texts:
 He expresses this resistance with great power and bitter irony in the poemVentaja grande es que esté ya muerto
Y que de muerto cumpla los tres siglos, que así pueden
Los descendientes mismos de quienes le insultaban
Inclinarse a su nombre, dar premio al erudito,
Sucesor del gusano, royendo su memoria. (it is a great advantage that he is now dead and that he lasted three centuries dead, for now the very descendants of those who insulted him may bow to his name, give a prize to the scholar, successor to the worm, gnawing away at his memory)

The title of the collection alludes to the atmosphere of Britain during the Second World War when "it was only possible to hope for an end to the world's retreat into a primitive world of darkness and terror, in the middle of which England was like the ark in which Noah survived the flood." Vivir sin estar viviendo (1944–1949)

Begun in Cambridge, continued in London and completed in America, this is very similar to the previous collection in that it contains a mix of introspective and self-analytical works and shorter impressionist poems. As a result of his reading of Hölderlin, <mask> had started to use enjambement. His increasing use of this device gave his poetry a duality of rhythm - the rhythm of the individual line and the rhythm of the phrase.Since he tended not to use rhyme or even assonance and was not very interested in writing poetry with a marked metrical pattern, the rhythm of the line tends to be swamped by that of the phrase, resulting in an effect that is often close to prose. It is a rhythm of ideas rather than a metrical rhythm. And yet, the influence of Hölderlin dates back to the period when he was writing


type: original

texts:
 Invocaciones in the mid-1930s, which gives a sense of how profound the influence was. The German poet gave him an example of "a poetic language using long sense periods in extensive poems that develop a theme in depth" and over time the reader can see <mask> absorbing and building on this example. The first eight poems were written in Cambridge and he added another 13 which he wrote during holidays in Cornwall. The title alludes to the state of mind in which he found himself at that time - living vicariously in foreign countries where he scarcely knew anybody. His voracious reading was taking the place of living.He could see nothing ahead of him but death. A typical poem from this collection is "El César", which is another use of the Doppelgänger motif. The aged Emperor Tiberius in retirement in his palace on Capri ponders his solitude and voluntary separation from the world and people. His feeling of misanthropy is almost idealised. He reflects on his power, his age, the blood he has shed, the rumours that circulate about him, his regrets and guilty feelings, what it is like to be an old man desirous of youthful flesh. It is a complex poem: Caesar is a projection of Cernuda's thoughts and yet he is also a figure in his own right, reflecting on his own life story. Con las horas contadas (1950–1956)

This collection was started in Mount Holyoke during the winter of 1950 and completed in Mexico.One of the most noteworthy things about this book is that it contains a group of 16 poems - "Poemas para un cuerpo" - about an intensely physical affair he had with an unidentified man in Mexico. The title of the collection suggests not merely <mask>'s obsession with the

masks: Cernuda Cernuda


texts: passing of time but also the sense of strangeness he felt whilst living this amorous adventure - an old man in love as he describes himself. As already stated, this was one of the happiest periods in his life. Some of the poems refer to the experiences he felt during the affair but the majority are reflections after the affair ended, attempts to explain and fix this experience of intense love. There are obvious parallels with Donde habite el olvido but these later poems are not bitter, resentful or disillusioned. <mask> "is primarily concerned to investigate the relationship between himself and the experience of love, so much so in fact that the loved one has only a secondary importance in the poems". However, he is, unlike Serafín Fernández Ferro or Stanley Richardson, present in the poems rather than a shadow or absence.The poems lack sensuality. Poem "IV Sombra de mí", for example, "is a meditation on the relationship between the lover and the beloved. The loved one is again the visible image of the lover's desire but nonetheless necessary for without him love could not have been exteriorised." What we get is a sense of the poet's gratitude for having been given the chance to experience love. It is interesting that although <mask> later expressed his affection for these poems he acknowledges that they give cause to one of the most serious objections that can be made to his work: that he was not always able to maintain the distance between the man who suffers and the poet who creates. The bulk of the poems in the collection are shorter than in previous books and start to incorporate assonance more frequently in an attempt to concentrate the thematic material


texts: rather than explore it at length and also to seem more purely lyrical, even though these urges were not the result of a conscious decision. Among the other interesting poems is the one that opens the collection, "Aguila y rosa", a very sober, restrained account of the unfortunate marriage of Philip II and Mary Tudor, and Philip's stay in Britain.At times, it could be that <mask> is projecting his own feelings onto the king. Brief and ultimately tragic as their married life was, at least the love she experienced gave Mary some recompense for her unhappy life. With this poem, <mask> completed a trilogy of works about Philip II. The first was "El ruiseñor sobre la piedra" in Las nubes, followed by "Silla del rey" from Vivir sin estar viviendo. Both of these poems evoke the building of the monastery-palace at El Escorial. In the first poem, the monastery becomes a symbol of the visionary, idealist, eternal Spain that <mask> loved. It is an image of beauty, the creation of a sensibility that despises the practical and is diametrically opposed to the utilitarian environment of Glasgow, the place where he lives in exile.The nightingale singing its song, just to please itself, is a symbol for <mask> the poet and it becomes fused with his conception of El Escorial. "Silla del rey" depicts Philip watching the construction of his palace from his seat in the hills above. <mask> takes as a starting point the king's thoughts of the building as the expression of his faith and centralising political ideas. This develops into a reflection on his work, time and society and leads to a declaration that he is creating a haven from the world, protected by spiritual power from temporal

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texts:
 change. Reality and desire have become one. The king is an outlet for <mask> himself. "El elegido" is an objective account of the choosing, preparation and killing of an Aztec sacrificial victim.It is recounted in very simple language but it clearly picks up on the thoughts behind the soliloquy in Invocaciones. The poem presents an allegory of the choosing, beguilement and final destruction of the poet by life or the "daimonic" power. Desolación de la Quimera (1956–1962)

<mask>'s last book of poems is a summing up of his career. It was published in Mexico in November 1962. It mingles poems in the style of his first book with epigrammatic works and extended reveries in his mature style. In "Niño tras un cristal", he completes a cycle of poems about the unawareness and hope of a child before its corruption by the world - a theme present right from the start of his poetic career. In addition there are poems that are derived from song-titles or catch-phrases - "Otra vez, con sentimiento" - and historical poems about figures such as Mozart, Verlaine and Rimbaud, Keats, Goethe, Ludwig of Bavaria.There is also a poem about a painting by Titian,"Ninfa y pastor, por Ticiano". It is as if <mask> has a need to base his experiences of life on a foundation of cultural references. Stylistically, this is an extreme collection. There no lyrical flights, no expansive metaphors. However, in the view of <mask> de Villena, this dry language is exactly right for these ironic, cutting but perfectly chiselled poems. It is clear that he knew that his life was coming to a close and he wanted to settle his accounts. This is shown by the titles of poems such as "Antes de irse", "Dos de

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Cernuda
Cernuda
Luis Antonio


texts:
 noviembre", "Del otro lado", "Epílogo" and "Despedida".There are direct links to previous collections. For example, "Epílogo" is explicitly related to the "Poemas para un cuerpo", and "Pregunta vieja, vieja respuesta" links back to Donde habite el olvido. He also returns to the theme of Spain, which had first appeared in Las nubes, analysing what he admires and dislikes. In "Díptico español", he shows his contempt for the intolerance, stupidity and cruelty of the Spanish society of his era. He is a Spaniard despite himself: he has no choice in the matter. However, he is proud of Spanish culture as exemplified by the works of Benito Pérez Galdós and Miguel de Cervantes: he is nostalgic not so much for the reality of Spain as for the idealised world created by Spanish literature. There are poems about other poets he knew, sometimes splenetic in tone.As usual, the major theme is that of the impossibility of finding happiness in a world where desire and reality diverge - cf "Hablando a Manona", "Luna llena en Semana Santa", or "Música cautiva". However, he does find some kind of consolation in the realm of art - listening to Mozart's music, or considering the world of Goethe compared with that of Napoleon's drunken soldiers. Also, by this time, he had gathered some degree of fame in Spain and there were signs that people were responding to his writings. In "Peregrino", he reacts to enquiries about whether he might return to his homeland in a characteristically grumpy way which shades into a tone of resolute stoicism as he explains that he is driven to keep moving forward and can never return to the past. Influences

It was at the urging of Pedro Salinas that <mask>


texts: began to read classical Spanish poets such as Garcilaso, <mask> León, Góngora, Lope de Vega, Quevedo and Calderón de la Barca. He also urged him to learn French and to read modern French literature, in particular André Gide and the poetry of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rimbaud. <mask> also became acquainted with the poetry of Pierre Reverdy and counts him as a major influence over the poems in his first collection, Perfil del aire, for his qualities of spareness, purity and reticence.No contemporary critic recognised this influence. In Un río, un amor, "Destierro" echoes Reverdy's poetry in its evocation of a solitary existence in a hostile urban world. He also read Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror and Préface a un livre futur, although their influence emerged at a later time when <mask> began to explore the French Surrealist movement. Just before he completed Perfil del aire, in March 1926, the Madrid book-seller León Sánchez Cuesta had already delivered to him a copy of Le Libertinage by Louis Aragon. In the time just after the publication of Perfil del aire, he began to read other books by the leaders of the Surrealist movement - André Breton, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon and René Crevel. He strongly identified with their boldness and their sense of alienation from their society and this emerges clearly in his third and fourth collections. While he was halfway through writing the poems of Invocaciones, he began to read Hölderlin, which he describes as one of his greatest experiences in poetry.He had grown tired of the very restricted range of literature championed by the French surrealists and was starting to interest himself in English and German poetry. In order

