"I heard him called by more than one writer the most influential poet of his generation": A Luis Cernuda Links Roundup

Next Tuesday, Nov 9, Stephen Kessler will be the Center's Lit&Lunch guest to talk about his translations of the major Spanish poet Luis Cernuda. (Full event info right here.)

Here are some links to get you up to speed on Kessler, Cernuda, and the books themselves. And if you're coming, let us know by RSVPing on Facebook. It's not required to attend, but it helps us out!

From the Academy of American Poets, the award citation for when Kessler received the 2010 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award (judged by Edith Grossman, no less): 

Luis Cernuda, a major twentieth-century poetic voice in Spanish, was closely associated with Federico García Lorca and the other members of what is called the Generation of 1927. His later works have been rendered into English with sensitivity, understanding, and grace by translator-poet Stephen Kessler. The poems in Desolation of the Chimera reflect the intense passion and despair of Cernuda's writing. They are nothing less than a gift to the English-language reader.

From Ron Slate's review of Desolation of the Chimera, which Kesller will be reading from and discussing at Lit&Lunch:

For Cernuda, Lorca represented less political martyrdom than the broader tragedy of the poet crushed between reality and desire. Cernuda witnessed the bombing of the University of Madrid – but when he later described the event, it was only to specify the very moment he discovered Leopardi’s poetry. Reginald Gibbons describes Cernuda as “highly principled, unsociable, dandified, very much an autodidact, homosexual, both grateful and grudging toward his literary elders.” He loved and studied Goethe and Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Yeats and Eliot. Like Leopardi, he was obsessed with solitude. Striving for authenticity and going his own way, Cernuda was a true poète maudit -- turning his prophetic face toward those who can’t see or hear him. His prophesies, however, were based on retrospection.

From the Center's own interview with Kesler (published last week ont his blog):

Cernuda, like pretty much all the others except Lorca, is scarcely known in the U.S. On the other hand, in Spain and Latin America he is held in very high regard, both among the literati and a certain portion of the "general" readership. This has a lot to do with his triple alienation--as a poet, an exile, and a gay man--the combination of which is essential to his identity as a writer. His rootlessness, his absence of illusions, his marginality all make him somehow emblematically modern, and perhaps resonate more deeply in the openness of post-Franco Spain, especially, than the biographical and poetic trajectories of some of his contemporaries who found relatively comfortable positions in the U.S. and elsewhere (Aleixandre stayed in Spain due to his fragile health). When I was in Spain in 2002, the centenary of Cernuda's birth, I heard him called by more than one writer the most influential poet of his generation.

And lastly, Kessler's translation of the poem "Desolation of the Chimera."