Abstract
Unlike Pedro Salinas, who had been his mentor and eventually became his nemesis, Luis Cernuda spent his years in the United States hiding, deliberately closed off from Americans and their culture. Salinas’s diatribes against the utilitarian lapidariness of the American vernacular could not disguise his fascination with it; indeed they were its symptom. But Cernuda, who also spent time in Scotland and England, felt no such fascination. He turned a deaf ear to ambient sounds as much as Salinas made a point of recording and recoiling from them. Although Cernuda learned English well enough to write knowledgeably about English poetry, he had no interest in the English spoken in Great Britain or the United States. The two great poems of his American exile, “Nocturno yanki” and “Retrato de poeta,” portray him incommunicado, in soundproof isolation. In “Nocturno yanki,” the speaker walls himself up in his apartment, windows closed and the shades drawn, listening out for the voices of absent friends; all he hears is the beating of his blood and the hissing of the radiator. In “Retrato de poeta,” he takes refuge in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where he begins a one-sided conversation with El Greco’s portrait of the seventeenth-century Spanish poet and preacher, Paravicino. In the comparable poems by Salinas, “Nocturno de los avisos” and “Hombre en la orilla,” the speaker is equally alone, equally alienated, but he is out and about, walking the streets of New York City and taking in the sights.
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Canta tus aires fielmente.
[Sing your airs faithfully]
—Luis Cernuda, “Amor en música”
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Notes
Max Aub, La poesía española contemporánea (Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1954), 175.
For Salinas’s “La nieve (Pensamientos de Thanksgiving day, para mi amada),” which formed part of a letter to Whitmore, see Pedro Salinas, Cartas a Katherine Whitmore, ed. Enric Bou (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2002), 292–294.
Jaime Gil de Biedma, El pie de la letra (Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1980), 329.
See Gonzalo Sobejano, “Alcances de la descripción estilística (Luis Cernuda: ‘Nocturno yanki’),” in The Analysis of Hispanic Texts: Currents Trends in Methodology, ed. Mary Ann Beck, et al. (New York: Bilingual Press, 1976), 89–112.
In the background of some of Cernuda’s references to air lies one of the privileged objects in Romantic iconography, the Aeolian lyre, which joins the musical and elemental senses of the word by making “airs” with “air.” Cernuda, who translated Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry (where Shelley develops the idea that the poet is a harp or lyre), uses similar imagery in several of his poems. In “Instrumento músico,” he compares the poet’s words to the sounds emitted by the strumming of a lute; in “La gloria del poeta,” the poet describes his “pecho sonoro y vibrante, idéntico a un laúd” [vibrant and sonorous chest, identical to a lyre] (233); and in “El arpa,” which has been linked to Coleridge’s “The Aeolian Harp,” the melody of the lyre is described as an “air” made of “rememberings and forgettings” (343). In Shelley, the Aeolian lyre expresses the “harmony” in the poet of objective stimulus and subjective response, as if the lyre were able to “accommodate its chords to the motions of that which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound.” (Shelley, A Defense of Poetry, in English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins [New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967], 1072). Shelley here describes the phenomenon that Cernuda, perhaps echoing A Defense of Poetry, would call el acorde. In the chapter on Shelley in his Pensamiento poético en la lírica inglesa (1958), Cernuda glosses this famous passage (Prosa I, 330). More generally, “aire” in Cernuda covers some of the same semantic ground as “wind” or “breeze” in the English Romantic lyric, for which see M. H. Abrams, The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism (New York: Norton, 1984).
On Coleridge and Cernuda, see Kevin Bruton, “Luis Cernuda’s Exile Poetry and Coleridge’s Theory of the Imagination,” Comparative Literature Studies 21 (winter 1984): 382–395.
Juan Ramón Jiménez, Guerra en España (1936–1953), ed. Ángel Crespo (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1985), 64.
Pedro Salinas and Jorge Guillén, Correspondencia (1923–1951) (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1992), 503.
Salinas, Poesías Completas, ed. Soledad Salinas de Marichal (Barcelona: Barral, 1975), 648.
On Mexico as maternal space, see Bernard Sicot, “Luis Cernuda, Variaciones sobre tema mexicano: El espacio y el tiempo recobrados,” in Poesía y exilio: Los poetas del exilio español en México, ed. Rose Corral, Arturo Souto Alabarce, and James Valender (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1995), 245–252.
Philip Silver, Ruins and Restitution (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997), 117.
On the poem’s intertexts, see Antonio Monegal, “Pre-texto e intertexto en ‘Retrato de poeta’ de Luis Cernuda,” Boletín de la Fundación Federico García Lorca 9 (June 1991): 65–75.
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© 2003 Gustavo Pérez Firmat
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Firmat, G.P. (2003). Spanish-Only Body Talk. In: Tongue Ties. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980922_4
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