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Cernuda
Cernuda


texts: to read them, he began to learn these languages. He was enthralled by the depth and poetic beauty that he discovered in Hölderlin and discovered not just a new vision of the world but also a new means of poetic expression. In a note that he wrote to accompany some translations of Hölderlin, <mask> describes him as imbued with the force of pagan myths, "a living echo of pagan forces now buried". He thinks that Hölderlin's metaphysical lyricism is closer to Keats rather than Blake "although at times, in his fragments which have such dark transcendence, he is not so far from the prophetic songs of the latter." There is a strong sense of <mask> identifying himself with Hölderlin as he describes his alienation from the world he lived in. For him, "the secret forces of earth are the only realities, far from the conventions that govern society."He also notes an occasion in which the poet was discovered one day in rapture at the feet of some Classical statues in a Paris park. In Invocaciones there are two poems that explicitly invoke ancient Greek gods and they seem to link closely to this reference. In "Himno a la tristeza", sadness is seen as something gifted by the gods to mankind, as in Hölderlin's "Die Heimat" and, more directly, in "A las estatuas de los dioses", <mask> portrays how "although forgotten and humiliated in an alien, degraded world, the gods still represent an age of joy, innocence, and harmony, when love was still possible." For <mask>, Hölderlin is as much a kindred spirit as an influence: they share a pantheistic vision of Nature, a sense of tragic destiny (the poder daimónico described by Cernuda in many poems and essays), the same conviction that

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texts: society was hostile to the Poet, the same nostalgia for a lost Golden Age of harmony. Before he even read Hölderlin, these themes emerge in the "Egloga", the "Oda", and "De qué país" from Los placeres prohibidos. During his stay in Paris in 1936, he bought a copy of the Greek Anthology in a French translation. He was stimulated by the concise and penetrating style of these poems and epigrams.After his move to Great Britain in September 1938, <mask> continued the exploration of English literature that he had begun the previous spring. While he was reading Eliot, Blake, Keats, Shakespeare's plays, he was struck by their lack of verbal ornamentation compared with Spanish and French poetry. He discovered that a poet could achieve a deeper poetic effect by not shouting or declaiming, or repeating himself, by avoiding bombast and grandiloquence. As in those epigrams in the Greek anthology, he admired the way that concision could give a precise shape to a poem. He learned to avoid two literary vices, the pathetic fallacy and "purple patches", avoiding undue subjectivity or features that did not fit in with the overall conception of the poem. The tendencies had been there, to gradually increasing extent, in his poetry from the outset but his reading confirmed him on this route. He also read Browning and learned how to take a dramatic, historic or legendary situation and to project his own emotional state onto it, in order to achieve greater objectivity, as in poems such as "Lázaro", "Quetzalcóatl", "Silla del Rey", or "El César".In a study of <mask>'s influences, E.M. Wilson suggests that, soon after his arrival in England, he began to emulate the way that T.S. Eliot


texts:
 borrows and alludes to works by other writers. He provides examples of such possible borrowings from Rodrigo Caro, Baudelaire, <mask> León and Quevedo. He also suggests that Lope de Vega and George Herbert were the sources for another 2 poems, "Divertimento" and "La poesía". Eliot's influence is also suggested in an essay by Octavio Paz - "La palabra edificante". One significant borrowing from Eliot is the title of his last collection of poetry, Desolación de la Quimera, which alludes to a line from "Burnt Norton"The loud lament of the disconsolate chimerain itself an allusion to a sermon by John Donne. At Mount Holyoke he started to read Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (The Fragments of the Presocratics) by Hermann Diels with the help of an English translation.In Mexico, he read John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy. These fragments of pre-Socratic thought seemed to him the most profound and poetic philosophical works he had ever read. The world of ancient Greece is often recalled in his poetry. It reminded him of his childhood reading of a book of Greek mythology which, even at that early age, had been sufficient to make his religious beliefs seem sad and depressing. He tried to express something of that experience in "El poeta y los mitos" in Ocnos. Poetics: the role of the poet and poetry

<mask>'s poetry shows a continual process of stripping away artifice and fashionable stylistic traits or mannerisms. This accounts in part for the abrupt changes in style and tone between various collections.He was also convinced that a poet needs to gain as much variety of experience and knowledge as possible, otherwise his work will be pallid and restricted. A poet's work

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Cernuda


texts: should reflect his growth, his intellectual and emotional development. When he describes things, it is his individual perception of them that he is trying to convey, what they mean to him, rather than their objective existence. However, after his early collections, he rarely uses the first-person. He frequently tries to create a sense of distance from his poetry by using the "tú" form but the person he is addressing is usually himself. The effect of this is that much of his poetry seems to be a self-conscious interior monologue. In part, this is because he was always conscious of a difference between the Cernuda who lived and suffered and the Cernuda who wrote poetry.In part, it is also probably a result of his natural reticence and caution against disclosing too much of himself, despite the fact that personal history lies behind much of his output. Whereas Browning might use a figure such as Fra Lippo Lippi or Andrea del Sarto to live imaginatively what he would not present as his own experience, <mask>'s characters have <mask>'s voice and present versions or aspects of his own thoughts and feelings. He was convinced that he was driven by an inner daimon to write poetry and that the poet is in touch with a spiritual dimension of life that normal people are either blind to or shut off from. it is a topic which he alludes to frequently in his critical writings. His urge to write poetry was not under his control. Reading some lines of poetry, hearing some notes of music, seeing an attractive person could be the external influence that led to a poem but what was important was to try to express the real, deep-lying poetic impulse, which was sometimes powerful enough to


texts:
 make him shiver or burst into tears. Although he was a self-absorbed person, dedicated to the art of writing poetry, he was vulnerable enough to need to know that he had an audience.After November 1947, when an edition of Como quien espera el alba was published in Buenos Aires, rumours of its favourable reception reached him in Mount Holyoke. He was gratified to learn that he was starting to find an audience and that his name was getting mentioned when Spanish poetry was discussed. Translations

During the writing of Invocaciones, he met the German philosopher and linguist Hans Gebser, who was living and working in Madrid in the Ministry of Education. This was at a time when <mask> was beginning to become enthused by the poetry of Hölderlin and, with Gebser's help he began to translate selected poems. These appeared in Cruz y Raya in early 1936. Because his knowledge of German was rudimentary, he made an error in translating the final line of one of the poems. A second edition was published in Mexico in 1942 but, since Bergamín did not advise him of this and <mask> himself was living in Scotland at the time, he was unable to correct this and other infelicities.Gebser himself, together with Roy Hewin Winstone, was compiling an anthology of contemporary Spanish poetry translated into German and <mask> tried to get him to exclude any poems by Guillén, Salinas or Dámaso Alonso, on the basis that they were teachers rather than poets. He only succeeded in getting Alonso excluded and the anthology was published in Berlin in 1936. In addition, he translated a set of 6 poems by Eluard, published in Litoral in 1929. In 1938, with the collaboration of Stanley Richardson, he

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texts:
 translated 2 sonnets by Wordsworth which were published in Hora de España. He also translated poems by Blake, Yeats and Keats, which were published in Romance in 1940. Three poems by Yeats, Browning and Marvell were included in the first volume of Poesía y literatura. Works in Prose

Prose poems

Ocnos (1940-1956)
<mask> did not enjoy his life in Glasgow.He felt exiled both from happiness and love and began to feel a yearning for his childhood days. He remembered the South as a lost paradise. It was in 1940 that the contrasts between the sordid and ugly city of Glasgow where he was living and his childhood memories of Seville inspired him to start to write brief prose poems to try to exorcise the tensions building up inside him. As the collection built up, he cast about for a title, finally finding one that pleased him in a work by Goethe. Ocnos was a mythical Roman figure who twisted reeds into ropes only to discover that his donkey methodically ate them. Yet he persisted in his efforts in order to give himself something to do and perhaps learn something. It struck <mask> that there was a fitting irony - the creator continually trying to create and the donkey symbolising time the destroyer, standing in the place of the reading public, an unwittingly destructive consumer.The first edition was published in London in 1942 and consisted of 31 pieces. <mask> continued mining the seam of work that writing prose poetry opened up for him and brought out a second edition in Madrid in 1949, with 48 pieces. The first edition had focused solely on <mask>'s childhood and adolescence in Seville. In the second edition, he gave the pieces a biographical sequence and moved beyond


texts: his life in Seville. The final edition had 63 pieces and was published in Mexico in 1963. The first group of poems overlapped with the writing of Como quien espera el alba and this was obviously one of those periods of inspired creativity, such as when he was writing "Un río, un amor" and Los placeres prohibidos. Exploration of his formative years was becoming a major preoccupation and there are overlaps between his poems and prose poems.The clearest example is "Jardín antiguo", which is both the title of a poem in Las nubes and a prose poem in Ocnos. Both are inspired by the gardens of the Alcázar of Seville. In the poem, an ageing man dreams of returning to the walled garden, with its fountain, lemon trees, magnolias and birdsong. He dreams of the return of youth with its pangs of desire, knowing full well that they will not come back. In Ocnos we get a more expansive description of the garden and at the same time a deeper reflection on his connection to that place, the sense of rapture that he felt as a boy there. It concludes with a statement of the gap between reality and desire: Más tarde habías de comprender que ni la acción ni el goce podrías vivirlos con la perfección que tenían en tus sueños al borde de la fuente. Y el día que comprendiste esa triste verdad, aunque estabas lejos y en tierra extraña, deseaste volver a aquel jardín y sentarte de nuevo al borde de la fuente, para soñar otra vez la juventud pasada.(Later you had to understand that neither action nor enjoyment could be lived with the perfection they had in your dreams at the edge of the fountain. And the day you understood that sad truth, even though you were far away and in a strange land,


texts: you wished to return to that garden and sit again on the edge of the fountain, to dream again of past youth.) John Taylor writes,"As [Cernuda] recalls loci of ephemeral harmony, increases his knowledge and self-knowledge, and crafts his ruminations, he hints that these introspective and poetic labours are all in vain. The donkey is already chewing the beautiful reed-woven rope." While the predominant mood of the collection is sad, imbued with a sense of loss and nostalgia, there is also room for the occasional celebration as in "El estío" and "El amante", where he recalls the sensual delights of a holiday in Málaga in 1933, frolicking on the beach and in the sea, walking naked under his white robe with his friends and, in particular, his lover Gerardo Carmona. Apart from the short-lived affairs with Serafín Fernández Ferro and Stanley Richardson, Carmona is the only other person we know about with whom <mask> had a lasting affair in the 1930s. Again, these prose poems share an affinity of mood and subject-matter with a poem written around the same time, "Elegía anticipada", included in Como quien espera el alba, in which he declares that their love has broken out of the prisons of time.When his thoughts turn to Glasgow, in "Ciudad caledonia", he describes his hatred of the place, its monotony, vulgarity and ugliness and his dislike of the utilitarian, puritanical people. It was like a prison, useless in his life apart from work, parching and consuming what youthfulness he had left. One prose poem, "Escrito en el agua" (Written in the water), was excluded from the second edition of Ocnos by the censors in Franco's Spain - presumably because it contains blasphemous


