Spanish literati to popularise anti-fascist poet / 16 August 2005

MADRID — The Spanish literary establishment was honouring one of its best-known anti-fascist poets who died in prison during the Franco dictatorship.

Some three dozen Spanish literati and historians are putting the final touches on a government-backed project intended to spread via globe-spanning digital radio the work of Miguel Hernandez.

'Radiopoesia', a project of the Miguel Hernandez Foundation set to launch on the anniversary of the poet's birthday on 30 October, is also designed to become a forum for both established and aspiring poets.

The show, which will be heard at www.radiopoesia.com , will also present interviews, hold contests and will play songs with lyrics written by Hernandez, as well as his poems.

The project is being supported by the Spanish culture ministry and has as its aim spreading the work of Hernandez, who died in prison in 1942.

The head of the foundation, Juan Jose Sanchez Balaguer, told EFE that Radiopoesia "will be directed quite a bit toward Hispanic America," and he added that the organization had been in contact with different communications media in Cuba, Miami and Argentina.

Sanchez Balaguer said that the show will be "very participatory" and will try to move closer to "new poets" so that they can get their work more widely known.

The team making up the Radiopoesia project is mainly comprised of 37 historians and philologists, and they have said that once the effort is under way they may work together with other figures in academic culture.

On the digital radio show will be heard some of Hernandez's poems read by authors including Portuguese Nobel laureate Jose Saramago and Spanish singer-songwriter Joan Manuel Serrat.

Hernandez was arrested several times after the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War for his Republican sympathies. Imprisoned under harsh conditions, he eventually died of tuberculosis.

Much of his most celebrated work, hailed for its power and simplicity, was produced in jail.

Hernández moved to Madrid shortly after getting married, leaving his wife and child behind in Orihuela. There he befriended the most prestigious poets in Spain, including Lorca, Aleixandre, Alberti and Neruda. Their influence, as well as the tragedy and horror he was later forced to endure, matured his work into an intensely personal and brutal form. Miguel served with the Republican Army during the Civil War, and the savagery he witnessed, as well as the early death of his firstborn son are vividly portrayed in his subsequent works. First Song depicts the dehumanizing effect of war on individuals, as do most of the poems in Viento del pueblo (1937) and El hombre acecha (1938).

At the conclusion of the Civil War, Miguel attempted to flee to Portugal, but was detained, beaten and arrested by the Guardia Civil. Hernández was moved to a prison in Madrid, where he continued to write poetry, often on scraps of toilet paper which were smuggled out. His influential friends secured his release, but Miguel stubbornly insisted that he return to Orihuela where his family remained, rather than flee the country as if he were a criminal. He was jailed once again and subsequently moved to a prison hospital in Alicante after contracting tuberculosis while imprisoned. During his 3 years in prison, Miguel wrote his most original poetry which was published posthumously in Cancionero y romancero de ausencias (1958). Ironically, the prison poems, while still obsessed with darkness and suffering, reflected a compassion and faith in the human spirit lacking in his earlier works. Just before Hernández died on March 28, 1942 he scrawled his last verse on the hospital wall: Goodbye, brothers, comrades, friends: let me take my leave of the sun and the fields.
http://users.adelphia.net/~fvila/Spain/poetry.htm

The Spanish poet Miguel Hernández (October 30, 1910-March 28, 1942), born to a poor family and given little formal education, published his first book of poetry at 23, and gained considerable fame before his death.

The poet was arrested multiple times after the Spanish Civil War for his republican sympathies, and eventually sentenced to death. His death sentence, however, was commuted for 30 years, leaving the poet to live in multiple jails under extraordinarily harsh conditions until eventually succumbing to tuberculosis in 1942.

While in jail, the poet produced an extraordinary amount of poetry, much of it in the form of simple songs, which he collected in his papers and sent to his wife and others. These poems are now known as his Cancionero y romancero de ausencia (Songs and Ballads of Absence). In these works, the poet writes not only of the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War and his own incarceration, but also of the death of an infant son and the struggle of his wife and another son to survive in poverty. The intensity and simplicity of the poems, combined with the extraordinary situation of the poet, give them remarkable power.

Perhaps the best known work of the poet is a poem called "Nanas de cebolla" ("Onion Lullaby"), a poem in which Hernández replies to a letter from his wife in which she told him that she was surviving on bread and onions. In the poem, the poet envisions his son breastfeeding on his mother's onion blood (sangre de cebolla), and uses the child's laughter as a counterpoint to the mother's desperation. In this as in other poems, the poet turns his wife's body into a mythic symbol of desperation and hope, of regenerative power desperately needed in a broken Spain.

The poet's works include:
Perito en lunas (1934)
El rayo que no cesa (1936)
Viento del pueblo (1937)
El hombre acecha (1938-1939)
Cancionero y Romancero de Ausencias (incomplete, 1938-1942)

Elegy
(XXIX: From ‘El Rayo Que No Cesa’)



(In Orihuela, his town and mine, Ramon Sije, whom I loved so much, has died like lightning, he and I.)



Friend of my soul, I want to be
the tearful gardener of the earth

you occupy, and enrich, all too soon.



My grief without purpose feeding

the rain, the snail-shells and organs,

I’ll give your heart for food



to the desolate poppies.

Such sorrow gathers in my chest,

that I mourn with painful breath.



A harsh slap, an icy blow,

an invisible, murderous axe-stroke,

a brutal thrust has felled you.



There’s no expanse big enough for my hurt,

I weep for my misfortune and yours together

and I feel your death more than I do my life.



I walk on the tracks of the dead,

and without warmth from anyone, or consolation

I go from my feelings to my work.



Too soon death lifted in flight,

too soon the dawn broke,

too soon you’re surrounded with earth.



No forgiveness for lovesick death,

no forgiveness for thankless life,

no forgiveness for earth or nothingness.


A storm rises, in my hands,

of rocks, lightning bolts, harsh axes,

thirsty and hungry for catastrophes.



I want to gnaw at the earth with my teeth,

I want to take the earth apart bit by bit

with dry, burning bites.



I want to mine the earth till I find you,

and kiss your noble skull,

and un-shroud you, and return you.



You’ll return to my garden, my fig tree:

In the high trellises of flowers,

birdlike your soul, the hive



of angelic waxes and labours.

You’ll return to the enamoured farm-hands’

ploughshares’ lullaby.



You’ll brighten the shadow of my brow,

and your girl and the bees will go along,

on both sides, arguing over your blood.



My eager voice of a lover

calls from a field of foaming almonds,

to your heart, already ruined velvet.



I summon you to the winged souls

of the creamy almond blossoms,

we’ve so many things to speak of,

friend, friend of my soul.



10th of January 1936

Aleixandre, a member of Spain's fabled 'Generation of '27," helped forge a dynamic new poetry in pre-Civil War Spain, along with Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, Jorge Guillen, Miguel Hernandez, Federico Garcia Lorca, Pedro Salinas, and others.