I met Cernuda in a garden. He was walking, moving alone, but he went along as if accompanied by fancy greyhounds. I realized then that a shadow accompanied him everywhere, an inseparable and mysterious dog, his own life perhaps, the outline of a life not lived.

I met Cernuda in a garden, but in fact he always seems to be in a garden. He does not fit on the street, in the classroom, or in the countryside. His faithful background is a garden or a beach.

Later, long after J [José ] B [Bergamín] introduced us, I’ve been a friend of Cernuda and his ghost dog. I have realized that the ghost is his own life, the life that accompanies him but never merges with him.

That’s why Cernuda is still a child today. Because his life was stolen, someone or something spends next to him a life that belongs to him, and he, Luis Cernuda, is still intact in his garden, spellbound, absorbed, a prisoner in himself.

Cernuda is The Poet, the purest case of a poet –but not of pure poet- that exists in Spain today. He has nothing to do with his reality. Cernuda does not live, he pulses.

Hence Cernuda’s surprise when he faces the world around this or that corner. That surprise, that clash is what animates his last poems. Philosophers are not born but made. And Cernuda, a born poet, is tinged increasingly with who knows what naked conclusions, which lead him to be one of the most serious poets of today and of Spain.

That’s why it’s Bécquer, Bécquer so profoundly, not superficially Bécquer like today’s fad. Because Cernuda has not borrowed anything from Bécquer; he already had it from birth.

And that’s why a lecture by Cernuda about Bécquer is exceptionally interesting for us because we know we will not hear a cold analysis, an accurate criticism, but something else; we will hear much of that missing voice, that pulse.

It does not matter if Cernuda would not accurately evaluate his fellow countryman with whom he shares métier, land and soul, for what we hope for is that he fills the air with that withered breath.

Because Cernuda is not a follower, not a disciple, not even someone influenced by Bécquer but a relative, his closest relative. He is Bécquer’s blood.

Introduction to the lecture given by Luis Cernuda at Alicante’s Ateneo, February 9, 1935.

It was first published by Nigel Dennis in volume IV of his edition of Ramón Gaya’s Obra completa (Valencia. Pre-textos, 2000)