To mark International Book Day, the Centre for Senior Citizens (CSM) in London also invited me in 2010 to give a lecture. On 27 April 2010, I spoke to them about the great Spanish poet Miguel Hernández, to mark the centenary of his birth.

Below, I have reproduced the text of my lecture, which you can also download here as a PDF in Castilian Spanish.

Following my lecture, the Language and Culture Group sent me a heartfelt letter, which I am posting here.

 

 

MIGUEL HERNÁNDEZ: LIFE AND WORK

1. INTRODUCTION

Miguel Hernández Gilabert (Orihuela, 30 October 1910 – Alicante, 28 March 1942) was a poet and playwright of particular significance in 20th-century Spanish literature.

Although he has traditionally been classified as part of the Generation of ’36, Miguel Hernández maintained closer ties with the previous generation, to the extent that he was regarded by Dámaso Alonso as ‘a brilliant follower of the Generation of ’27’.

“Few poets are as generous and luminous as the big lad from Orihuela, whose statue will one day rise amongst the orange blossoms of his slumbering homeland.” Pablo Neruda (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1971).

 

2. BODY OF THE TEXT

2.1. THE LIFE AND WORK OF MIGUEL HERNÁNDEZ

There are many biographers and scholars of Miguel Hernández, both Spanish (Concha Zardoya) and foreign (William Rose and Marie Chevallier). For this presentation, we have drawn on the relatively recent (2002) biography by José Luis Ferris, entitled “Miguel Hernández: Passions, Prison and Death of a Poet”. Ferris divides the poet’s life into six cycles.

Cycle I: Childhood and Enchantment (1910–1925)

He was born the second son into a family in Orihuela who raised livestock. A goat herder from a very early age, Miguel attended the ‘Nuestra Señora de Montserrat’ school between 1915 and 1916 and received his primary education at the Amor de Dios schools from 1918 to 1923; in 1923, he went on to study for his A-levels at the Santo Domingo College in Orihuela, run by the Jesuits, who nominated him for a scholarship to continue his studies, which his father refused. In 1925, he abandoned his studies on his father’s orders to devote himself exclusively to tending sheep. Although it is not often mentioned, the reality was that a severe economic crisis affected Miguel Hernández’s family that year, which is why his father turned to his son for help with the farm work.

Cycle II: Adolescence and Early Verses (1925–1931)

Whilst tending the flock, Miguel read voraciously and wrote his first poems. Around this time, Canon Luis Almarcha struck up a friendship with Miguel and provided the young poet with books by San Juan de la Cruz, Gabriel Miró, Paul Verlaine and Virgil, amongst others. His visits to the Public Library became increasingly frequent, and he began to form an impromptu literary circle with other young people from Orihuela, centred around his friend Carlos Fenoll’s bakery. The main participants in those gatherings were, in addition to Miguel and Carlos Fenoll himself, his brother Efrén Fenoll, Manuel Molina, and José Marín Gutiérrez—a future lawyer and essayist who would later adopt the pseudonym ‘Ramón Sijé’ and to whom Hernández would dedicate his famous Elegy.

From this point onwards, books became his main source of education, and he became entirely self-taught. The great authors of the Golden Age – Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Garcilaso de la Vega and, above all, Luis de Góngora, would become his principal teachers.

On 13 January 1930, his poem ‘Pastoril’ was published in the Orihuela newspaper ‘El Pueblo’, and this was the first poem of Miguel’s to be published.

PASTORIL

By the crystal-clear river
that the golden sun colours.

Her tears are bitter gall.
Why is the little shepherdess weeping?
What sorrow, what great heartbreak
has turned her cheek white?

Her shepherd has abandoned her!
He has gone to the city
and left her all alone
by the side of the flock.

She no longer shares his hut
nor nurses his lamb!
He no longer says to her, ‘I love you’,
and the girl weeps and weeps!

