Editing Luis Cernuda (section)

====Ocnos (1940–1956)====
Cernuda 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.<ref name="Villena introduction35">Villena intro to edition of Las Nubes p 35</ref> 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 Cernuda 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. Cernuda 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 Cernuda's childhood and adolescence in Seville. In the second edition, he gave the pieces a biographical sequence and moved beyond his life in Seville. The final edition had 63 pieces and was published in Mexico in 1963.<ref name="Poesía completa823-826">Luis Cernuda: Poesía completa Notes p823-826</ref>

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.<ref name="Harris A Study91">Harris: Luis Cernuda a study p 91</ref> It concludes with a statement of the gap between reality and desire: <blockquote>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, you wished to return to that garden and sit again on the edge of the fountain, to dream again of past youth.)</blockquote>
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."<ref name="Taylor18">Taylor: Into the Heart of European Poetry p 18</ref>

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.<ref name=Taravillo277>Taravillo: Cernuda Años españoles p 277</ref> Apart from the short-lived affairs with Serafín Fernández Ferro and Stanley Richardson, Carmona is the only other person we know about with whom Cernuda had a lasting affair in the 1930s.<ref name=Taravillo303>Taravillo: Cernuda Años españoles p 303</ref> 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.<ref name="Taylor17">Taylor: Into the Heart of European Poetry p 17</ref> 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 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,<ref name=Taravillo2218>Taravillo: Cernuda Años de exilio p 218</ref> so his writings were always likely to come under close scrutiny from the censors. Cernuda himself decided not to include it in the third edition.<ref name="Epistolario452">Epistolario Letter to José Luis Cano June 1948 p 452</ref> Taylor points out that the title is a translation of Keats's epitaph, "Here Lies One Whose Name was Writ in Water". Cernuda 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."<ref name="Taylor18" />