texts:
 ideas - "God does not exist." He had the reputation of holding Communist views, of being anti-Franco, of living a lifestyle and holding views repugnant to the regime - a homosexual who was anti-religion and anti-family values, so his writings were always likely to come under close scrutiny from the censors. <mask> himself decided not to include it in the third edition. Taylor points out that the title is a translation of Keats's epitaph, "Here Lies One Whose Name was Writ in Water". <mask> had come to think it was too rhetorical in tone.It is another account of the destructiveness of time and how reality destroys all hopes and dreams. There is also an extended meditation in "El acorde" on his conception of cosmic harmony, a unity of feeling and consciousness that comes fleetingly, a moment of ecstasy. He calls it by the German word Gemüt and writes that the closest thing to it is "entering another body in the act of love [and thereby obtaining] oneness with life by way of the lover's body." Variaciones sobre tema mexicano (1950)
The first piece in this book is called "La lengua". Since his departure from Spain in February 1938, although he had been in contact with many Hispanic people, he had missed the sense of being surrounded by his native language. His visit to Mexico in the summer of 1949, the feeling of being in a Hispanic culture, the temperament of the people, the hot sun all seem to have kick-started his inspiration. These prose poems and his next collection of poetry, Con las horas contadas, are the result.He wrote these pieces in the course of 1950, once he was back at Mount Holyoke, and the collection was published in 1952. He sets the general theme in


texts: an introduction by discussing the lack of interest in Mexico shown by writers from peninsular Spain. As a child, he had no curiosity about the country. His curiosity was sparked by chance after his arrival in America. Curiosity turned into interest, which developed into love and this love is explored in these pieces. This is one of the sunniest, in all senses, of <mask>'s collections. Gone is the sad introspection of Ocnos.In "Miravalle", he is enchanted by the viceroy's palace. If he were allowed to stay, he cannot imagine that he could tire of it or want to move elsewhere. In "Lo nuestro", the sight of native children begging reminds him of his homeland. His initial impulse is to return to the USA but, on further reflection, he comes to realise that this country is alive, in spite of its poverty. He reflects that perhaps poverty is the price you pay for being so alive. The USA seems vacuous and trivial in comparison. In "El mirador, he describes how the landscape, so similar to Spain, is taking control of him, exerting a spell over him, like it must have done over the conquistadors."Perdiendo el tiempo" depicts a scene of indolent sensuality. "Ocio" is a reflection on the necessity of idleness. In "El patio", he feels as if he is back in the Seville of his childhood. He has finally managed to recover it. In "La posesión", he describes his urge to fuse with the land. In "Centro del hombre", he observes that the feeling of being a stranger, which had been a constant in his years of exile, has gone. He had been living with his body in one place and his soul in another.Now they are reunited: con todo o con casi todo concordabas, y las cosas, aire, luz, paisaje,


texts:
 criaturas, te eran amigas. (you agreed with everything or almost everything, and things, air, light, landscape, creatures, were friends with you.) However, these moments of harmony and union can only be fleeting - perfect shimmering moments, each of which is like a pearl between its two valves. On the plane back to the USA, he had to hide his tears and keep his feelings private. He then comments that this would add to the legend that has been created of his being dry and cold-hearted. Short Stories and Drama
He published a set of three short stories - Tres narraciones - in Buenos Aires, 1948. The stories are:

"El Viento en la Colina", originally written in 1938,
"El Indolente", originally written in 1929,
"El Sarao", originally written in 1941-42.Two more stories appeared in Hora de España, "En la costa de Santiniebla" (1937) and "Sombras en el salón" (1937). The latter depicts the atmosphere of Carlos Morla's tertulias in which "not only literary and aesthetic questions were debated but quarrels and affairs of the heart: love, disillusion, dislikes..." It seems to be a fictionalised account of the breakdown of <mask>'s affair with Serafín Ferro. He completed one play - La familia interrumpida - in two acts in 1937-38. It was published posthumously in 1988. Before that, in 1931, he wrote 9 pages of an untitled play that he never completed. During his time in London, probably 1946, he began to translate Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida into Spanish verse. This was a task that taught him a lot and which gave him a great deal of satisfaction.He acknowledged the advice given by E.M.Wilson, especially his help in clarifying difficult passages. Wilson was an eminent


texts:
 British scholar of Spanish Golden Age theatre who was at that time Professor of Spanish Literature at King's College, London. They had met in Madrid in 1930-31, when Wilson was on a scholarship at the Residencia de Estudiantes. <mask> finished his translation in 1950 when he was at Mount Holyoke. With sponsorship from the British Council, it was published in Ínsula in 1953. He also translated part of the first act of Romeo and Juliet. Criticism

<mask> wrote critical essays throughout his career, many of which were published in newspapers or magazines.Towards the end of his life, however, he brought out 4 collections of his most important pieces. The first was Estudios sobre poesía española contemporánea (Madrid 1957). The conception of this work probably dates back to the 1940s but he only began work on the articles that comprise it in 1954. <mask> gives a survey of what seem to him to be the most important currents in Spanish poetry from the 19th century onwards. He deliberately omits any neo-Classical or Romantic poets and starts with Ramón de Campoamor. He also covers Bécquer and Rosalía de Castro before moving on to a general essay on "Modernismo and the Generation of 1898". This is followed by individual essays on Miguel de Unamuno, Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez.He then moves on to León Felipe, José Moreno Villa and Gómez de la Serna before focusing on his contemporaries, Salinas, Guillėn, Lorca, Diego, Alberti, Aleixandre and Altolaguirre. He ends the collection with some thoughts on developments since 1936. These articles were first published in a magazine called México en la Cultura between 1954 and 1956. The subsequent publication of the collected


texts: articles was delayed by the uproar that some of them had provoked, especially the essays on Juan Ramón Jiménez, Salinas and Guillén. It was eventually published in 1957 in a heavily bowdlerised version that omitted chapters relating to Guillén, Aleixandre, Altolaguirre, Diego and Alberti. His next collection was Pensamiento poético en la lírica inglesa (Mexico 1958). <mask> suggests that it is more interesting as an indication of Cernuda's interests than as a work of criticism in its own right, given that it was written up in Mexico from his notes at a time when he lacked access to a proper English language library and so could not properly develop his arguments.Yet, his audience was attracted by the novelty of a study of English poetry, written by a Spaniard. In a letter to Derek Harris, dated March 3, 1961, <mask> states that "English literature, from my arrival in England (1938) until now, has been part of my daily reading." In his essay on Aleixandre, collected in the Estudios sobre poesía española contemporánea, he writes of his fascination with the tradition of poet-critics in English literature, comparing unfavourably the writings of such people as Sainte-Beuve and Menéndez y Pelayo with Coleridge, Keats, Arnold and Eliot. He was particularly inspired by his reading of essays by Eliot such as "The Frontiers of Criticism" and "Tradition and the Individual Talent". The collection shows just how extensive and deep his reading of English literature was, as it contains studies of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Swinburne and Hopkins. Poesía y literatura, I y II (Barcelona 1960, 1964) These collections gathered together

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Luis Maristany
Cernuda


texts: his most important essays or articles on literary themes. They display the extraordinary range of his reading, covering authors as diverse as Galdós, Goethe, Hölderlin, Cervantes, Marvell, Browning, Yeats, Gide, Rilke, Ronald Firbank, Nerval, Dashiell Hammett, Reverdy, Valle-Inclán as well as figures more often found in his writings such as Eliot and Juan Ramón Jiménez.The dates of composition of the essays range from 1935 to 1963, so they cover the full range of his critical career. For students of <mask>, the main interest lies in the first volume. Not only does it contain his heartfelt 1946 tribute to Andrė Gide but also "Palabras antes de una Lectura" and "Historial de un Libro", two of the most revealing accounts of his poetics and starting-points for all Cernuda criticism. "Palabras" was the text of a lecture delivered at the Lyceum Club in Madrid in 1935 and edited for publication in 1941. He begins by discussing the purpose of poetry, which for him is a question of conveying his personal experience of the world. It is in this lecture that he reveals his primary theme: reality versus desire. His aim is to find "a transcendental plane of existence where the division between the objective and the subjective dimensions of the world is eliminated" and cosmic harmony can be attained.He makes a clear distinction between the world's deceptive appearance and the hidden "imagen completa del mundo", which is the true reality. He also develops the idea of a "daimonic power" that pervades the universe and is able to achieve this synthesis of the invisible underlying reality and its deceiving appearance. But a force powerful enough to do this is also capable of


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 destroying the poet, as in the case of Hölderlin. The "Historial" was first published in instalments in México en la Cultura in 1958. It is a detailed account of <mask>'s intellectual development and gives great insight into the process of how he became a poet and how his poetry evolved over time. In a review in the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Arthur Terry described it as "the most remarkable piece of self-analysis by any Spanish poet, living or dead". It is, however, very reticent about his emotional development.For example, he only alludes very obliquely to the love affairs that inspired Los placeres prohibidos, Donde habite el olvido and "Poemas para un cuerpo". <mask> and his contemporaries

Salinas and Guillén

He came to the attention of Pedro Salinas in his first year at Seville University - 1920-21 - and recorded, as late as 1958, that he would probably never have found his vocation as a poet had it not been for the older man's encouragement. However, his attitude towards Salinas seems to have been quite complex, as far as can be judged from his writings. In 1929 and 1930, his growing political militancy, inspired by his attraction to surrealism, made it difficult for him to tolerate friends whom he had come to consider bourgeois - such as Guillén, Salinas and even Aleixandre. Even though he might have reverted to friendly terms with Salinas and Guillén (and this was right at the start of his relationship with Aleixandre, when he viewed him as a comfortable bourgeois), in a collection of essays published in 1957, Estudios sobre Poesía española contemporánea, it is possible to see that he continues to view them as adhering to a different conception of