‘Your fiery mouth’
used to say it loved me.
‘A lie!’ she says sorrowfully,
‘Oh! Why did he say that to me?’

I, who blindly believed you,
I, who left my homeland
to follow you to your mountains,
find myself forsaken by you!…

By the crystal-clear river
which the night is casting its shadow upon
and where the eastern breeze ripples,
the unhappy girl continues to weep.

No longer does the tender, white flower
walk towards the hut
when the sun touches the mountains
beside her shepherd.

Now she goes alone to the ravine
and to the plain, and returns alone;
she walks and returns, sad and dejected,
behind her white flock.

Why, outcast shepherd,
do you abandon your shepherdess
who, without you, weeps and weeps all the more
by the side of the flock?

Night comes rushing in
mourning the blue sky:
the river keeps flowing
and the shepherdess keeps moaning.

Yet she regains her former vigour,
and, beautifully serene,
buries her dark sorrow
among the river’s waters.

A sacred silence reigns…
The shepherdess weeps no more!
Yet afterwards it seems she weeps
as her flock calls out to her!

Miguel Hernández wrote a great deal but published very little; that is why the collections and anthologies vary so much from one to another. From this early period of his writing, I would also like to highlight ‘To My Soul’.

TO MY SOUL

They whisper that I speak too little,
my soul, those who know nothing
of our long conversations.

And ‘La Palmera Levantina’, one of the 13 poems that the singer-songwriter Joan Manuel Serrat included on his second album of Miguel Hernández’s poems in 2010, to mark the centenary of the poet’s birth. The first album dates from 1987.

THE LEVANTINE PALM TREE (excerpt)

The Levantine palm tree,
the walking column.
The palm tree…
The Levantine palm tree,
the one that scans the sea,
the Mediterranean era.
The Levantine palm tree,
the one that catches the first
breath of spring,
the first swallow.

The mistress of landscapes.
She who scratches at the morning stars
and wraps the lace
of the clouds, like turbans, around her date-palm stilts.
The magnificent censer
that sways alone
at the top of the hill,
against an extraordinary blue…

The Levantine palm tree!
The one that plucks
the first strand of light
from the white dawn.
The one that offers sun in grains to the greenish-blue.
The one that throws itself face-first
against the Sun.
The one that cradles
the archangel of the moon.

The one climbed by the palm-growers,
who pluck its teardrop-shaped clusters
amid laughter and songs
and goldfinches;
though at times they turn to weeping,
laughter and songs,
when, shaken by a violent wind,
these whirling trees
scatter everything into the heavens:
birds, palm fronds, men, dates.

The Levantine palm tree,
the first thing the sailor’s eye
sees on the seas of the Levant.
The palm tree of Alicante!

Cycle III: First trip to Madrid and publication of “Perito en lunas” (1931–1933)

Miguel arrives at Atocha station at dawn on 2 December 1931. Backed by recommendations, he attempts to make his way in Madrid’s literary world. On 15 January 1932, Giménez Caballero published in “El Robinson Literario” a rather offensive first profile of Miguel, which concluded with: ‘…a charming little shepherd who has fallen this Christmas because of this Madrid birth’. He knocked on many doors, only to have them shut in his face. Even so, he continued to write and to visit the National Library, for which he had secured a pass. It is an example of a titanic effort to overcome adversity. On 20 February 1932, a full-page feature on Miguel by Federico Martínez Corbalán appeared in the magazine “Estampa”.

Even so, he fails to secure the long-awaited scholarship from the Alicante Provincial Council and, distressed by his debts to the boarding house, irons his only tie by placing it between the pages of his dictionary, and is forced to spend many nights sleeping rough.

Finally, after six months of adventures and despondency, Miguel returned to Orihuela on 20 May 1932. His time in Madrid did, however, serve to show him just how out of step his early poetry was.

