Luis Cernuda

Article from the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, ed. Wayne Dynes (New York: Garland, 1990). Note: no footnotes could be published with this encyclopedia article. Cernuda, Luis (1902-1963), Spanish poet. Cernuda was an unhappy man, his only major and enduring pleasure the writing of poetry, the focus of his intellectual life. He scorned careers, and supported himself by working in a bookstore and by commissioned translations. During the Spanish Civil War Cernuda moved to England, later to the United States, in both of which countries he held university teaching posts, which were for him nothing more than a source of income. His last years were spent in Mexico, where he died. Cernuda was a twentieth-century Romantic; he admired and wrote on the English and German romantic poets, and translated Hölderlin into Spanish. Timid, introspective, mysoginistic, easily offended, in an isolation at least somewhat self-imposed, he permitted few to be his friends, and never had an enduring love relationship. He was obsessed with the loss of his youth and with the fugacity of sexual pleasure. His anger was expressed in withdrawal and in poetry, rather than activity in support of social change; Cernuda felt the world unworthy of efforts on its behalf. Secure in his own gay identity, confident that he was correct and puritanical society wrong, Cernuda’s primarily autobiographical poetry explores his own isolation and suffering. He sought to recapture his lost youth in that of young sexual partners, and his Forbidden Pleasures and Where Oblivion Dwells are openly pederastic; he was the first to publish on such topics in Spain. In addition to his verse, which was well received in literary circles, Cernuda was a frequent contributor of critical essays to literary magazines. He published a lengthy essay on Gide, from whose writings he learned that others felt as he did and that suffering could be expressed and alleviated through literary creation. Daniel Eisenberg Bibliography: Poesía completa, 2nd revised edition, Barcelona: Barral, 1977; Prosa completa, Barcelona: Barral, 1975. Two partial translations are The Young Sailor and Other Poems, trans. Rick Lipinski, San Francisco: Gay Sunshine, 1986; and The Poetry of Luis Cernuda, New York: New York University Press, 1971. Rafael Martínez Nadal, Españoles en la Gran Bretaña: Luis Cernuda. El hombre y sus temas, Madrid: Hiperión, 1983.