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 poetry. For <mask>, a true poet has to break away from society in some way, even if he might live a lifestyle that looks totally conventional from the outside, and these two poets never managed to do that. He does not approve of the playful qualities in Salinas's poetry and his seeming refusal to deal with profound subjects.When he considers the change that came over Salinas's poetry with La voz a ti debida, he dismisses it as

just another game, a desire to show that he was as human as the next man. In truth, the poetry of Salinas was alien to <mask> - so alien as to be antipathetic to him. His personal relationship with Salinas had probably never fully recovered from the blow of his apparent rejection of Perfil del aire in 1927. Not even his favourable review of the first edition of La realidad y el deseo seems to have appeased <mask> for long. Salinas wrote an introduction to an anthology of Spanish poetry that was published in the 1940s and referred to Cernuda as el más Licenciado Vidriera de los poetas, an allusion to the Cervantes short story El licenciado Vidriera, in which the hero retreats timorously from life under the delusion that he is made of glass. In a poem called "Malentendu", included in Desolación de la Quimera, <mask> launches a bitter attack on a man who, he claims, consistently misunderstood and ill-treated him, alluding specifically to that description. His contacts with Guillén seem to have been more sporadic.<mask> clearly valued his supportive words when Perfil del aire first appeared and he does not seem to have done anything to vex <mask>. However the latter's assessment is based solely on the evidence of Cántico - the later collections

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 had not begun to appear when <mask>

has a different view of reality than <mask>. Nevertheless, <mask> respects his dedication to his poetry and his commitment to revising it and making it better. However, he does regret that Guillén should have expended so much care and energy on expounding such a limited view of life. He notes what he views as Guillén's tendency to draw everything he sees into a contained, bourgeois viewpoint. He also notes the way that when Guillén writes about Lorca, the latter's life and works become a personal affair of the Guillén family.His assessment ends in a contradictory way. He views Guiillén as a poet in the manner of Coventry Patmore - a now forgotten 19thc. British poet - and yet also one of the 3 or 4 finest poets of his generation. Aleixandre

One of the first things that <mask> did on arriving in Madrid in 1928 was to pay a visit to Vicente Aleixandre. This was their first meeting. However, they did not immediately become friends and <mask> blames it on his own timidity and distrust. He was struck by Aleixandre's warmth and friendliness, not realising until a later date that his visit had been during the hours when Aleixandre, for the sake of his health, would normally have been resting.Unfortunately he was also struck by Aleixandre's calmness and the sense of ease that he exuded at being in familiar surroundings. For <mask>, who was always uneasy about feeling at home anywhere, this was a reason for deciding that he did not want to see Aleixandre again. After his return to Madrid from Toulouse in June 1929, he met Aleixandre again: he recounts that it was Aleixandre who re-introduced himself to <mask> as he himself did not

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 recognise him. Gradually, over the course of many meetings, <mask>'s habitual reserve and distrust faded. His friendship with Vicente Aleixandre developed into the closest he had ever had. They often met in Aleixandre's house, sometimes with Lorca and Altolaguirre there as well. Aleixandre seems to have had a special gift for friendship, because he also became one of Lorca's closest friends (according to Ian Gibson).and <mask> notes specifically his skill as an attentive and sympathetic listener. The implication is that he was trusted with the intimate confessions of many of his friends. <mask> also gives a very favourable account of Aleixandre's poetry in Estudios sobre poesía española contemporánea, seeing in his work the struggle of a man of intense feeling trapped inside a sick body, an analogous situation to his own struggle for fulfilment. However, not even Aleixandre was able to escape from <mask>'s sensitivity about his future reputation. In the 1950s, he wrote a few essays on his memories of <mask>, which of course were fixed in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He describes his friend's apparent detachment from the world and unwillingness to engage. No attempt was made to see whether that old image still fitted the man who had gone through all the upheaval that <mask> had experienced while going into exile.Perhaps more importantly, there was no attempt made to dissociate the poetry written by <mask>, from <mask> the man as Aleixandre had known him 20 years earlier. Lorca

<mask>'s relationship with Lorca was one of the most important in his life, notwithstanding the fact of its brevity. He first met Lorca in Seville in December 1927, during the celebrations

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 in honour of Góngora. He recalled this meeting in an article he wrote in 1938. They met on the patio of a hotel in the evening. <mask> was struck by the contrast between Lorca's large, eloquent, melancholy eyes and his thickset peasant's body. He was not favourably impressed by his theatrical manner and by the way he was surrounded by hangers-on - reminiscent of a matador.However, something drew them together: "Something that I hardly understood or did not wish to acknowledge began to unite us....he took me by the arm and we left the others." He next met Lorca three years later in Aleixandre's apartment in Madrid after Lorca's return from New York and Cuba. He noticed that something in Lorca had changed; he was less precious, less melancholy and more sensual. Considering the friendship between them and his admiration for Lorca, <mask> is dispassionate in his assessments of Lorca's poetry. He is not a whole-hearted admirer of the Romancero gitano, for example, unimpressed by the obscurity of the narratives in many of the individual poems and by the theatricality and outmoded costumbrismo of the collection as a whole. When he discusses Canciones, he deplores the jokiness of some of the poems -

an attitude unworthy of a poet, but more appropriate to the son of a wealthy family who, comfortable in his very bourgeois status, is able to mock it, because he knows that it will not cost him anything and that it will earn him the reputation of being a smart, witty chap. He notes that this is a fleeting characteristic in Lorca but more persistent in someone such as Alberti.For <mask>, poetry is a serious business and he tends not to approve of people who take it lightly. It


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 also tends to show how his criticism is guided by his own principles. He tends to be more lenient in his judgments of poets who are like him. He seems to approve of the fact that after the success of the Romancero gitano, Lorca continued along his own track, not seduced into writing more gypsy ballads. In Poeta en Nueva York, a collection not published in Spain in Lorca's lifetime, <mask> identifies the heart of the collection as the "Oda a Walt Whitman". This is interesting as it is a poem in which Lorca clearly shows his identification with homosexuals but <mask>'s reference is rather obscure -

in it the poet gives voice to a feeling that was the very reason of his existence and work. Because of that it is a pity that this poem is so confused, in spite of its expressive force.On March 8, 1933, he was present at the premiere in Madrid of García Lorca's play Bodas de sangre. but he makes no reference to it, or indeed to any of Lorca's plays in his writings. He notes at the end of the chapter on Lorca in Estudios sobre Poesía española contemporánea that Lorca's later poems give clear signs to suggest that he had a lot more to say at the time of his death and that his style was developing in emotional force. <mask> wrote an elegy for Lorca which he included in Las nubes and to the end of his life took pains to try to ensure that the image of Lorca was not academicised, that he remained a figure of vitality, rebellion and nonconformism. Dámaso Alonso

In 1948, <mask> published an open letter to the famous critic Dámaso Alonso in reaction to an article by the latter titled Una generación poética (1920-36). He takes exception to two passages:
<mask>, at that time very


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 young
Cernuda was still a boy, almost isolated in Seville, in the year of our excursion to Seville, the same year in which Perfil del aire appeared in Málaga, which neither represents his mature work.... He points out that he was 25 at this time, so can scarcely be considered "very young" or a "boy".As for his isolation in Seville, Alonso should recall that he had already had poems published in the Revista de Occidente and elsewhere. However, it is noteworthy that in his later essay, Historial de un libro, he used the same expression to depict his sense of confusion at the hostile reviews to his first collection. He also criticises Alonso's use of the word "mature". He points out the essential inconsistency in saying that the poet was young and then expecting maturity in his early work. He then states that for him the key factor is not whether a poem is mature or not but whether it has artistic merit. He goes on to say that, even after the passage of time, he still prefers some of his earlier poems to certain poems written later. The major complaint he raises is that this critique is just a lazy repetition of the initial critical reaction in 1927.One of his key beliefs is that there are poets who find their audience at once and poets who have to wait for an audience to come to them - he reiterates this in Historial de un libro. He is one of the latter. So when people like Alonso, who rejected his early work and still persist in calling it immature, now say he is a fine poet, he takes that to mean that they are merely picking up on the favourable reactions of people 20 years younger to his recent works - in other words, the audience that has found him - and that


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 they are unable to see the continuities between the earlier and the later work. This develops into a key theme of <mask>'s final collection. In "Malentendu", he shows his unease that his own reputation could be shaped beyond the grave by the perceptions of someone such as Pedro Salinas and his reference to El Licenciado Vidriera. In "Otra vez, con sentimiento", he shows the same unease on behalf of Lorca. Alonso had written in the same article (Una generación poética (1920-36)) a tribute to Lorca, calling him "my prince".<mask> is keen to save his old friend from appropriation by reactionary forces, defending his unconventional lifestyle (homosexuality) and everything else about him that would prevent him from being free to live in Franco's Spain. Alberti and political commitment