It was during this period that he composed ‘El Silbo de Afirmación en la Aldea’ (The Whistle of Affirmation in the Village), better known by its opening line ‘Alto soy de mirar a las Palmeras’ (I am tall for gazing at the palm trees), in the vein of the ‘beatus ille’, in which he compares life in the city and in the countryside, although it is a poem that does not appear in any book.

THE WHISTLE OF AFFIRMATION IN THE VILLAGE (Excerpt)

I am tall for gazing at the palm trees,
too rugged to live amongst the mountains…
I found myself small and weak upon the pavements
of a splendid city of spiders.
Tough ravines of staircases,
silent waterfalls of lifts,
what a sense of emptiness!
They took the place of my flowers,
the breezes of my breezes and my river.
I saw the most remarkable part of my being
carried off by the devil, and God absent.
I held you in the distance of oblivion,
village, orchard, fountain
where I found myself in a moment of carelessness:
orchard, where I found the best life,
village, where, in the open air and freely,
in a state of peace, I urinated long and at ease.
But I immediately turned
my attention to the pure existences
of my retreat, mindful of my own absence,
and all their absences
filled my thoughts with light.
My foot wandered without ground—what torment!—
wavering on the waxed floors,
with a constant fear, a start,
which were heightened by the bells, the warnings,
the alarms, the men and the tarmac.
Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!
Order! Order! What a haughty
imposition of order—a hand,
a colour, a sound!
My sense of sight,
alas, was losing its meaning.
Bumped into by a thousand breasts, assailed
by more than a thousand dangers, temptations,
mechanical packs of hounds,
I was pursued by lusts and car horns,
desires and trams.
So many lips of theatrical purples,
exaggeratedly sinful!
So much vocabulary of glass,
driving the colours to frenzy
in a struggle, in a contest
of originality and excellence!
What confusion! A Babel of Babels!
Great city! Great fiend! Great hell!
The world on rails,
and its imbalance on a bicycle!

It took several months for his first book, “Perito en Lunas”—a work in the style of Gongora or the Culteranos—to see the light of day, and it was finally published by the printing house of the Catholic-oriented magazine “La Verdad” in Murcia on 20 January 1933, having borrowed the money to cover the printing costs. The book features a foreword by his friend Ramón Sijé. Despite such high expectations, the book went unnoticed, sold very few copies and did nothing to alleviate the poet’s dire financial situation. According to experts, the poems in this book show clear influences from the “Segunda Antología Poética” (1922) by Juan Ramón Jiménez [Nobel Prize in Literature, 1956] and from Rubén Darío. The following poem describes masturbation.

SEX IN AN INSTANT, 1

To the ticking—albeit muffled—I recall
the dark perpendicular of before,
bisector of zero over zero,
now equivalent, and equidistant.
It cries out imperatively for its right,
with more numbers, though few, for a moment;
but her situation, extreme in short,
without a vertex of love, foams away.

 

Cycle IV: Second trip to Madrid and “El Rayo que no Cesa” (1934–36)

Miguel has written the first two acts of a sacramental play and, with his meagre savings and money from his friends, sets off for Madrid for the second time in March 1934. This time he has better luck and manages to complete his auto-sacramental play “Quién te ha visto y quién te ve y sombra de lo que eras” (“Who Has Seen You and Who Sees You Now, and a Shadow of What You Once Were”), which is published in the Madrid-based Catholic magazine “Cruz y Raya” in July, August and September 1934.

In 1934, Miguel alternated between stays in Madrid and returns to Orihuela. In June 1934, his friend Ramón Sijé began publishing the magazine “El Gallo Crisis”, which managed to produce six issues up until Easter 1935; all of them featured poems by Miguel offering a profound theological and Eucharistic vision of the countryside.

During one of his stays, he met Josefina Manresa, with whom he formalised their engagement on 27 September 1934. Throughout 1934, he wrote love sonnets to his beloved, which would later form “El Silbo Vulnerado” , which Miguel had planned to publish in 1934 but did not. Many of these poems serve as a prelude and source of inspiration for the sonnets that would make up “Rayo que no cesa”. One example is “Te me mueres de casta y de sencilla”, poem 22 from *El Silbo Vulnerado*; and, slightly revised, poem 11 of “Rayo”, inspired by Josefina Manresa.

