Editing Luis Cernuda (section)

===Spanish Civil War===

When the [[Spanish Civil War]] broke out, a friend of his, [[Concha de Albornoz]], arranged for him to join her in Paris as secretary to her father, the ambassador [[Alvaro de Albornoz]].  He remained there from July to September 1936, but after that he returned to Madrid along with the ambassador and his family.<ref name="Cernuda642"/> Alvaro de Albornoz was a founding figure of the Spanish Second Republic and his daughter was a prominent figure in the artistic world of Madrid.

For perhaps the only time in his life Cernuda felt the desire to be useful to society, which he tried to do by serving on the Republican side.<ref name="Cernuda642">Cernuda: OCP Historial de un libro vol 1 p 642</ref>  He was hopeful that there was a possibility of righting some of the social injustices that he saw in Spanish society.  From October 1936 to April 1937, he participated in radio broadcasts with A. Serrano Plaja in the [[Sierra de Guadarrama]], north of Madrid.  In April 1937, he moved to Valencia and began to write poems that would be collected in ''Las Nubes''.  He also came into contact with Juan Gil-Albert and the other members of the editorial team behind the periodical ''[[Hora de España (magazine)|Hora de España]]'' and began to work with them.<ref name="Poesia completa" /> In June, the representative of the Ministry of Education made objections to a poem to be published in that journal on the subject of Lorca's murder and he had to remove a stanza that made explicit mention of the subject's homosexuality, which was neither common knowledge at that time nor was it acceptable to the Communist Party, who exerted pressure to censor it.<ref name=Taravillo383>Taravillo: Cernuda Años españoles p 383</ref> This poem, "A un poeta muerto (F.G.L.)" was later published in ''Las Nubes'' with the censored stanza restored. In later life, Cernuda reflected that this attempt to be socially committed had been futile: "the flow of events made me see, little by little, how instead of that chance of life for a young Spain, there was only the criminal game being played by a party that many people joined for personal gain."<ref name="Cernuda857">Cernuda: OCP notes to Historial de un libro vol 1 p 857</ref> He was motivated by his innate rebelliousness and disgust at Spanish society rather than by real political commitment.

He played the role of Don Pedro in a performance of Lorca's play ''Mariana Pineda''<ref name="Poesia completa" />  during the Second Congress of [[Anti-fascism|Anti-Fascist]] Intellectuals in [[Valencia (city in Spain)|Valencia]] in 1937.<ref name="hispanicexile.bham.ac.uk"/>  At this time, he met [[Octavio Paz]].<ref name="Poesia completa" />  In October, he returned to Madrid, where he remained until February 1938, working on the periodical ''[[El Mono Azul]]'', edited by Alberti and María Teresa León.<ref>{{cite book|author1=Silvina Schammah Gesser|author2=Alexandra Cheveleva Dergacheva|editor1=Raanan Rein|editor2=Joan Maria Thomás|title=Spain 1936: Year Zero|year=2018|chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=M5vHugEACAAJ|page=194|location=Brighton|publisher=Sussex Academic Press
|isbn=978-1845198923|chapter=An Engagé in Spain: Commitment and Its Downside in Rafael Alberti’s Philo-Sovietism}}</ref>