Alberti was another of the people whom he met for the first time in the Góngora celebrations in Seville in 1927. Alberti describes him as "dark, thin, extremely refined and meticulous". However, it is not likely that Alberti ever became close to <mask> although the latter contributed to many of the former's journals during the early 1930s. Alberti invited him to contribute to the celebratory album that he was editing but <mask> did not follow it up. His relationship with Alberti is suggestive of the pathways along which his mind was moving after his initial contact with surrealism. In 1933, for example, he wrote for Alberti's magazine Octubre a piece called Los que se incorporan (Those who join up).In it he calls for the destruction of bourgeois society:  "I trust in a revolution inspired by communism to achieve this". In an article written for Hora de España in 1937, he wrote that: "the


texts: poet is inevitably a revolutionary... a revolutionary with full awareness of his responsibility". However, by that time, it seems clear that he did not expect poets to get directly involved in revolutionary actions. In an essay devoted to Aleixandre in 1950 he goes so far as to say that, for a poet to take the course of direct action "is absurd and tends to ruin the poet as a poet". This attitude seems to colour his response to Alberti's poetic output. A key point in <mask>'s view of Alberti's poetry is that Alberti seemed to lack any sense of self and his poetry lacks interiority. He also highlights the fact that Alberti was a virtuoso versifier, able to counterfeit the manner of Gil Vicente or any other folk poet.<mask> does not approve of the playfulness that Alberti shows in his first three collections. He does not believe that Alberti rises above the level of his models, such as Góngora and Guillén in Cal y canto - in other words he sees Alberti as a parodist rather than as an original poet. The reader gets the impression that he envies the fact that Alberti became so successful so rapidly, using him as an example of a poet who found his public immediately. These thoughts were written in his essay in Estudios sobre poesía espaňola contemporánea on Alberti and seem to derive from Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent", because he goes on to draw a contrast between writers who are readily accepted by the public with writers who are more original, who modify the tradition with their own experiences of life and who have to wait for the public to accept them. <mask> ends up by praising his poetic fluency and virtuosity while stating that he had nothing


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 to say and that his work is basically deprived of passion and emotion. <mask> even wonders whether Alberti's recognition of the social injustice of Spain was the inspiration for him to write political poetry because it is difficult to see any fundamental change in his ideas and feelings. The political poems are not very different from his previous phase and he remains just as committed to traditional poetic forms as ever.<mask> closes his essay by noting that Alberti's commitment to Communism does not stop him from turning to apolitical subject-matter in which the reader can divine nostalgia for his former success. In an attempt to revive this, he churns out variations of his old themes. Altolaguirre and his family

That there was a close bond between Altolaguirre, his wife Concha Méndez, and <mask> seems clear. <mask> devoted separate chapters in both Estudios sobre poesía española contemporánea and Poesía y literatura to the poetry of Altolaguirre, consistently asserting that he was not a minor poet, despite the critical consensus to that effect. In Desolación de la Quimera, he defends his dead friend from superficial, mistaken memories of "Manolito" the endearing man, held by people who have forgotten or never knew his rare gifts as a poet, in "Supervivencias tribales en el medio literario". It is like an echo of his fears for what will happen to his own reputation after death - will people remember him or turn to the legends promulgated by people like Salinas. When Altolaguirre and Concha married in June 1932, <mask> was one of the witnesses at their wedding, along with Lorca, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Guillén.When in March 1933 their first child died in


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 childbirth, <mask> dedicated a poem to him - "XIV" in Donde habite el olvido. They lived in the same building in Madrid from 1935 to 1936 and, in Mexico, he lived in Concha's house. At times, it seems that this was his real family. In Desolación de la Quimera, there are two poems that suggest this. "Animula, vagula, blandula" is a tender poem about watching Altolaguirre's five-year-old grandson, whom he nicknamed Entelechy, playing in the garden and wondering how his fate will differ from his own. "Hablando a Manona" is like a nursery rhyme addressed to their granddaughter. Generation of 1898

<mask>'s best critical writing tends to be about writers who interested and inspired him.His writing about the Generation of 1898 is objective but nevertheless lacking in sympathy for the most part. For one thing, he seems to have found it difficult to forge personal relations with them. Regarding Juan Ramón Jiménez and Valle-Inclán, he recalled that they were so intent on their own speech that they neglected to listen to other people. And even in respect of Antonio Machado, so revered by for example Alberti,  he recalled that he spoke little and listened to even less. In contrast to most Spanish thinkers, he respected Unamuno more as a poet than as a philosopher. For Ortega y Gasset, he had little positive to say:  scattered all through <mask>'s critical writings are remarks such as "[he] always understood very little when it came to poetry" and "with his strange ignorance of poetic matters". Regarding Valle-Inclán, he makes it clear in his 1963 essay how much he admires his integrity as an artist and human being.He does not rate his poetry very highly, does not comment


texts: often on his novels and reserves his admiration for 4 plays, the 3 Comedias bárbaras and Divinas palabras. In his study Estudios sobre poesía española contemporánea, <mask> is clearly drawn to those aspects of Antonio Machado where he finds similarities with his own poetic practice. So, for him, the best of Machado is in the early poems of Soledades, where he finds echoes of Bécquer. He writes of them  these poems are sudden glimpses of the world, bringing together the real and the suprasensible, with a rarely achieved identification. He is also drawn to the commentaries of Abel Martín and the notes of Juan de Mairena which began to appear in 1925. In these, he finds the "sharpest commentary on the epoch". On the other hand, he is definitely not attracted by the nationalistic themes that appear in Campos de Castilla, especially the poet's focus on Castile, which <mask> sees as negating the essence of Machado's best poetry, which stems from his Andalusian nature.However, this is difficult to reconcile with a strand of <mask>'s own poetry, as exemplified by the first poem of the "Díptico español" from Desolación de la Quimera, which is a tirade of invective against Spain that would not seem out of place in Machado. Indeed, one of <mask>'s major themes is the contrast between modern Spain after the Civil War and the glorious past, which is also an important current in Machado's poetry. One aspect of Machado that he focuses on is his use of language and how he fails when he tries to emulate the type of popular language described by German Romantics. He shows particular scorn for Machado's attempt to write a popular ballad, "La tierra de Alvargonzález". As Octavio Paz


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 says: "Jiménez and Antonio Machado always confused "popular language" with spoken language, and that is why they identify the latter with traditional song. Jiménez thought that "popular art" was simply the traditional imitation of aristocratic art; Machado believed that the true aristocracy resided in the people and that folklore was the most refined art.......Influenced by Jiménez, the poets of <mask>'s generation made of ballad and of song their favourite genre. <mask> never succumbed to the affectation of the popular.....and tried to write as one speaks; or rather: he set himself as the raw material of poetic transmututation not the language of books but of conversation

The member of that generation who had most impact on him is Jiménez, although when he went to Britain one of the very few books that he took with him was Gerardo Diego's anthology Poesía española and he found solace for his nostalgia for Spain in reading the selection of poems by Unamuno and Machado contained within.It is also true that in his study of Unamuno, he makes a comment that seems to relate directly to his own practice as a writer, his preoccupation with creating and perpetuating himself in his poetry, transforming the circumstances of his life into myth:

Alive and striving beyond what were only current circumstances, moments that pass and do not remain, Unamuno was hoping to create himself, or at least create his personal myth, and to be forever what was passing. He first met Jiménez in late September-early October 1925 in Seville. The meeting had been arranged by Pedro Salinas and he suggested to <mask> that he should ask one of his friends, whose father was a warden of the Alcázar,


texts: for permission to visit the gardens, out of hours. <mask>'s account is interesting. He was overawed by being in the presence of such an important figure. In addition, there was the presence of Jiménez's wife - Zenobia Camprubí - which also put him at a disadvantage, both because of his shyness and a lack of interest in women, although he had not yet realised why women did not interest him. He placed himself in the role of a disciple, just listening to the Master.He records how gracious Jiménez was to him that evening and on subsequent meetings. At that time, he was something of a hero to <mask> and he notes how much effort it cost him to free himself from Jiménez's type of egoistic, subjective poetry with no connection to the world and life, which was so influential in Spanish cultural circles at that time. In the essay in which he describes this meeting, "Los Dos Juan Ramón Jiménez", included in Poesía y literatura vol 2, he analyses the Jekyll and Hyde personality of Jiménez. On the one hand he was a famous poet, worthy of admiration and respect. On the other hand, he was the man who launched abusive attacks on numerous literary figures. This latter side gradually became more and more dominant. In particular he took against the poets of <mask>'s own generation, at first confining his attacks to verbal ones but then turning to print.He continued to print vilifications right to the end of his life, which had the effect of turning <mask>'s former admiration into indifference or even worse. <mask> wrote many pieces about Jiménez, including a satirical poem included in Desolación de la Quimera. The early influence was decisively rejected and his essays identify all


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 the stylistic elements that he cast off, such as the impressionistic symbolism, hermeticism, the fragmentation of his poems, his inability to sustain a thought, the lack of desire to go beyond the surface of things. His final thoughts about Jiménez came in an essay titled "Jiménez y Yeats" dated 1962 and included in Poesía y literatura vol 2. E.M. Wilson included a look at this in his survey of <mask>'s literary borrowings because it contains a translation of Yeats's poem "A Coat" and compares it to Jiménez's "Vino, primera, pura". Of the translation, Wilson writes One can point out minor infidelities....but the translation has life of its own and fulfils its purpose in <mask>'s essay: a rod for the back of Juan Ramón Jiménez. <mask> concludes that Jiménez is a more limited poet than Yeats because the latter put his poetry to one side in order to campaign for Irish Home Rule and to work as director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin whereas Jiménez's whole life was totally dedicated to poetry.He devoted himself to aesthetics and did not involve himself with ethical considerations at all. Gide, the dandy and homosexuality

His sexual awakening seems to have coincided with the birth of his desire to write poetry, around the age of 14, but it was many years later before he really came to terms with this side of himself. A very important influence on his emotional development were the writings of André Gide. In Historial de un libro, <mask> wrote that his introduction to the works of Gide was when Pedro Salinas gave him either Prétextes or Nouveaux Prétextes to read, followed by Morceaux Choisis, which is a selection by Gide himself of passages from his works. These books


texts: opened the way for him to resolve or at least reconcile himself with "a vital, decisive problem within me". These works deal openly with the topic of homosexuality amongst many other things. For example, Gide included in the Morceaux Choisis the section of Les Caves du Vatican where Lafcadio Wluiki pushes Amédée Fleurissoire out of a moving train just from curiosity as to whether he can actually bring himself to do it - the original acte gratuit.<mask> comments,"I fell in love with his youth, his grace, his freedom, his audacity." This is redolent of the homoeroticism of a poem such as "Los marineros son las alas del amor" in Los placeres prohibidos. He went so far as to write a fan letter, perhaps even a love letter, to Lafcadio, which was printed in El Heraldo de Madrid in 1931. It includes these words: "the only real thing in the end is the free man, who does not feel part of anything, but lives wholly perfect and unique in the midst of nature, free from imposed and polluting customs." This is reiterated in his essay of 1946, where he writes: "the transcendent figure for Gide is not that of a man who by means of abstention and denial searches for the divine, but that of a man who seeks out the fullness of humanity by means of effort and individual exaltation." In other words, he was affected by the idea of total hedonism without any sense of guilt. Another idea that he takes from Gide is expressed in Book 1 of Les Nourritures Terrestres:There is profit in desires, and profit in the satisfaction of desires - for so they are increased.And indeed, Nathaniel, each one of my desires has enriched me more than the always deceitful possession of the object of my desire.