YOU DIE FOR ME, SO CHASTE AND SIMPLE

You die for me, so chaste and simple…
I am convinced, my love, I confess
that, as a daring kidnapper of a kiss,
I plucked the flower from your cheek.
I plucked the flower from your cheek,
and since that glory, that event,
your cheek, burdened by scruples and weight,
falls away, withered and yellow.
The spectre of that criminal kiss
haunts your cheekbone,
ever more evident, dark and large.
And sleepless you lie, jealously,
watching over my mouth—how carefully!
lest it become corrupt and run wild.

He made further trips to Madrid and secured work, first as a contributor to the Misiones Pedagógicas and, later, as secretary and editor of the encyclopaedia “Los toros”, whose director and chief editor, José María de Cossío, was preparing it for Espasa-Calpe. From then on, Cossío would be Miguel’s most fervent supporter.

He met Vicente Aleixandre and became friends with him and with Pablo Neruda, who had just arrived in Madrid in 1934 as a diplomat; this marked the beginning of his brief period within Surrealism, characterised by torrential vigour and telluric inspiration.

On 24 January 1936, the first copies of “El Rayo que no cesa” were printed. This collection of poems has a curious structure: a long poem, thirteen sonnets, a long poem, thirteen sonnets, an elegy and a final sonnet. In this book, Miguel has transformed himself into a passionate bard of profane love, with unbridled sexuality and eroticism.

In 1935, he had ended his relationship with Josefina Manresa and had been involved in a torrid affair with the very liberated painter Maruja Mallo. He would dedicate the following sonnet to her, sonnet 23 from “El Rayo que no cesa”:

LIKE THE BULL I WAS BORN FOR MOURNING

Like the bull I was born for mourning
and pain; like the bull I am branded
by a hellish iron on my flank
and, as a man, in my groin with a fruit.
Like the bull, my boundless heart
seems to him but a mere speck,
and from the face of the lover’s kiss,
like the bull, I vie for your love.
Like the bull, I grow through my punishment,
my heart is bathed in my tongue
and I bear a resounding gale around my neck.
Like the bull, I follow you and pursue you,
and you leave my desire upon a sword,
like the mocked bull, like the bull.

In December 1935, his lifelong and dear friend, Ramón Sijé, had died, and Miguel dedicated his extraordinary ‘Elegy’ to him. This ‘Elegy’ is considered one of the masterpieces of Spanish literature and one of the greatest achievements of Hernandine poetry; an elegy which, at the time, elicited the rare praise of Juan Ramón Jiménez in a column for the newspaper “El Sol”; and the acclaim of Ortega y Gasset and Marañón, amongst others.

POEM: ELEGY TO RAMÓN SIJÉ

(In Orihuela, his town and mine, Ramón Sijé, whom I loved so dearly, has died
as suddenly as a bolt of lightning.)

I wish to be, weeping, the gardener
of the earth you occupy and fertilise,
companion of the soul, gone so soon.

Nourishing rains, seashells,
and organs—my pain without instruments—
to the despondent poppies
I shall give your heart as sustenance.

So much pain gathers in my side,
that, because it aches, even my breath hurts.
A hard slap, an icy blow,
an invisible, murderous axe-blow,
a brutal shove has brought you down.

There is no expanse greater than my wound;
I weep for my misfortune and all its aspects,
and I feel your death more keenly than my own life.

I walk upon the stubble of the dead,
and without anyone’s warmth or comfort I go
from my heart to my affairs.

Early did death take flight,
early did the dawn break,
early is it rolling across the ground.

I do not forgive death in love,
I do not forgive inattentive life,
I do not forgive the earth nor nothingness.

