Triple Alienation: Stephen Kessler on Poet Luis Cernuda

On November 9, poet and translator Stephen Kessler will be our guest for Lit&Lunch to talk about his award-winning translations of the Spanish poet Luis Cernuda. Full event details are available here. Here we offer an interview with Kessler to help explain who Cernuda is and why his poems are worthy of your attention.

Scott Esposito: In your introduction to Desolation of the Chimera, you call Cernuda "one of the brightest stars" in the famed Generation of 1927 Spanish poets, which of course is best-known for Federico Garcia Lorca. You also note that Harold Bloom called Cernuda a "saint" (in his book Genius) and compared him to Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan. Can you talk a little about what distinguishes Cernuda's poetry from that of his contemporaries?

Stephen Kessler: Lorca, Cernuda, Aleixandre, Salinas, Guillén and Alberti--generally considered the most important poets of that extremely gifted generation--each has a voice distinct from the others, so it's hard to say how specifically Cernuda's is different. But one thing that I think distinguishes his work is its unromantic sense of disillusionment with Spain, and a certain bitterness (as opposed to nostalgia, though there's that, too) of tone. The lyricism of his early work evolves in the later poems into a more straightforward, seemingly prosaic style, although I think if one reads carefully enough you sense the finely tuned ear of a master of the lyric. But after 1936 all of these writers grieve for their country and the friendships scattered by the civil war and subsequent dictatorship.

Scott Esposito: In your introduction to your 2004 collection of Cernuda's prose poetry, Written in Water, you note that before that book, the only substantial book of Cernuda's verse was Reginald Gibbons' Selected Poems, from 1977. How well known is Cernuda in English, and how does this compare with his Spanish reputation?

Stephen Kessler: 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.

Scott Esposito: Does your approach to Cernuda significantly differ from Gibbons'?

Stephen Kessler: I read the Gibbons translation long ago, and haven't looked at it since, so I'm unable to compare exactly what I've done differently with the very few poems we both have translated. But as you know, every translator hears the original a little differently, and has a different way of adapting style(s), so I imagine if you look at the Gibbons book and mine you will be able to discern significant distinctions. Beyond that, I would rather not try to evaluate the differences. Each reader can decide on the basis of what they see; but there's very little overlap in our books, as Gibbons (if I recall correctly) emphasizes the early and middle work and I have focused on the later, largely neglected poems.

Scott Esposito: Cernuda fled Spain in 1938, and you talk about how pleased he was to finally arrive in Mexico after a 14-year exile, both for that country's culture and because of a gay man he was in love with. How important was this period of exile, as well as the various landscapes Cernuda inhabited and his sexuality, to the poetry he wrote?

Stephen Kessler: Exile and sexuality are both central to Cernuda's post-1938 poetry (and sexuality to his earlier work) and to his enduring identity as a poet. Actually, he didn't "flee" Spain so much as accept an invitation to read his poems and lecture in London, then got an offer to teach in Glasgow, and decided not to return once it was clear that Franco was taking power. He hated Scotland (mainly for the cold climate) and New England as well (climate and Yankee personality), where he taught from 1947 to '52 at Mount Holyoke. A visit to Mexico--an an affair there--was all it took to make him feel he had to leave the North. The climate, the language, the easy sensuality of the Mexican way of life, were not exactly Andalusian, but close enough to make him feel far more at home there than in any Anglophone environment where he had lived. All this is revealed quite eloquently in the writings.

Scott Esposito: The poems you'll primarily be talking about at Lit&Lunch are drawn from your translation Desolation of the Chimera, which collects Cernuda's final work and which won the 2010 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets (judged by Edith Grossman). You write that these late poems are from a man cut off from his surroundings, and with nothing left to prove as a poet--essentially, they are Cernuda writing only for himself. What kind of poetry does this give rise to?

Stephen Kessler: I think it gives rise to a naked honesty and unguarded self-revelation that, while highly sophisticated technically, is really rather shocking in its lack of purely literary effects. The poems feel stripped of artifice (though very skillfully composed), so the reader feels as if he or she is witnessing something almost too painful for comfort. At the same time, he somehow manages to transform his grief and passion and anger and frustration into poems that live quite strongly on their own apart from their association with the author.

Scott Esposito: How did the work of translating these late poems compare to translating Cernuda's earlier poetry?

Stephen Kessler: The difference was not so much earlier vs. later (many of the prose poems in Written in Water were written during the same period as Desolation of the Chimera) than between prose and verse, which require certain technical adjustments of the translator. Put most simply, the unit of composition in prose is the sentence, while in verse it's the line. Curiously enough, some of Cernuda's prose poems sound equally or more lyrical than the verse ones, while some of the verse poems seem (as noted above) rather straightforward, almost prosaic. A stanza in a verse poem may be a single sentence, but the poet (or translator) must give each line a certain rhythmic tension or pressure to make it work as a line of verse. In a prose sentence the rhythms are more flexible, adjustable to the thought or description it's meant to convey. How one deals as a translator with such subtleties is largely a function of the ear, how you hear the music, and how you try to create an analogous movement in the new language.

Scott Esposito: Could you talk about a particular translation challenge you encountered while translating the poems in Desolation of the Chimera?

Stephen Kessler: Probably the most difficult aspect of this project was to remain true to the meaning(s) of the poems while creating a sound in English that works as poetry. This is not an uncommon problem in translating any poem, but given the directness of style noted above--and in some cases a more elevated tone, as in "Mozart" for example--the subtlety of the Spanish music was an interesting challenge to my powers of transformation. But for me it's largely a mystery exactly how such problems are (or are not) solved. Doing a translation, as far as I'm concerned, is no more rational a process than writing an original poem. You hope you hear something clearly and are able to write it down before it vanishes. You apply your skills, and you may be able to explain specific decisions later, but with me the process is mostly intuitive. Not fully understanding what I'm doing is what keeps it interesting.