致未来的诗人

by Luis Cernuda, 范晔 (Translator)

《致未来的诗人》是塞尔努达的诗歌精选集，在中文世界首次翻译出版。塞尔努达在超现实主义中寻找诗歌的现代精神。对塞尔努达来说，超现实主义不仅仅是一种风格，一种诗歌流派：它是将诗歌融入生命的一种尝试，一种对语言和制度的颠覆。对他来说，超现实主义是一种解放运动，而不是诗歌或者意识运动，是西方世界的*后一次伟大的精神震撼。

Genres: Poetry, Spanish Literature, Spain

216 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Luis Cernuda was a Spanish poet and literary critic.

The son of a military man, Cernuda received a strict education as a child, and then studied law at the University of Seville, where he met the poet and literature professor Pedro Salinas. In 1928, after his mother died, Cernuda left his hometown, with which he had all his life an intense love-hate relationship. He briefly moved to Madrid, where he quickly became part of the literary scene. However, his detached, timid and morose character, his search of perfection frequently made him lose friendships and popularity.

His mentor and former professor Salinas arranged for him to take a lectureship for a year at the University of Toulouse. From June 1929 until 1937 Cernuda lived in Madrid and participated actively in the literary and cultural scene of the Spanish capital. Cernuda collaborated with many organisations working to support a more liberal and tolerant Spain. He participated in the Second Congress of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals in Valencia.

During the Spanish Civil War a friend secured him a position as teacher in Cranleigh School, where he taught Spanish Language and literature. After WWII another friend got him a lectureship in Holyoke, Massachusetts, USA, where he would spend some years. Later on, moved by his sentimental relationships, he would move to Mexico, where he died.

The central concerns of this poet are evident in the title of his life's major opus: La realidad y el deseo ("Reality and Desire"). He published his first collection of verse, Perfil del aire ("Air's profile"), in 1927. Several books followed, and he collected new and already published poetry under this title in 1936. Subsequent editions would include new poetry as new books inside La realidad y el deseo. Expanded on almost until his death in 1963, in this work the poet explores desire, love, subject, object, history and sexuality in poems which draw influences from romanticism, classicism, and the surrealist avant-garde. Besides verse, he also published a collection of reminiscent prose poems, 'Ocnos', about his childhood in Seville.

Cernuda is known as a member of the Generation of '27, a group of Spanish poets and artists including Federico García Lorca. He broke new ground with Los Placeres Prohibidos ("Forbidden Pleasures"), an avant-garde work in which the poet used surrealism to explore his sexuality. During his British period he became deeply familiar with English poetry, which he would admire for its containment and lack of superfluous artifice and paraphernalia. He would also translate several poems and plays into Spanish. He would comment that translating Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida made him intensely happy.

Deeply influenced by André Gide, Cernuda embraced his homosexuality at an early age and made homosexual desire and love the core of his poetry. Or, at least, unlike other gay poets at the time, in his poetry he was never ambiguous about the fact that the objects of his desire and love were men. One of the most influential poets in contemporary Spanish poetry, he is definitely a crucial ground-breaking figure for homosexual writing in Spanish.

During the Spanish Civil War, deeply moved by the assassination of Federico Garcia Lorca, Cernuda fled to England, where he began an exile that later took him to France, Scotland, Massachusetts (Mount Holyoke College), California and finally settling in Mexico; he never returned to Spain. He never married and had no children.

His major English language critics include Derek Harris and Phillip Silver.

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

But here the rainbowed wings of the wind
Are still, and if he shakes his livid memories
He finds a stroke of light-the remembrance of air.
*
Like mine, your flesh
Desires — after water and sun — the touch of shadow;
Our word passionately
Wants the youth like a flowering branch
Who plaits his loveliness of scent and hue in the warm spring air;
Our eyes want the monotonous, diverse sea,
Filled with the gray bird’s cries in the storm;
Our hands want lovely verses to scatter to the disdain of men.
*
Alive, it all returns to the mind,
Unattainable now time has passed;
Like a sharp sure dagger
Its memory pierces my breast.

