Summary: In this audio, award-winning translator Stephen Kessler discusses his work with Cernuda's amazing late poetry. Cut off from his readership and his colleagues, Cernuda continued to write, but he was unaware of his growing renown in his native land. Then, at almost 50 years of age, Cernuda moved to Mexico, where he began to write the poetry that appears in Kessler's translation, Desolation of the Chimera. Though Cernuda was lured to Mexico by both the promise of a familiar lifestyle and the love of a young man, the poems in Desolation are, per Kessler, the work of a man writing "as if for himself alone."