In my hands I raise a storm
of stones, lightning and shrill axes,
thirsty for catastrophes and hungry.

I want to dig into the earth with my teeth,
I want to tear the earth apart piece by piece
with dry, hot bites.

I want to gaze into the earth until I find you
and kiss your noble skull
and remove your gag and bring you back.

You will return to my orchard and my fig tree,
through the lofty scaffolding of the flowers
your beekeeper’s soul will flit
with angelic wax and craftsmanship.

You will return to the cooing by the trellises
of the lovers, the farm labourers.
You will brighten the shadow of my brows
and your blood will flow to either side,
as your bride and the bees vie for it.

Your heart, now withered velvet,
calls out to a field of frothy almonds,
my greedy voice of a lover.

To the winged souls of the roses
of the creamy almond tree I call upon you,
for we have many things to discuss,
companion of the soul, companion.

In February 1936, he wrote again to Josefina’s father, asking him to resume his relationship with his daughter.

Cycle V: The Poet in the Civil War (1936–1939)

When the Civil War broke out on 18 July 1936, Miguel Hernández enlisted in the Republican cause. Hernández served in the 5th Regiment and was transferred to other units on the fronts of the Battle of Teruel, in Andalusia and in Extremadura. His poetry at this time took on a more social tone and clearly expressed a political commitment to the poorest and most dispossessed.

In the midst of the war, he managed to escape briefly to Orihuela to marry Josefina Manresa on 9 March 1937. A few days later, he had to return to the front in Jaén.

In the summer of 1937, he attended the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers held in Madrid and Valencia, and later, in August, he travelled to the Soviet Union on behalf of the Republican government, from where he returned in October to write the play “Pastor de la muerte”.

In September 1937, he published a new book, “Viento del Pueblo“, dedicated to Vicente Aleixandre. It is a vibrant work, stripped of rhetorical artifice and imbued with extraordinary power. Of his poems, the following stand out here:

WINDS OF THE PEOPLE CARRY ME

Winds of the people carry me,
winds of the people drag me along,
they scatter my heart
and buffet my throat.
The oxen bow their heads,
helplessly meek,
in the face of punishment:
the lions raise theirs
and at the same time mete out punishment
with their roaring paws.
I do not belong to a people of oxen,
for I am of a people who possess
lion’s lairs,
eagle’s gorges
and mountain ranges of bulls
with pride in their horns.
Oxen never thrived
on the moors of Spain.
Who spoke of placing a yoke
upon the neck of this race?
Who has ever placed upon the hurricane
either yokes or shackles,
nor who has held the lightning
prisoner in a cage?
Asturians of bravery,
Basques of armoured stone,
Valencians of joy
and Castilians of soul,
carved like the earth
and graceful as wings;
Andalusians of lightning,
born amidst guitars
and forged in the torrential
anvils of tears;
Extremadurans of rye,
Galicians of rain and calm,
Catalans of steadfastness,
Aragonese of noble stock,
Murcians of dynamite
fruitfully propagated,
Leonese, Navarrese, masters
of hunger, sweat and the axe,
kings of the mines,
lords of the fields,
men who, amongst the roots,
like gallant roots,
go from life to death,
go from nothing to nothing:
yokes they wish to place upon you
people of the weeds,
yokes that you must leave
broken upon their backs.
Twilight of the oxen
dawn is breaking.
The oxen die clad
in humility and the scent of the stable;
the eagles, the lions
and the bulls in arrogance,
and behind them, the sky
is neither clouded nor ends.
The agony of the oxen
has a small face,
that of the male animal
enlarges all creation.
If I die, let me die
with my head held high.
Dead and twenty times dead,
my mouth pressed against the grass,
I shall have my teeth clenched
and my beard resolute.
Singing, I await death,
for there are nightingales that sing
above the rifles
and in the midst of battles.

THE YOUNG OX-HERDER

Born for the yoke,
more humiliated than beautiful,
his neck pursued
by the yoke for his neck.

