ABSTRACT
Luis Cernuda (1902-63) was a member of the Spanish “Generation of 1927,” which included other well-known poets such as Federico García Lorca (1899-1936), Rafael Alberti (1902-1999), Pedro Salinas (1892-1951), Jorge Guillén (1893-1984), and Vicente Aleixandre (1898-1984). Following upon a Sheep Meadow reissue, in 1999, of Cernuda’s verse (in a translation by Reginald Gibbons), Written in Water groups together two prose collections, Ocnos and Variations on a Mexican Theme, each made up of sad, delicate, gently thought-provoking short texts. As to the former title, Ocnos is a Roman mythical 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,” as Goethe reports in his retelling of this fable, which moreover provides the perfect epigraph for Written in Water.