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

As sea's gray tumult lifts
A high arch of spume, the water's
Faceted loveliness, that now breaks
On the shore, as another advances;

As the earth always wakes in spring
Steadfast beneath the shadowy
Cloudscape, and in cold sunlight
Covers the plain with asphodels;

As genius is born in different bodies, forms
That will nourish its ancient, fiery, glory,
While the merely human dross
Sleeps and is burnt in the flame;

So you always return in shadow
As water, flower, flame, clandestine
Force of an other love. The dull world offends.
But life is yours: come forth and love.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a dramatic shift halfway through this chronological collection. Cernuda’s early poems are adroitly beautiful, with references to nature, death, youth, and longing, but they merely exist as vague poetic expressions without any strong unifying theme or sense of purpose beyond the poetry itself. They are adequate imitations of the surrealist imagery popular at the time.

But then we reach his poems of the thirties, and suddenly he harnesses all the power of these images and verse forms – almost as if he were training himself for just this moment – and turns them to reflect on the pain of exile, the alienation of a lost nation, and the suffering of a poet (and a people) searching for an impossible respite. This shift occurs at a very specific point in the collection: a poem titled “To a Dead Poet (F. G. L.).” Anyone familiar with Spanish verse knows the reference to Lorca without reading the endnotes or Introduction. Knowing nothing about Cernuda’s life or his work (I only read the Introduction to the collection after reading the poems), I immediately gathered from the poems that we had entered into the war years and Cernuda’s subsequent exile. The tone of the collection shifts so dramatically, it seems like everything that came before was a mere warm-up to the entire reason for his existence as a poet.

One should read the early poems only to get a sense of the development of his voice; but the true height of his powers are only revealed in the poems appearing after 1936.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely poetry and lovely translations. Translations are by Reginald Gibbons.

Cernuda was a rebellious individual, at odds with conventional society, a homosexual, an unbeliever. He was in exile after the Civil War. His poetry is about solitude, love, living with integrity. I was less enthusiastic about the early writing, but the poems from his middle period are wonderful, in particular the Apologia pro vita sua. [I don't think Goodreads supports Spanish characters, so in the following quotes turn leading question marks upside down and assume needed accents.]

?No es la pasion medida de la grandeza human
Y acero templado por su fuego el alma grade?

[Is not passion the measure of human greatness?
And in its fire, the great soul tempered steel]

But in the next stanza:
...
Despues del purgatorio ?no ha de ser grato el limbo?
Mas respeta la sena de esta hermandad, la tuya
Si a la pasion renuncias.

...
After purgatory--will not limbo be bliss?
But honor the sign of this brotherhood-- it is yours too
if you renounce passion.

[Silvia Santipolo · Rating 5 out of 5]

De Cernuda, “34 poemas”. Los poemas de Cernuda dicen resaltar la sensualidad. Pero su caudal va más allá, mucho más allá. Habla de presencias y de ausencias, de lo físico y de lo espiritual, de partidas que pueden ser regresos. Los encantos de la naturaleza son los encantos del cuerpo, pero también lo son a la inversa. Cada verso remite a una sensación de pérdida, sin embargo cada verso está poblado de esperanza. Los libros, la literatura, las ansias de conocimiento, de sabiduría y la admiración por autores célebres y no tanto. Uno de los poemas más representativos es “Jardín antiguo”, que, en parte rumorea así: “Oír de nuevo en el silencio, // vivo de trinos y de hojas, // el susurro tibio del aire, // donde las almas viejas flotan”

[Josue Olvera · Rating 3 out of 5]

…pero la vida solo la aprendemos.

Luis Cernuda. Colección poética.

[Ray Mo · Rating 5 out of 5]

自古就被灌输 认定理性太过傲慢 在理性前肆意呼喊： “知识去死“，这民族已预先注定 以崇拜锁链告终 而这淫秽的崇拜必将它带向 我们今天所见之处：锁链加身 ——诗人原话，早看早了免烦恼。没出卖译者。