He is born, like a tool,
destined for blows,
from a discontented land
and an insatiable plough.

Amidst the pure, living manure
of cows, he brings to life
a soul the colour of an olive tree,
already old and calloused.

He begins to live, and begins
to die from one end to the other
lifting the crust
of his mother’s soil with the yoke.

He begins to feel, and feels
life as a war,
and to labour wearily
upon the bones of the earth.

He knows not how to count his years,
yet he already knows that sweat
is a solemn crown
of salt for the labourer.

He works, and whilst he works
with manly seriousness,
he anoints himself with rain and adorns himself
with the flesh of the graveyard.

By the force of blows, strong,
and by the force of the sun, burnished,
with a deathly ambition
he tears apart a hard-won loaf.

Each new day is
more root, less creature,
who hears beneath his feet
the voice of the grave.

And like a root he sinks
slowly into the earth
so that the earth may flood
his brow with peace and bread.

This hungry child pains me
like a mighty thorn,
and his ashen existence
hardens my oak-like soul.

I see him ploughing the stubble,
and devouring a crust of bread,
and declaring with his eyes
why he is flesh for the yoke.

His plough pierces my chest,
and his life chokes my throat,
and I suffer as I watch the fallow land
stretching so vast beneath his feet.

Who will save this little lad
smaller than a grain of oats?
From where shall the hammer come
to break this chain?

Let it spring from the hearts
of day labourers,
who, before becoming men, are
and have been child labourers.

OLIVE GROWERS
Andalusians of Jaén,
proud olive growers,
tell me from the depths of your soul: who,
who planted the olive trees?
They were not planted by nothingness,
nor by money, nor by the master,
but by the silent earth,
labour and sweat.
United with pure water
and united with the planets,
the three gave rise to the beauty
of the gnarled trunks.
Rise up, grey-haired olive tree,
they said at the foot of the wind.
And the olive tree raised a hand
powerful as its very foundations.
Andalusians of Jaén,
proud olive-growers,
tell me from the depths of your soul: who
nurtured the olive trees?
Your blood, your life,
not that of the exploiter
who grew rich from the generous
wound of sweat.
Not that of the landowner
who buried you in poverty,
who trampled upon your foreheads,
who crushed your heads.
Trees that your toil
consecrated at the height of the day
were the beginning of a loaf of bread
that only the other ate.
How many centuries of olive-picking,
feet and hands in bondage,
sunrise to sunset and moonrise to moonset,
weigh upon your bones!
People of Jaén in Andalusia,
proud olive-growers,
my soul asks: whose,
whose are these olive trees?
Jaén, rise up proudly
upon your moonlit stones,
do not become a slave
with all your olive groves.
Within the clarity
of the oil and its aromas,
your freedom is signalled
by the freedom of your hills.

SONG OF THE SOLDIER-HUSBAND

I have filled your womb with love and seed,
I have prolonged the echo of blood to which I respond
and I wait by the furrow as the plough waits:
I have reached the very depths.

Dark-haired one of lofty towers, bright light and lofty eyes,
wife of my flesh, great draught of my life,
your wild breasts grow towards me, leaping
like a fawn in the womb.

It already seems to me that you are a delicate crystal,
I fear you might shatter at the slightest stumble,
and to strengthen your veins with my soldier’s skin
I would be like the cherry tree.

Mirror of my flesh, sustenance of my wings,
I give you life in the death they give me and which I do not take.
Woman, woman, I love you whilst surrounded by bullets,
longing for the lead.

Upon the ferocious coffins lying in wait,
upon the very dead, without remedy and without a grave,
I love you, and I would kiss you with all my heart
even in the dust, my wife.

When, by the battlefields, my brow thinks of you
—a brow that neither cools nor soothes your image—
you draw near to me like an immense mouth
with hungry teeth.