texts: So hedonism and the exaltation of desire are not enough in themselves; what matters is the dignity and integrity of the desire. That is what gives it virtue, not the object of the desire. As <mask> expressed it, "what he holds in his arms is life itself, rather than a desired body." In "Unos cuerpos son como flores", another poem from Los placeres prohibidos, the transience of love is accepted as a perfectly normal phenomenon because it is the transcendent nature of that love that overrides everything. Following Gide's example, <mask> becomes concerned with maintaining his personal integrity. Free from guilt, he will live true to his own values, which include rejection of conventional sexual mores and acceptance of his homosexuality.In "La palabra edificante", Octavio Paz wrote "Gide gave him the courage to give things their proper names; the second book of his surrealist period is called Los placeres prohibidos (Forbidden Pleasures). He does not call them, as one might have expected Los placeres pervertidos (Perverse Pleasures)". <mask>'s reading of Gide was thorough. As well as the works mentioned above, his essay includes discussions of the "Journals", Les cahiers d'André Walter, Le Traité du Narcisse, Paludes, Le Prométhée Mal Enchaîné, Les Nourritures Terrestres, Amyntas, L'Immoraliste, La Porte Etroite, Le Retour de l'Enfant Prodigue, Corydon, Les Caves du Vatican, Les Faux Monnayeurs, Si le grain ne meurt, and Thésée. One of the most interesting passages concerns Gide's memoirs, Si le grain ne meurt. Many of the episodes recounted in this book had formed the basis for his previous works; however, this new account is not so much a repetition as a complement


texts: to the previous versions. The reader gets a broader vision of what was happening.Gide's works are clarified and are heightened when they can be interpreted in the light of the extra information in the memoirs. It was clearly with a similar aim in mind that <mask> set out writing Historial de un libro, to recount "the story of the personal events that lie behind the verses of La realidad y el deseo." Narcissism is another trait that Gide and <mask> shared: "After all, we cannot know anybody better than our self." At times, it seems that the two writers share the same sensibility. For example, Gide had visited Seville in 1892, in company with his mother, and was struck by the gardens of the Alcázar. This made its way into Les nourritures terrestres: "What of the Alcazar? Marvellous as a Persian garden!Now I come to speak of it, I believe I prefer it to all the others. When I read Hafiz, I think of it." <mask> describes a similar sense of transcendence in "Jardín antiguo" in Ocnos. Gide was in Seville during Semana Santa and revelled in the sensuality of the celebrations. In his journals, he describes how there was a feeling of loosening the corsets and throwing off prudish morality, which is quite similar to the atmosphere of <mask>'s poem "Luna llena en Semana Santa" from Desolación de la Quimera. As seen in his accounts of his first meetings with Jiménez in 1925 and Lorca in 1927, he took a few years to come to terms fully with his sexuality. This only seems to happen once he finally left Seville in 1928, after his mother's death.However, during that period he seems to have cultivated his sense of difference by becoming a dandy. During his time at the University of


texts: Seville, Salinas had already noted his dapper appearance, commenting on his "well-cut suit, a perfectly-knotted tie". This tendency seems to have intensified during his brief stay in Madrid before going to Toulouse, where he assumed the pose of a man who frequents bars, drinks cocktails, affects English shirts, discussed in an article by Villena (La rebeldía del dandy en <mask>rnuda). Villena diagnoses it as the sign of a refined hermit trying to hide his hyper-sensitivity and repressed desire for love. In Toulouse, he wrote to a friend that he was starting to think that he was too well-dressed. Two months later, he wrote to the same friend complaining that he had only managed to make female friends - the young men being too coarse for him - and boasting about some purchases: an American hat exactly like the one worn by Gilbert Roland in the film Camille, a wristwatch that cost 1000 francs and some other things "simply so that during these courses they might call me a snob and accuse me of being frivolous and lightweight." He also says that he sometimes wears his moustache in the manner of Don Alvarado or Nils Asther.In his short story El indolente <mask> reflects on dandyism:a certain friend once claimed to convince the writer of this that he dressed and adorned himself not to attract but rather to rebuff people from his side. He had noticed, or thought he had noticed, that if an elegant women attracts, the elegant man repels. According to this theory, dandyism would be just one of the ways of aspiring to the ascetic solitude of the wasteland. In some way, however, the combination of his contact with the world, especially the atmosphere of Paris which he visited

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Luis Ce
Cernuda


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 in the university vacations, the rebellious attitudes and thinking of the surrealists, the influence of Gide, and his pent-up fight against bourgeois tendencies coincided in the belated acceptance of his sexuality, as expressed finally in Un río, un amor. His dandified style of dressing seems to have continued for the rest of his life. For example in 1950, he stayed overnight with Jorge Guillén and the latter wrote to Pedro Salinas,"What a blue robe with white spots...what a smell of perfume in the passageway on rising the following morning!" Critical reception and legacy

For a long time, the reactions of critics to <mask>'s poetry were based on a caricature of his personality - the shy, introverted but prickly person so quick to take offence.Concha de Albornoz, one of his closest friends, wrote of him "his is a climate that changes: now serene, now tormented. Sometimes I feel so close to him and at other times so distant ... His spirit is like a fly's eye: made of a thousand facets." He found it difficult to make friends. Many of the people who knew him allude to his aloofness and this is a trait borne out by the critical comments he makes in his writings about his contemporaries, which are sometimes so harsh that it is hard to believe they were ever friends or colleagues. <mask> was well aware that his reputation was of a complicated, tortured individual and this became a matter of concern for him in his later years. In the final poem in his final collection, "A sus paisanos", he criticises his countrymen for the way they have accepted this perception of him, without making any effort to see if it is justified. He makes it clear that this "legend" is a gross


texts:
 distortion of reality:¿Mi leyenda dije?Tristes cuentos
Inventados de mí por cuatro amigos
(¿Amigos? ), que jamás quisisteis
Ni ocasión buscasteis de ver si acomodaban
A la persona misma así traspuesta. Mas vuestra mala fe los ha aceptado

(Did I say my legend? Sad tales made up about me by four friends, (Friends? ), that you never wanted nor sought any occasion to check to see whether they fitted that person thus superimposed. But your bad faith has accepted them)  It seems likely that the four "friends" were Juan Ramón Jiménez, Pedro Salinas, Vicente Aleixandre and José Moreno Villa. Jiménez shows him as aloof and effete to the point of sickliness.Aleixandre emphasises <mask>'s solitariness and detachment from the world. Salinas shows him as dedicated, timid, solitary and fragile. Moreno Villa, in his autobiography, concentrates on the tortured side of his character and effeminacy: "He was then a fine and shy young man, very dapper and very sad. He suffered with material things and with human relationships. They say he cried in front of the windows of clothes's shops because he could not buy some silk shirts; but I, of course, have seen him almost in tears for not having friends or anyone to love him." It is striking that all these accounts refer to the young man they knew in the 1920s and 1930s but Moreno Villas wrote his autobiography in 1944; Salinas wrote his description in 1945 and Aleixandre in 1955. The only contemporary account was Jiménez's from 1934.Cernuda's character seems to have left a lasting impression on them which they do not seem to have thought of revising. The fundamental problem is the unquestioning, if not naive, belief that the poetry is


texts: the man, that there is no distinction between them. They project the brittle, languid, effete personality of the man they knew onto his poetry even though it reveals a very partial, incomplete and misleading reading. It might apply to some of the earlier work but it bears no relation to the passion of the surrealist poems, or the later poems of reflection and self-examination, or the use of the Doppelgänger device. Even as late as 1962, it was possible for a critic to write "he is so accustomed by now to live surrounded only by the creations of his own mind - who obey him always and are much more easily controlled than people - that real company bothers him." The projection of these unbalanced ideas of the man onto the poetry - a man seeking to escape from the real world - was the dominant theme of Cernuda criticism, even among people who never met him. It was not until 1965 that a different viewpoint began to emerge.The key was the publication in that year of Octavio Paz's essay La palabra edificante: "<mask>'s work is an exploration of himself...He said it himself:'I have only tried, like every man, to find my truth, my own, which will not be better or worse than that of others, only different. '...The work of Cernuda is a road toward our own selves. That is what gives it its moral value." <mask> is a moralist, a seeker after truth rather than an effete man of glass. Of course, this is implied by the title he chose for his oeuvre, La realidad y el deseo. His work is grounded in reality and he criticises poets, such as Juan Ramón Jiménez, who try to escape from or ignore reality. In the words of Villena, "<mask> defends liberty, anti-conventionalism, joy,


texts: faithfulness to your own destiny, the individual leading the way for other people, a blend of stoicism and epicureanism."He goes on to compare the satirical poems in <mask>'s final collection to those of Persius, Juvenal and Quevedo as they are not merely personal attacks but also defences of a moral code that is different from that held by the person being attacked, a different set of ethics. Towards the end of his life, <mask> was gratified to learn that a younger generation of Spanish writers were taking an interest in his work. Given the censorship that was operating in Spain at the time, it must have been difficult to get hold of unexpurgated copies of <mask>'s poetry. The first tangible sign was an edition of the magazine Cántico dedicated to his work in 1955. In a letter to the scholar <mask> Cano, he gives praise to an essay by Vicente Núñez, accuses Adriano del Valle of inventing anecdotes about him, such as wearing patent leather shoes or yellow gloves, and claims not to believe a word of the praise that they give him. It is interesting that <mask> does not mention the fact that Aleixandre also made a contribution to that issue, one of the essays that stoked the legend of <mask>. However, he was sufficiently impressed to commend the homage to a young British scholar, Derek Harris, who was starting his researches into <mask>'s works.This was followed in 1962 by a special edition of La caña gris. This homage seems to have pleased him even more than the earlier one, with the exception of another contribution by Aleixandre and one by Juan Gil-Albert. Two of the contributors were poets who showed signs of <mask>'s influence -Jaime Gil de Biedma and José

masks:
Cernuda
Cernuda
Cernuda
José Luis
Cernuda
Luis Cernuda
Cernuda
Cernuda


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 Valente. Biedma wrote an elegy for him called "Después de la noticia de su muerte". Another poet of that generation who was influenced by him was Francisco Brines. Popular culture

