Zenobia and the Costa Brava
It’s a splendid place to begin any new adventure. The Costa Brava has some of the finest beaches in the world, so they say, and there are many opportunities to get distracted from the petty details of life in Malgrat de Mar. Hotel accommodations are always spectacular in this part of the world, but there’s something very precious about this place. It is everything one dreams of when thinking about the perfect getaway in Spain, where there’s a lovely nightlife, with plenty of choices for an exquisite time, along with a natural beauty that is impossible to ever get over.
These days, there are many contemporary pleasures here, with dance clubs and discos, and certainly more than enough to feel far away from the world you know, but still connected to a very vital urban scene. But there is also a charm that hearkens back to the days when the main entertainments were troubadours and poetry. You can almost sense the ghost of the young Zenobia Camprubí here, in the time before she met and married Juan Ramón Jiménez.
His fame as a poet would overshadow her own accomplishments in her lifetime, but she is still very beloved, and her own life reveals a spectacular series of contributions to the cultures of the world. Her famous Diarios are still regarded as important contributions to literature as well as world history, and she is one of the most important translators of Tagore’s works. Her life’s work, along with that of her husband, took her all over the world, to Columbia, to Cuba, to the U.S., where she taught at Maryland, and to Puerto Rico, where she eventually died, in 1956. Her lifelong love affair with her husband was legendary, and apparently very tumultuous as well, but it seems obvious from her journals, and the stories told about the couple, that they both drove each other to work, again and again, with great benefit to the world at large.