Written in Water

the long version

While Cernuda’s verse is vivid testimony to various aspects of his biographical itinerary, it is in his prose poems that he traces more explicitly an outline of his life’s journey. Reviewing this work, Octavio Paz wrote: “In these memories and landscapes, in these notes toward the history of his sensibility, there is great objectivity; the poet doesn’t set out to fantasize, or to lie to himself or anyone else. He attempts only to illuminate, with an almost impersonal light, something very personal: a few moments in his life. But is it truly ours, this life we live?” Luis Cernuda (1902–1963) was one of the leading poets of Spain’s Generation of 1927, which included Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti and Jorge Guillén.