 A sculptural monument to <mask> stands in Sevilla, Spain. Spanish painter Gregorio Prieto drew portraits of <mask> and Vicente Aleixandre.The Spanish government has issued several postage stamps featuring portraits of <mask>, including a stamp issued on the one hundredth anniversary of the poet's birth. Notes

Bibliography

(Library of Congress Catalog Card Number)

J. A. Coleman, Other voices. A study of the late poetry of <mask> (North Carolina University Press, 1969)
 Ph. Silver, <mask>: el poeta en su leyenda (Madrid, 1972)
 D. Harris (ed. ), <mask> (Madrid, 1977)
 R. Martínez Nadal, Españoles en la Gran Bretaña: <mask>. El hombre y sus temas (Madrid, 1983)
 M. Petrelli, "L'arte pura in tutte le lingue del mondo: <mask>" in "Confluenze.Rivista di Studi Iberoamericani", vol. 1, n. 2, 2009. M. Ulacia, L. <mask>: escritura, cuerpo y deseo (Barcelona, 1986). External links

 Biography

1902 births
1963 deaths
People from Seville
Spanish educators
English–Spanish translators
French–Spanish translators
German–Spanish translators
Spanish gay writers
Writers from Andalusia
Spanish literary critics
Generation of '27
LGBT poets from Spain
20th-century translators
20th-century Spanish poets
Spanish people of the Spanish Civil War (Republican faction)
Exiles of the Spanish Civil War in the United States
Exiles of the Spanish Civil War in Mexico
Exiles of the Spanish Civil War in the United Kingdom
National Autonomous University of Mexico faculty
El Colegio de México faculty
Mount Holyoke

masks:
Cernuda
Luis Cernuda
Cernuda
Luis Cernuda
Luis Cernuda
Luis Cernuda
Luis Cernuda
Luis Cernuda
Cernuda


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<mask> (born 1948) is an Ecuadorian author who has won multiple national and international awards. She is considered the most important figure in children and young adult's literature of her country and, with fifty-seven books published, some of them in Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Spain, this author has attained significant international recognition. She is a 2014 International Latino Book Awards Finalist. <mask> has six children and nine grandchildren. She lives in Quito, Ecuador in the Valley of Tumbaco with her husband and four dogs, who keep her company while she writes. She visits school children who read her books often. Biography

Impact
<mask> has positioned her as one of Latin America's most skilled, prolific and versatile authors of children's and young adult literature, with 59 books over a career that spans 35 years.Her collection of short stories Green Was My Forest was selected as one of the ten best children's books written in Latin America during the 20th Century. <mask>'s influence has expanded beyond Ecuador. In the United States four of her books were chosen to be part of the Common Core kits in the schools in Los Angeles, California and Houston Texas. The Texas Library Association selected two of her bi-lingual books for its 2016-17 list of ten recommended bi-lingual books. Two of her books are part of the Require Summer Reading Books recommended by Scholastic Books. Three of her books have won the Skipping Stones International Book Prize and five of her books won the International Latino Book Award. In Mexico, three of her books were also chosen, in different years, by the SEP, the Mexican Secretariat of Public Education, to be part of all the school libraries in that country.Her book Verde fue mi selva (Green was my Forest), was

masks:
Edna Iturralde
Edna
Edna Iturralde
Edna


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 selected as one of the ten “essential” books in the Latin-American List of Children and Young Adults Literature of the 20th Century by a panel of 27 experts from Latin American countries that was convoked by the SM Foundation and the Directorate of Libraries, Archives and Museums of Chile. (Fundación SM y la Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos de Chile (DIBAM)). These are substantial achievements for a writer who comes from a small country where opportunities to be known internationally are relatively few. Childhood and Young Adulthood
<mask>'s early childhood years laid the foundation for her literary career. Her aviator father died in a plane crash when she was one, and she was raised as a single child. Her maternal grandfather told her stories and her mother read to her, but without siblings, her imagination developed as she amused herself by telling stories to her dolls and dogs, and day-dreaming on garden swings. In fifth grade her class was selected to present a play at the school assembly and no appropriate play could be found, so <mask> went home, sat down, and wrote one.Her teacher approved, the play was given and <mask> realized how much she loved writing. From then on her dream was to become a writer when she grew up. Classmates asked her to write stories for them on topics they chose; the birth of a new baby brother or sister, a trip to the mountains, the death of a beloved pet and many other themes that were important in their lives. She also wrote in the school newspaper and was part of the Oratory Club. In 1967, she became the first girl to win Ecuador's Presidential National Award for Oratory and the first girl to win the oratory prize of the Municipality of Quito. University was not an option, and she still dreamed of writing, but

masks: Edna Edna Edna


texts:
 she needed to work. As a tour guide for Metropolitan Touring in Ecuador, her stories so amused tourists that they voted her the best tour guide in South America of IntravTravel Group.She started a boutique by renting a room in an old house, which she painted and decorated herself. It was Quito's first boutique, called Carnaby Street. She sold, often on credit, the clothes and copper and silver jewelry she designed. She married at twenty-two to Diederick van Maasdijk and became the full-time mother of four children. Early career
Marriage turned out to further her literary career, because since her children insisted she repeat her bedtime stories exactly the same way every time she had to write them down. So when Panorama, a supplement of the Quito newspaper El Comercio, solicited children's’ stories, she sent in one of hers. Not only did Panorama choose her story, but also asked her to provide it a story every week.After one year of writing for Panorama (1980-1981), <mask> founded La Cometa (The Kite) in 1982. That same year, her husband died in a plane crash. <mask> continued writing La Cometa, the first weekly children's magazine to be published in Ecuador. For the next eleven years (1982-1993), she produced La Cometa every week (with the assistance of only a secretary, an artist, and a pet squirrel), filling its 16 pages only with her own stories, serial novels, comics and games. She signed many of them with a pseudonym to make people think the magazine had a larger staff. La Cometa was distributed for free with the newspaper Diario Hoy, considerably increasing its circulation, and reached about 210,000 children weekly. Many of these children lacked money to buy books but learned the pleasure of reading from La Cometa.La Cometa provided a model for

masks: Edna Edna


texts:
 several other free South American children's magazines. In 1985 she married Bruce Kernan and had two more children. Growth as an author and communicator
In 1993, commissioned by the United Nations Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and the Ecuadorian Ministry of Education to write about values children should learn, Iturralde wrote the 60 amusing stories in the three volumes of ‘’To Be and To Share’’, for three different age groups. She also was a consultant of PLAN International, for which she wrote a humoristic but useful book on social relations. From 1996 to 1998, she was the representative in Ecuador of Educational Development Center (EDC). She used the Interactive Radio Instruction Method to write, produce and test 15 free distance education programs entitled “Let’s Play Theatre”. The program guides preschool teachers, or care givers, during 20 minutes sessions, in developing emotional intelligence and conflict resolution by appealing to the imagination of young children.Many Ecuadorian daycare centers have used it successfully. In 1996, <mask> founded the Union of Writers of Literature for Children (UDELI), with the idea of helping writers of children and young adult literature to publish. The international publishing houses which were operating in Ecuador at the time only commercialized children books from Hispanic writers or translations from other languages. The association published an anthology of Christmas stories, enabling new writers and illustrators to gain exposure and giving impetus to children's literature in Ecuador. In 1998 Editorial Santillana, followed by Editorial Norma, the two most important international publishing houses in Ecuador, selected Iturralde's literature for publication. Until then, foreign titles completely dominated


texts:
 children and adolescent literature within Ecuador and most writers had to publish their own work. The success of Iturralde's books Verde fue mi Selva and Y su corazón escapó para convertirse en pájaro encouraged these publishers to look into publishing more children's literature by Ecuadorian authors.Since then <mask> has continued to publish with Santillana, Norma and also with Editorial SM, and Penguin Random House, Colombia. She has published 59 books between picture books, novels, chapter books, and collections of short stories in Colombia, Mexico, Spain and the United States. From 2000 to 2002 Iturralde taught a course on Creative Writing at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in the International Program. In early 2016 she started writing a weekly column for Family Magazine, a supplement to El Comercio newspaper. Influence on Literature in Ecuador and Beyond
In 2006 <mask> founded and became the first president of the Ecuadorean affiliate of the Latin-American Academy of Children and Young Adults Literature. She was its president until 2012. The literary congresses she organized in Ecuador served to draw international attention and appreciation of Ecuadorean children and young adults literature.<mask> has forcefully contributed to promoting reading and raising appreciation of children and young adult literature in Ecuador. The Hoy en la Educación Foundation named its annual literary contest after her. She only asked it give its award to new, unpublished authors of children and young adult literature, since she wanted to encourage them. She has presented and discussed her literature in hundreds of visits to schools and dozens of radio, television, newspaper and magazine interviews. Her literature has become part of the curriculum of Children's

masks:
Edna Iturralde
Edna
Edna


texts:
 Literature studies at several Ecuadorian universities such as Universidad Tecnica Particular de Loja (UTPL) Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (PUCE), Universidad de Cuenca Ecuador, Universidad Técnica de Machala, Universidad Central del Ecuador, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Universidad Tecnológica del Equinoccial (UTE). Her books have been used as the basis for plays, ballets. The National Symphony Orchestra commissioned an orchestral piece based on one of her books, Los hijos de la Guacamaya.Her numerous awards (e.g. 2013 Woman of the Year for Literature; 2014 Manuela Saenz Libertadora del Libertador Gold Medal; 2010 Silver Rose Award for the Woman of the Year; 2007 Essential Women in Ecuador) have enormously raised the awareness in Ecuador of the beneficial role of literature for the development of children and young adults. Dr. Jaime García Padrino, professor of Children's and Young Adult Literature at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, has summarized <mask>'s contribution to children and young adult literature:

