By RON SLATE [On the Seawall] – Born in Seville in 1902, Luis Cernuda left Spain in 1938 for permanent exile. He had emerged with Federico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Vincente Aleixandre and Jorge Guillén in the Generation of 1927, avant garde poets influenced by surrealism. But his experimental urge had played itself out by the time the civil war began in 1936. Earlier that year, La realidad y el deseo (Reality and Desire), his first volume of collected poems, showed a poet who had tried out several poetic modes. Although he joined the Communist party in 1934, he never exerted himself politically. But he keenly felt the significance of Lorca’s murder in 1936 by Franco’s fascists, writing in “To A Dead Poet”:
Just as one never sees bright petals
Spring from a rock,
Thus among a hard and sullen people
There is no proud new ornament of life
To flower in splendor.
For this they killed you;
You were the green in our barren land,
And the blue in our dark air.
Por esto te mataron. For Cernuda, Lorca represented less political martyrdom than the broader tragedy of the poet crushed between reality and desire.
Continued at On the Seawall | Hear Stephen Kessler, Cernuda’s translator (Desolation of the Chimera
