment he kept writing and participating in the Malaga cultural life, ”abounds the Malaga poet remembering Jiménez Millán.
In the words of another friend of his, the Roteño writer Felipe Benítez Reyes, “apart from his excellence as a poet, as a university professor, as a researcher and as essayist, of Antonio we will always remember his goodness, his generosity and his deep sense of friendship,” affirms. “He was the quiet man who enjoyed life with wisdom and enjoyed literature with enthusiasm. In his poems his temperate voice is heard, his reflective and close tone is perceived, as he was. An example of human dignity and literary dignity, ”he says.
“Antonio Jiménez Millán has gone, without making noise, kind and with the old tobacco pitilla prohibited in his pocket. And in another a dedicated poems book, ”says Guillermo Busutil, another transplanted Granada to Malaga. “This time I have not shared a night taxi, like so many times, or that hug of so many years in the middle of the path of farewell, and the purposes. His youth friends in Granada, when he liked to be a dandi of squares, streets, libraries and bars where there was never the end of the night, and the words stayed until the last cup of a verse, we were blank and black. The same as those of Granada, from Barcelona, of Rennes, of any clandestinity of the life that made us complicit. He always liked to read the cities, his secret music, the ghosts of the windows, the loneliness of the station when the trains left, and the silence showed him his photographs of lovers in the platforms, ”recalls his friend.
The joy of his verses
Among his books, they stand out Picasso’s poems (1983), Rafael Alberti’s poetry (1984), Avant -garde and ideology (1984), Contemporary Catalan poetry (1993), Between two centuries. Comparative literature studies (1995), Contemporary Galician poetry (1996, in collaboration with Luciano Rodríguez), Madrid end of the century. Modernism, Bohemia and Urban Landscape (1998), Promise and desolation. The commitment in the writers of the generation of 27 (2001) and Love and time. Joan Margarit’s poetry (2005), along with others.
He also made critical editions of Pablo Picasso’s literary work (poems and statements, 1990), of the Louis Aragon, Aniceto or El Panorama (1989) and the book of Luis Cernuda where forgotten inhabits (2003). A selection of its first poems books is found in THE INFIER LOOK ANTHOLOGY 1975-1985 (1987).
Among his awards, it is worth mentioning the Rey Juan Carlos International Poetry Prize for Windows on the forest (1987), the International Poetry Prize City of Melilla for Inventory of disorder (2003) and the Machado brothers of the City of Seville for Night in Paris (2022). In 2009 he was a commissioner of the exhibition and author of the Catalog of Tribute to Antonio Machado organized by the Ministry of Culture of the Junta de Andalucía through the Andalusian Center of Las Letras.
Jacobo Cortines, also a poet and his last editor as responsible for the Vandalia collection, is equally sad at death. “He has improvised me, but I think one of the most serious poets of our generation, of the deepest and most intense poetry that we could call clarity. A very authentic poet has been lost, who had a high degree of the fundamental of poetry, emotion and beauty, to the point of becoming a true master of contemporary Spanish lyric. We have the joy of his verses, ”he concludes.
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