“<mask>’s contribution to Children’s Literature and Young Adult Literature is today one of the most outstanding in Ecuador and, by extension, in Latin America. This is due to both the number of works she has published to date and the variety of themes about which she has written. Her historical and biographical books are notable for their solid documentation and rigorous accuracy. Above all, her writing is of high expressive quality. There is no doubt that <mask> has made a significant, diverse and substantial contribution to Spanish-American Children’s and Young Adult Literature.She has drawn conspicuous attention to Ecuador, highlighting through her literature its cultural contributions to the world. Due to her keen ability

masks:
Edna
… Iturralde
Edna Iturralde


texts:
 to see the world through their eyes, Iturralde has successfully reached children and young adults. Her works are contributing to the creating a new generation of readers who are sensitive, tolerant and caring human beings." Work

Iturralde's literature develops within a multicultural, ethnic, and social context. In an epoch when local and regional histories are being obliterated, and when few people are concerned with the special knowledge that has been preserved by certain local ethnic groups, a voice that weaves together fictional and ingenuous stories, based though they are on serious research, and through such fiction documents and projects such knowledge, is somewhat transcendental in the eyes of many. Iturralde removes the veils from the identity that is unknown or forgotten and projects it to the rest of the world. Iturralde is considered one of the most important and prolific figures of Ecuadorian children and juvenile literature.Mother of six children, she has dedicated much of her life to writing for children. Her books have been published in Colombia, Mexico, and Spain and are distributed in the United States, Peru, and Bolivia. <mask> was the founder and director of the children's magazine La Cometa ("The Kite"), which for fifteen years was published together with the newspaper, Hoy, from Ecuador. She has published fifty eight books concerning a variety of themes, but for the last few years, she has concentrated on narratives based on ethnicity, and she is the pioneer in this genre in the children's literature of Ecuador. She has given lectures on creative writing at the University of San Francisco de Quito in the International Program. She has won various prizes and nominations within and outside her country. Among the most important of these


texts:
 are the Ecuador National Prize for Children's Literature Dario Guevara Mavorga in Ecuador in 2001, the Skipping Stones Award in the

United States in 2002 and 2005, and the Mention of Honor of the Municipality of Quito in 2003 and 2004.She has been nominated twice, in 2012 and 2013, to the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (ALMA). As Her work was selected by the SEP within the competition of the Mexican Ministry of Education in 2003 and 2005. In 2005, two of her books were nominated for the Ecuadorian Honor List of IBBY (International Board of Books for the Young). She is the president of the Ecuadorian Academy of Children and Juvenile Literature, which is associated with the Latin American Academy of Children and Juvenile Literature. References

1948 births
Living people
Ecuadorian women writers
Ecuadorian women children's writers
Universidad San Francisco de Quito faculty
21st-century Ecuadorian


texts:
<mask> (January 24, 1944 – August 6, 1983), known professionally as <mask>, was a German countertenor noted for his wide vocal range and an unusual, otherworldly stage persona. In the 1970s Nomi immersed himself in the East Village art scene. He was known for his bizarrely visionary theatrical live performances, heavy make-up, unusual costumes, and a highly stylized signature hairdo that flaunted a receding hairline. His songs were equally unusual, ranging from synthesizer-laden interpretations of classical opera to covers of 1960s pop standards like Chubby Checker's "The Twist" and Lou Christie's "Lightnin' Strikes". Nomi was one of David Bowie's backup singers for a 1979 performance on Saturday Night Live. Nomi died in 1983 at the age of 39 as a result of complications from AIDS. He was one of the earliest known figures from the arts community to die from the illness.Biography

Early life and career
<mask> was born <mask> in Immenstadt, Bavaria, Germany on January 24, 1944. In the 1960s, he worked as an usher at the Deutsche Oper in West Berlin where he sang for the other ushers and maintenance crew on stage in front of the fire curtain after performances. He also sang opera arias at the Berlin gay discothèque Kleist Casino. Nomi emigrated to New York City in 1972. He did some off-Broadway theater work and moonlighted as a pastry chef. In 1977, Nomi appeared in a satirical camp production of Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold at Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theater Company as the Rheinmaidens and the Wood Bird. Music career
Nomi came to the attention of the East Village art scene in 1978 with his performance in "New Wave Vaudeville", a four-night event MC'd by artist David McDermott.Dressed in a skin-tight spacesuit with a clear plastic cape, <mask> sang the aria "Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix" ("My heart

masks:
Klaus Sperber
Klaus Nomi
Klaus Nomi
Klaus Sperber
Nomi


texts: opens to your voice") from Camille Saint-Saëns' opera Samson et Dalila The performance ended with a chaotic crash of strobe lights, smoke bombs, and loud electronic sound effects as Nomi backed away into the smoke. Joey Arias recalled: "I still get goose pimples when I think about it... It was like he was from a different planet and his parents were calling him home. When the smoke cleared, he was gone." After that performance Nomi was invited to perform at clubs all over New York City. At the New Wave Vaudeville show Nomi met Kristian Hoffman, songwriter for the Mumps. Hoffman was a performer and MC in the second incarnation of New Wave Vaudeville and a close friend of Susan Hannaford and Tom Scully, who produced the show, and Ann Magnuson, who directed it.Anya Phillips, then manager of James Chance and the Contortions, suggested <mask> and Hoffman form a band. Hoffman became Nomi's de facto musical director, assembling a band that included Page Wood from another New Wave vaudeville act, Come On, and Joe Katz, who was concurrently in The Student Teachers, the Accidents, and The Mumps. Hoffman helped Nomi choose his pop covers, including the Lou Christie song "Lightnin' Strikes". Hoffman wrote several pop songs with which Nomi is closely identified: "The Nomi Song", "Total Eclipse", "After The Fall", and "Simple Man", the title song of Nomi's second RCA French LP. This configuration of the <mask>mi band performed at Manhattan clubs, including several performances at Max's Kansas City, Danceteria, Hurrah and the Mudd Club. He also appeared on Manhattan Cable's TV Party. Disagreements with the management Nomi engaged led to a dissolution of this band, and Nomi continued without them.In the late 1970s, while performing at Club 57, The Mudd Club, The Pyramid Club, and other venues, <mask> assembled various

masks:
Nomi
Klaus No
Nomi


texts: up-and-coming models, singers, artists, and musicians to perform live with him, including Joey Arias, Keith Haring, John Sex and Kenny Scharf. He was briefly involved with Jean-Michel Basquiat, then known for his graffiti art as SAMO. <mask> and Arias were introduced to David Bowie at the Mudd Club, who hired them as performers and backup singers for his appearance on Saturday Night Live on December 15, 1979. They performed "TVC 15", "The Man Who Sold the World", and "Boys Keep Swinging". During the performance of "TVC 15", <mask> and Arias dragged around a large prop pink poodle with a television screen in its mouth. <mask> was so impressed with the plastic quasi-tuxedo suit that Bowie wore during "The Man Who Sold the World" that he commissioned one for himself. He wore the suit on the cover of his self-titled album, as well as during a number of his music videos.<mask> wore his variant of the outfit, in monochromatic black-and-white with spandex and makeup to match, until the last few months of his life. <mask> played a supporting role as a Nazi official in Anders Grafstrom's 1980 underground film The Long Island Four. The 1981 rock documentary film Urgh! A Music War features <mask>'s live performance of "Total Eclipse." His performance of "Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix" was used for the closing credits. In the liner notes of <mask>'s 1981 self-titled record, 666 Fifth Avenue was listed as the contact address. He released his second album, Simple Man, in November 1982.He also collaborated with producer Man Parrish, appearing on Parrish's 1982 album Man Parrish as a backup vocalist on the track "Six Simple Synthesizers". In the last several months of his life, <mask> changed his focus to operatic pieces and adopted a Baroque era operatic outfit complete with full collar as his typical onstage attire. The

masks: Nomi Nomi Nomi Nomi Nomi Nomi Nomi Nomi


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 collar helped cover the outbreaks of Kaposi's sarcoma on his neck, one of the numerous AIDS-related diseases Nomi developed toward the end of his life. Illness and death
<mask> died at the Sloan Kettering Hospital Center in New York City on August 6, 1983. He was one of the first celebrities to die of complications from AIDS. Upon his death, <mask>'s close friend Joey Arias became the executor of his estate. His ashes were spread across New York City.Legacy
Filmmakers such as Andrew Horn and writers such as Jim Fouratt consider Nomi an important part of the 1980s East Village scene, which was a hotbed of development for punk rock music, the visual arts and the avant-garde. Although <mask>'s work had not yet met with national commercial success at the time of his death, he garnered a cult following, mainly in New York and in France. Andrew Horn's 2004 feature documentary about <mask>'s life, The Nomi Song, which was released by Palm Pictures, helped spur renewed interest in the singer, including an art exhibit in San Francisco at the New Langton Arts gallery and one in Milan at the Res Pira Lab, which subsequently moved to Berlin's Strychnin Gallery, called "Do You Nomi?". New music pieces inspired by Nomi were commissioned by the gallery for a variety of European musicians, including Ernesto Tomasini. In pop culture

In 2001, German pop duo Rosenstolz and English singer Marc Almond recorded a cover version of "Total Eclipse". Garbage used his "Valentine’s Day" song as the basis for their 2012 "Beloved Freak". Nomi makes an appearance in Derf Backderf's graphic novel Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, released in 2008.Nomi is one of the Sovereign's bodyguards in the Adult Swim series The Venture Bros. The Sovereign is the leader of the Guild of Calamitous Intent, and often takes the form of David Bowie. In

masks: Nomi Nomi Nomi Nomi