Though he was Federico Garcia Lorca's homosexual contemporary, Spanish poet Cernuda hasn't been honored - or romanticized - nearly as much. Lorca died young, assassinated by the fascists of Spain's civil war, while Cernuda went into lifelong exile in Europe and North America, dying in Mexico in 1963. Written in Water goes a long way toward relieving the restless poet's undeserved obscurity. His writing - lyrical, autobiographical, sensual, philosophical, and always guarded - traces his Seville boyhood, his passion for peace, his sad longing for a sense of place, and his radical (for its time) embrace of his sexuality. Few of the pieces are more than a page or two long; many ache with contradictions of an aristocratic intellectual fated to be a rootless wanderer. This slim book, translated with delicate assurance by Stephen Keller, combines two different Spanish collections (Ocnos and Variaciones sobre tema mexicano) that the author had hoped to reissue as a single volume before his death. These evocative illuminations of an intensely internal life are worth the four-decade wait.
