Written in Water (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Written in Water Alan E. Smith Luis Cernuda . Written in Water. Translated, with an introduction, by Stephen Kessler. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2004. 156 + xiv pp. In 1936, just before the beginning of the Civil War in Spain, Cernuda triumphed with his book of verse, La realidad y el deseo, and with it consolidated his place among a handful of extraordinary poets, known as the Generation of 1927, which included Federico García Lorca and Jorge Guillén. The war was to make of him an exile. First published in Oxford in 1942, it was in Glasgow, Cernuda tells us, "around 1940," that he "began to write Ocnos, obsessed with memories of his childhood and early youth in Seville, which, then, compared with the sordid ugliness of Scotland, seemed to him worthy of written remembrance, and so that they may be exorcised."1 The Variations on a Mexican Theme were written in 1950, as Gil de Biedma tells it, while Cernuda was teaching at Mount Holyoke College, and they reflect his first contacts with Mexico, during his vacation. It was Cernuda's desire that Ocnos and Variaciones (unpublished during his lifetime) should be published together, but that did not happen until the Taurus edition of 1979. It is therefore fitting that they be included in the same book in this translation, under the title which Cernuda gave to one of his prose pieces. Since a friend gave me Clayton Eshleman's translations of César Vallejo's posthumous poetry, more than twenty years ago, I have not experienced such pleasure in reading a Spanish language poet in English translation. A comparative reading of these prose pieces, first in Spanish and then in Kessler's translation, quickly makes evident the excellence of the English renderings. Yes, la espina de una flor was overly defined as "a rose 's thorn," and su sed inexperta was shorthanded into "its thirst;" but en él se cifraba had found its solution in "it was encoded." And desmesurado was "uncontainable," happily. And coche, for example, was historically and contextually accurate as carriage and not car. Memory and desire, music, the human body, and its harmony, gardens, plazas, seascapes: solitude and exile, not only from a native land, which was the case, but from the earth. Thereby the speaker's longing gaze at Nature, and at the lost paradise, that walled garden, emblematized by the poet's childhood wonder in Sevilla, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, only fleetingly recovered, so that it all became discovery. [End Page 301] How delicate the Adam's gaze, how plainly beautiful the prose (vying with his verse for excellence), how color and sound were relished as if they were food, and then there is the profound lesson of the stubborn persistence of the poet's "hot-blooded" body to transport the spirit, through sex, into a sea at daybreak. Errático, "wandering" (much better than the discarded cognate which lacks the fresh under-paint of the Spanish: to be abroad, to err, to range, to leave the road that might lead too soon to an impossible home), Luis Cernuda and/or the poetic persona, no, Luis Cernuda, in hotel rooms, or in a hammock among palm trees in Mexico. And the reflections, the quietness of these soliloquies, the time to think, the time for philosophy. We read: "Fine. Drop the soliloquy and take a look around," but soliloquy and looking around are in these pieces of prose one and the same. Praise is due to Stephen Kessler for his loving, careful, intelligent, and happy work. [End Page 302] Alan E. Smith Boston University Footnotes 1. 1. Cited in the prologue by Jaime Gil de Biedma to Luis Cernuda, Ocnos. Madrid: Taurus, 1979, xiv. Dickinson College