Write to me in the thick of the fighting; feel me in the trench:
here, with my rifle, I summon and hold fast to your name.
And I defend your poor womb that awaits me,
and I defend your child.

Our son will be born with his fist clenched,
wrapped in a clamour of victory and guitars,
and I shall lay down my soldier’s life at your door
without fangs or claws. ,

One must kill to go on living.
One day I shall go to the shadow of your distant hair.
And I shall sleep on the sheet of starch and din
sewn by your hand.

Your relentless legs stride straight towards childbirth,
and your relentless mouth with its indomitable lips,
and before my solitude of explosions and breaches,
you tread a path of relentless kisses.

For the child there will be the peace I am forging.
And at last, in an ocean of irretrievable bones,
your heart and mine will be shipwrecked, leaving
a woman and a man worn out by kisses.

In December 1937, whilst Miguel was on the Teruel front, their first son, Manuel Ramón, was born; he died at ten months old, and to him is dedicated the poem ‘Son of Light and Shadow’. As the war drew to a close, in January 1939, his second son, Manuel Miguel, was born.

Cycle VI: Persecution, imprisonment and death (1939–1942)

In April 1939, General Francisco Franco declared the war over, and ‘El hombre acecha’ had just been printed in Valencia, a collection of poems written between 1937 and 1939. This book was dedicated to Pablo Neruda. Whilst still unbound, a Francoist purge commission, chaired by the philologist Joaquín de Entrambasaguas, ordered the complete destruction of the print run. However, two copies that were saved made it possible to republish the book in 1981.

MOTHER SPAIN

Clutching your body as the tree trunk clings to its soil,
with all its roots and all its courage,
who will separate me, tear me away from you,
mother?

Clutching your womb, who will take it from me,
if its titanic depths give rise to my flesh?
Clutching your womb, which is my eternal home,
no one!

Mother: eternal abyss, eternal earth:
womb where all bloods converge and flow into one:
where all fallen hollows rise again,
mother.

To say ‘mother’ is to say ‘earth that has borne me’;
it is to say to the dead: ‘brothers, rise up’;
it is to feel in my mouth and hear beneath the ground
blood.

The other mother is a bridge, nothing more, of your rivers.
The other breast is a bubble of your seas.
You are the whole mother with all her infinity,
mother.

Earth: earth on the gallows, and in the soul, and in everything.
Earth that I am eating, which in the end will swallow me whole.
With greater strength than before, you will give birth to me once more,
mother.

When I am but a faint imprint upon your body,
you will give birth to me once more with greater strength than before.
When a child is a child, he lives and dies crying out,
‘Mother!’

Brothers: let us defend her besieged womb,
towards which the rooks flock from all sides, for
for the evil wings to fly, there is still
air.

Cast aside, to the shores of your heart,
limited feelings, partial affections.
They are small stories beside her, ever
great.

A photograph and a patch of earth,
a letter and a mountain are sometimes one and the same.
Today you are the grass that grows above all else,
mother.

Family of this land that merges us into the light,
the darkest of the dead strive to rise,
to merge with us and save the first
mother.

Spain, stoic rock that split in two
into pieces of pain and deep stone to give me life:
they shall not separate me from your lofty depths,
mother.

As well as dying for you, I ask for one thing:
that the wife and son I have, when they pass away,
may go to the corner of your womb where I dwell,
mother.

Once the war was over, a gruelling ordeal began for Miguel.

His friend Cossío offered to take the poet in at Tudanca, but he decided to return to Orihuela. As he was in great danger in Orihuela, he decided to go to Seville via Córdoba, with the intention of crossing the Portuguese border via Huelva. Salazar’s police handed him over to the Civil Guard. From the prison in Seville, he was transferred to the prison on Calle Torrijos in Madrid (now Calle del Conde de Pe ñalver), from where, thanks to Pablo Neruda’s interventions with a cardinal, he was unexpectedly released without being prosecuted in September 1939.
On his return to Orihuela, he gave Joefina a notebook containing his writings up to that point, the seed of the book “Cancionero y Romancero de Ausencias”. Miguel was denounced and arrested, and spent his first period of imprisonment in the seminary in Orihuela, which had by then been converted into a prison.

