Cernuda in Current Spanish Poetry

Abstract

The poet Luis Cernuda (Spain, 1902-Mexico, 1963) has left his mark on much of the poetry written in Spain since the sixties. First rediscovered in the Peninsula in the late fifties and early sixties by, among others, Francisco Brines, Jose Angel Valente, and Jaime Gil de Biedma, his influence became pervasive both through the work of these poets, and, through the reading of Cernuda’s poetry itself, available since 1975 in Harris and Maristany edition. Referring in particular to Biedma, whose impact on younger poets has been significant, this paper examines the presence of Cernuda in certain approaches to language and reality in the poetry of several “poetas de la experiencia” ‘poets of experience,’ such as Jesus Garcia Montero, Felipe Benitez Reyes, and Alvaro Garcia. Centering mainly on the simplification of language and the search for a non-rhetorical rhythm, developing in Cernuda from Invocaciones ‘Invocations,’ to Desolacion de la Quimera ‘The Disconsolate Chimera,’ this article examines the same traits in Biedma. Thereafter it traces their incorporation in the poetry of Garcia Montero, Benitez Reyes, and Garcia. These readings offer an occasion to reflect on some of the strengths of the “poesia de la experiencia” that underlie its apparent straightforwardness and simplicity. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol36/iss2/3 Cernuda in Current Spanish Poetry Salvador J. Fajardo Binghamton University (SUNY) Luis Cernuda’s poetry has had a formative influence on the Spanish poetic landscape of the second half of the twentieth century and has done so across the entire expressive range of the genre. Its impact has been felt in terms of language (a colloquial turn, the avoidance of the poetic, simplicity); in terms of forms (interior monologues, auto-dialogue, fictional I, meditative turn); in terms of its approach to reality (objective, experiential); in terms of themes (intimate realism, homosexuality, art, ethics). While these topics offer a richly suggestive gamut of issues to explore, I will only be able to address those concerning language and the poets’ approach to reality. Upon first contact, what probably attracted most readers who discovered Cernuda in the late fifties and early sixties may have been the elegiac tone of his poetry, a number of its themes, and its cultural cosmopolitanism. He stood apart from the other modernists1 of his period, those more familiar to the young poets of the fifties and sixties: Lorca, Alberti, Guillen, Salinas, and, of course, Aleixandre who was still in the Peninsula. Francisco Brines, upon finding a dusty copy of Como quien espera el alba ‘Like Someone Waiting for the Dawn’ in some library, recalls how he read it, “despacioso y maravillado” (La cana gris 152 ) ‘with lingering wonder’; Jose Angel Valente is especially taken with the poetry’s moral and intellectual rigor, and proclaims it “una de las piezas capitales en el desarrollo contemporaneo de nuestra poesia” (38) ‘one of the principal components in the contemporary development of our poetry.’2 According to Jacobo Munoz, editor of the special 1962 issue of La cana gris dedicated to him, Cernuda is not as well-known to the Spanish public as others of his generation, but his influence on younger poets and critics has been “callada y decisiva” (154) ‘quiet and decisive.’ Later on, the seventies and eighties was the period of the 1 Fajardo: Cernuda in Current Spanish Poetry Published by New Prairie Press