gran bretaña (1938-1947)

In September 1938, after a failed attempt to return to Spain, Cernuda became a teacher of Spanish language at Cranleigh School, a traditional boarding school in Surrey. He spent most of his free time reading English poets and writing poems, stories and essays. In January 1939, Cernuda took up a teaching assistant position in the Spanish department at the University of Glasgow, where he stayed until 1943. During these four years he wrote the last poems of Las nubes, most of Como quien espera el alba, the poems in prose Ocnos, and several critical essays. During the holidays he used to meet with other exiles, like Rafael Martínez Nadal and Gregorio Prieto in London, and Salvador de Madariaga and his daughter Nieves in Oxford.

In the summer of 1943, Cernuda left Glasgow, a city that he had come to loathe, and accepted a position as lecturer at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University. During the spring of 1944, he fell in love and wrote Cuatro poemas en una sombra, the beginning of his new book, Vivir sin estar viviendo. In June 1945, he accepted a position at the Instituto de España in London, a Republican center that presented to the British people a more liberal vision of Spanish culture that the one projected from Franco’s establishment. Cernuda lived at painter Gregorio Prieto’s flat, across from Hyde Park. During this period he began translating Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, with the assistance of Edward M.Wilson, a professor at King's College, London. Tired of the British lifestyle, Cernuda left the country to take up a university job in the United States in September 1947.