Recognizing forbidden pleasures Translating the tension between reality and desire in Luis Cernuda's poetry

Literary translation is a site of both literary production and ethical engagement. Translators of queer-authored texts ought to recognize how, and to what ends, their subjects use eroticism and desire. English-language translators have had varied successes in such recognition of how twentieth-century Spanish poet Luis Cernuda himself constructs the social, ethical and poetic importance of desire and passion. Depending on his translators' apparatuses and the language they use to render his verse, Cernuda's framing of the tension between reality and desire assumes different ethical resonances immediately after the 1969 Stonewall riots and during the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis.