In the Foreward [to Shadow of Paradise, translated by Hugh A. Harter, 1987] Claudio Rodríguez indicates that opposing forces await the reader of this book:

Clearly, Shadow of Paradise is a book about a paradise lost, about the loss of the innocence of love. Paradise and its absence, harmony and destruction, light and shadow, elegy and exaltation: the playing out of human destiny under the immortal canticle of trees, ocean foam, and moonlight: the glittering, unifying energy of erotic forces within a diversity of organic forms.

In the Introduction by Hugh A. Harter, a different view of Aleixandre's paradise is offered, one based on how a sense of loss in the postwar years—Madrid: dark, present—combines with bliss—Málaga: light, past—in a mind highly sensitive to beauty:

For these poems present neither paradise nor a vision of it, but only the illusory, hallucinatory contours of its shadow—diaphanous, intangible, transitory—glimpses of primordial splendor tinged with the nostalgia for worlds that have vanished or perhaps never were, and vague remembrances and intuitions of a remote… Utopia, the mythopoetic Málaga of childhood and contemplations of sea, foam, sand, bird, cloud, and stone. The insistent note of loneliness and deprivation acts as a poignant counterpoint to the gorgeous spectacle of nature.

Naturally, the poet evokes other hells, other Edens; as Harter says, Dante, Milton and English and German romantics enter into the elaboration of Aleixandre's poetic world, which also reveals an affinity with the Spanish mystics, Bécquer, Antonio Machado, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Rubén Darío. The themes shared are love, nature and solitude; the probing into the self, though, seems deeper in Aleixandre's case.

Fifty-two poems make up the bilingual edition, and each should ideally receive comment, for the translator "struggled sometimes night as well as day, with obtuse or resistant passages." The results were worth it: poems delicately crafted in English project not only their own atmosphere, but also peculiarly Aleixandrian qualities. I propose that we concentrate on several in which images of light and darkness appear, both because they are crucial to the theme and because, as Harter writes, the poems "are shot through with light, and the poet's rejoicing in it." Taking isolated images, we find "se ve brillar el lomo de los calientes peces sin sentido" rendered as "one sees the shining backs of silent fiery fish" (2-3); "un beso sin luz, un beso largo" as "a lightless kiss, a lengthy kiss" (2-3); and "carne mortal… que… arde en la noche" as "Yours is mortal flesh that… blazes in the night." Then comes a stanza (in the same poem, "El poeta") locating light not in the world, but in the poet:

No. Esa luz que en el mundo
no es ceniza última,
luz que nunca se abate como polvo en los labios,
eres tú, poeta, cuya mano y no luna
yo vi en los cielos una noche brillando.

No. The light that in this world
is not its final ash,
a light that never melts like powder on one's lips,
that light is you, poet, whose hand and not the moon
was what I saw one shining night up in the skies.

Even in these few snatches of magic we can appreciate the translator's struggle to achieve. Light in Aleixandre contains everything, is everything; it issues from natural or reflected sources and is seen by the poet who is light, the complex human kind that makes us see in a hand, a moon, essences reflecting each other. Located as a presence (fish) or an absence (kiss), this Aleixandrian light acts upon our mind, refracting and filling, eroticizing and inspiring awe as its many forms and varying intensities mesmerize, leaving us oblivious of the devices that create the effects, effects which must again, in English, function (albeit analogously at times) to enliven the page. In the stanza quoted, tone, rhythm, vowel, and consonant patterns: are these recreated? Yes, and beautifully so. The English version retains the confidence of the poetic voice; the sequenced pauses (before "The light" and "poet") are offset by a flowing image following each; the stressed u's in Spanish are balanced by the stressed s's in English: a sound pattern is preserved.

There is also the more problematic aspect of light, its literaturization, which is rejected:

which becomes:

Even naked light hitting a rock like a ball a wall, this, the poet wants to intercept, to capture for his book.

Essential differences between Spanish and English can change the feel of even a closely translated line such as the first verse of "Creatures of the Dawn": "Vosotros conocisteis la generosa luz de la inocencia." The rhythm invalidates a polysyllabic synonym for "generosa" in the target language because the English line is built of monosyllables: "You knew the full rich light of innocence." The solution, the use of two short synonyms for one long adjective, is curious and effective, rhythmically.

Transparency is yearned for, and when captured in a paradisiacal kingdom it excites; touching produces light:

Mouth against mouth I find release, transformed into light,
transformed into flame that flashes in the air.

For Aleixandre, pleasure from within happiness is suffused with light ("Los Besos" ends with "¡Oh mundo así dorado!"). And this line, rendered as "Oh glowing world thus touched with gold!" prompts the reflection that Harter's translation leans toward the archaic. A romantic style, as in "Oh world turned golden, golden!" (suggested to recall how relative an art literary translation is) would emphasize in a dramatic place—closure—the element usually disassociated with sensual pleasure in Aleixandre, but which in this particular poem envelopes the amorous experience.

In the final section, two poems register despair and ambivalence. In "Destino de la carne," in a stanza full of shadowy dullness comes the sudden, irritated exclamation "¡Siempre carne del hombre, sin luz!"; and in "Último amor" the poet is no longer exalted by the moon: its radiance has left in him only an ember and he wonders "¿ Es sόlo muerte tu mirada?" Gone is the earlier vital cry, the one heard most often, most characteristically, in Shadow of Paradise: