Reading Luis Cernuda

I decided that I would post some of my free-writing from my journal, this one from a write I did this past weekend on the a book of translations of Spanish poet Luis Cernuda (much of my personal free-writing is responsive to books, films, etc.).  I post this one because I was particularly frustrated by the noise in the house and by my inability to remember much of what I read or even make head or tail of it.  Anyway, I thought it might be a good example to share, so that you can see how a do it myself.

Free-Write on The Poems of Luis Cernuda

I started reading Cernuda today in the Edkins and Harris translation put out by New York University Press in 1971, an edition I didn’t know existed till I was browsing the shelves at OCC’s library yesterday.  Anyway, I find Cernuda’s poetry interesting.  I recall trying to read Paz’s introduction to his work at Installations Unlimited a few years ago, when I was waiting on my car, and then I recall sitting on my front steps and trying to read the first poem and a couple others one summer when I was still living on Westcott, and I recall from all this that his work is difficult—not at all easy to comprehend on a basic level.  This is for a few different reasons.  First, he doesn’t always locate the reader in a location, but instead seems to write in the abstract emotional space of desire and dream, though via fairly straightforward imagery and metaphors.  But as a reader, you never know exactly where you are in his work, except inside his own feelings.  At least this is how the poems I’ve read from the First Poems strike me.  There are also rapid shifts of place, inasmuch as there are location markers at all (for example, in the autumn poem where Virginia is mentioned—I can’t remember the name).  Anyway, I’ve read about ten poems so far today, so I thought I’d try to write about them, the parts that I recall, and simply by describing some of these, start to connect with his work, which I don’t quite feel myself doing yet, though in part this is because of children around me, etc.  It’s hard to read with small children demanding attention.  I noticed the interesting first poem in First Poems where the window becomes the means for the man looking out of it to find peace.  There is a binary in the pieces (and this is mentioned in the translators’ introduction) between something like an ideal world of dream and the changing world of ordinary reality.  There is also love in his dream/ideal world, and this theme crops up constantly in the poems from his second book.  Anyway, there is a tension between peace and change in the first few poems.  I remember also the second poem, where sleep doesn’t give us access to a joyous land—there is no joyous land, something like this.  [As a digression here:  I’m having an incredibly hard time concentrating here because Katie’s singing and rocking in the next room, and I’m getting increasingly agitated.  I need to stop before I yell at her for no reason.  What this all brings up for me are my anxieties about memory because I’m trying to remember parts of the text, quite intentionally, instead of simply letting what comes up come up.  Actually, I just went in and brought her out her, and now she’s “writing” in her notebook at the other end of the table.]  Sleep is the time of “disillusionment,” since it is the time where we don’t dream—where there is no desire? Something like this.  And the walls are constantly there in the first book, at least (again) the poems I’ve read from it—walls that hem the speaker in, but that also (I think) give him the space away from the changing world, the place where nothing stays the same, where nothing is constant, and where consequently there is no peace—something like this.  I also noticed in the second collection the hunter returning home to Virginia and the strange image of the lambs with brutal faces, or some kind of harsh faces, and I think he means the hunter who is returning to Virginia, that he is the lamb; or of course it could be what he’s hunting, but that’s not clear.  Here’s where translation can be problematic because I bet in the original it’s probably clear, as I’d gather it would be clear in English—not that there can’t be obscurity in English poetry, of course:  Hart Crane leaps to mind, and he would seem to be an analogue to Cernuda.  Anyway, there’s a single tree in two of the poems:  the one in the first poem that makes indolence take notice of ardor—no, it’s not ardor, but a word like it—just can’t think of it now.  And there’s the tree that recognizes those returning home in the Virginia poem.  I wonder if the hunter is like the hunter in the Elizabethan poems? Could be? Hunting a heart? Something like this.  I also noticed in the last poem I read that there is the night—well, this isn’t the last poem, but near the end of those I read—the night which goes everywhere, like foam, and that seems to be looking for someone—the speaker? That is his question, though now I can’t recall enough details:  I know she shakes her hips, or sways her hips, but is she looking for someone, or what is the verb? I don’t recall now.  And there’s the wind, which made me think of Shelley’s poem, the wind which goes through, the foreigner, the agent of change, perhaps? But then the speaker is the wind? I don’t know, now I feel like I only got about 30% of what I read—or that I at least only remember about this much of the basic “plots” of the poems.  But they are difficult for, since I do like a location, even if the writer moves away from it quickly.  My bias? My Saturn side? Something like this.  I also noticed that there are often white walls in the poems, but I’ve already said this, right?

[Later]

I think I need to re-frame how I read poetry, particularly difficult poetry:  I am a man listening to another man or woman telling me something about the world, for in some sense that’s why we write, isn’t it? To tell someone else something? And I think I’ll go back through the poems I’ve read, slow down a little bit, and see what Cernuda is telling me.  Maybe that’s a frame I can work with when I read his work and not get so caught up in the difficulty of what’s going on, of not understanding, etc.—all my old fear-traps.  I want to get back to Duncan, too, and finish reading the “Medieval Scenes” and everything else in my pile(s).  At any rate, with poetry, I have to slow down some, and I should emphasize this with my students on Tuesday at Oswego:  you have to slow down with poetry.