Written between 1950 and 1962, the poems in this collection amount to the final poetic testament of one of Spain's most important twentieth-century poets. These last two volumes of Cernuda's life work, Con las horas contadas (With Time Running Out) and Desolación de la Quimera, show a master at work with nothing left to prove. Exiled in Mexico after more than a decade in the inhospitable northern climates of Scotland and New England, the poet savors the warmth and cultural continuity of his new residence while maintaining his long argument with his Iberian homeland, a love/hate relationship explored directly and indirectly. Love in its various cruelties and pleasures is the other constant theme of these books; Cernuda's open homosexuality and passionate connection with younger men are invoked with a range of emotions and from perspectives of gratification and acutely felt loss. A lifelong devotion to Beauty in both its ideal and physical incarnations informs his philosophical investigations of time, art, love, grief, and exile. The title poem, “Desolation of the Chimera,” is a powerful invocation of the poetic archetype and a meditation on the fate of poets and poetry at the midpoint of the century.
Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) was a leading member of Spain's legendary Generation of 1927-Lorca, Alberti, Aleixandre, Guillén, Salinas, Buñuel, Dalí, et al. He left Spain during the Civil War in 1938 and never returned, teaching first in Great Britain and then in Massachusetts before settling in Mexico in 1952. His collected poems, La realidad y el deseo (Reality and Desire), is regarded in Spain and Latin America as one of the seminal works of modern Hispanic poetry. Thus far only two major collections of his writing are available in English in the US, Selected Poems, translated by Reginald Gibbons (Sheep Meadow Press), and Written in Water, his collected prose poems, translated by Stephen Kessler (City Lights Books). Written in Water received a 2004 Lambda Literary Award.
Stephen Kessler is a poet, translator, essayist and editor whose work has appeared in hundreds of publications across the United States since the late 1960s. He is the author of eight books and chapbooks of original poetry, most recently Burning Daylight (Littoral Press), and more than a dozen books of poetry and fiction in translation, including works by Julio Cortázar, César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, Vicente Aleixandre, Ariel Dorfman, and Fernando Alegría, as well as a major contributor of translations to the Selected Poems of Jorge Luis Borges. He is the editor of The Redwood Coast Review and a contributing editor for Poetry Flash. For more about the works of Stephen Kessler, visit www.stephenkessler.com.
“Few modern poets, in any language, give us this chilling sense of knowing ourselves to be before a man who really speaks, effectively possessed by the fatality and the lucidity of passion. If it were possible to define in a phrase the place Cernuda occupies in modern Spanish-language poetry, I would say he is the poet who speaks not for all, but for each one of us who make up the all. And he wounds us in the core of that part of each of us 'which is not called glory, fortune, or ambition' but the truth of ourselves.”
--Octavio Paz
