The Francisco Franco dictatorship in Spain lasted almost 40 years, from his military invasion of the Second Spanish Republic in 1936 and three years of civil war to his death in the fall of 1975. My first three sojourns in that country were in 1966, 1973 and 1976, so I experienced what it felt like (as a visitor) to be there in the later years and just after the end of his rule. As I was to learn in the course of my work as a translator, Franco’s brutal destruction of Spanish democracy — personified in the murder of Federico García Lorca in the first days of the civil war — had a devastating impact on the cohort of poets known as the Generation of 1927, two of whose writings I would come to have the privilege of rendering in English, and so the effect of Franco’s regime on them was something I came to know intimately.I fell in love with Spain when I landed there as a clueless 19 year old traveling in Europe for the first time.

Not only was I happy to have a chance to practice my high school Spanish; I was captivated by a charmingly backward country that felt enchanting in its timeless atmosphere of slowness and everyday sensuality, the pleasures of leisurely meals and siestas and animated social life in the plazas and in the bars where people ate and drank and talked with noisy abandon. To an outsider it had the romance of a poor but seemingly happy country — though to the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, Spain was “the caboose” of Europe. Armed troops of the Guardia Civil in their tan uniforms and black patent leather hats patrolled the streets in pairs. It took me a while to connect Spain’s charming backwardness with the repression of the Franco regime. My education began on my second visit when, thanks to a series of serendipitous encounters, I was taken to meet the resident living master of Spanish poetry, Vicente Aleixandre, at his home in Madrid. For more than a decade, from the early 1920s until the outbreak of the civil war, Aleixandre’s family home had been a gathering place for Lorca and his peers of that second Golden Age of Spanish poetry. While many of his contemporaries were killed or fled the country, due to his fragile health Aleixandre remained and became for younger poets a vital link with his generation. During our visit he encouraged me to translate a book he had published shortly before the civil war. Three years later I returned to show him what I had done. Then I took a train south to Granada, where Franco’s death a few months earlier was being celebrated as a rebirth of democracy. García Lorca was a romantic emblem of the new era just beginning, and at a rally in the plaza of his birthplace, Fuente Vaqueros, the excitement of the moment was mixed with the lingering menace of the Guardia Civil, whose soldiers pulled the plug on the sound system and dispersed the crowd before it got too exuberant.

I have returned to Spain three times since then: in 1978 — after Aleixandre had won the Nobel Prize for literature, which he told me had been “un catástrofe” for his quiet, orderly life — again in 1990, and one more time, in 2002, the centenary of the birth of Luis Cernuda, another member of that tragic generation, who died in exile in Mexico in 1963. Cernuda is revered in Spain and Latin America as a seminal modern poet, triply alienated as an exile, as a gay man, and as an artist, much of whose work has since been published in my English versions.

That last visit, when Spain had long since joined the contemporary world and was now a member of the European Union, I spent most of my time in Cernuda’s hometown of Seville, where I got know the neighborhoods that had informed his sensibility and were the subject of a nostalgia that infuses much of his writing. During the Franco years he could not return to his country and was embittered by what had befallen him and his friends. Through my immersion in his work I’ve learned again how, even as dictators come and go, poetry endures.

Stephen Kessler is a Santa Cruz writer and a regular Herald contributor. To read more of his work visit www.stephenkessler.com