From there he was transferred to the prison in Plaza del Conde de Toreno in Madrid, where he was tried and sentenced to death in March 1940. There he shared a cell with Buero Vallejo, who produced one of the poet’s most famous charcoal portraits. Cossío and other intellectual friends, including Luis Almarcha Hernández—a friend from his youth and Vicar General of the Diocese of Orihuela (who later became Bishop of León in 1944)—interceded on his behalf, and his death sentence was commuted to thirty years’ imprisonment.

He was transferred to Palencia prison in September 1940 and, in November, to Ocaña Prison (Toledo). In June 1941, he was moved to the Adult Reformatory in Alicante, where he was finally able to see Josefina and his son again.

From prison to prison, the poet continued to write. His book “Cancionero y Romancero de Ausencias” contains poems written between 1938 and 1941, whilst “Poemas Últimos” brings together the poems in classical verse also written during that period.

Among these poems, ‘Nanas de la Cebolla’ stands out; it was written for his second son when he was eight months old, after receiving a letter from his wife in which she described their hardships and said they were eating nothing but bread and onions. Concha Zardoy described it as ‘the most tragic lullaby in Spanish poetry’.

ONION’S LULLABY

The onion is frost
closed and poor.
Frost of your days
and of my nights.
Hunger and onion,
black ice and frost
large and round.

In the cradle of hunger
my child lay.
With onion’s blood
he was nourished.
But your blood,
frosted with sugar,
onion and hunger.

A dark-haired woman
set against the moon
spills out, thread by thread,
over the cradle.
Laugh, child,
for I bring you the moon
when it is needed.

Lark of my home,
laugh heartily.
It is your laughter in your eyes
that is the light of the world.
Laugh so much
that my soul, upon hearing you,
may fill the space.

Your laughter sets me free,
gives me wings.
It takes away my loneliness,
tears me from my prison.
A mouth that soars,
a heart that on your lips
flashes like lightning.

Your laughter is the sword
most victorious,
conqueror of flowers
and larks,
rival of the sun.
The future of my bones
and of my love.

Flesh that flutters,
a sudden flutter of the eyelid,
life as never before
coloured.
How many goldfinches
soar, flutter,
from your body!

I awoke from being a child:
never wake up.
My mouth is sad:
laugh always.
Always in the cradle,
defending laughter
feather by feather.

A being of flight so broad,
so expansive,
that your flesh is the sky
newly born.
If only I could
soar back to the origin
of your journey!

In the eighth month you laugh
with five orange blossoms.
With five tiny
ferocities.
With five teeth
like five jasmine blossoms
in their prime.

The frontier of kisses
will be tomorrow,
when in your teeth
you feel a weapon.
You feel a fire
running down your teeth
searching for the centre.

Fly, child, in the double
moon of the breast:
he, sad as an onion,
you, content.
Do not crumble.
Know not what is happening nor
what is taking place.

The following poem, which he wrote for his wife, is also particularly poignant:

EXCEPT YOUR WOMB

Except your womb,
everything is confused.
Except your womb,
everything is a fleeting
future, a barren
past, murky.
Except your womb,
everything is hidden.
Except your womb,
everything is uncertain,
everything is final,
dust without a world.
Except your womb,
everything is dark.
Except your womb
clear and deep.

In December 1941, the first symptoms of his illness became apparent, progressing from bronchitis to typhus and pleurisy. On 4 March 1942, he entered into a canonical marriage in the prison infirmary, as Franco’s regime had annulled the validity of civil marriages from the Republic, which was the condition that the vicar, Luis Almarcha, had set in order to help him. Even so, the help [the order to transfer him to the hospital in Alicante] arrived too late, on 17 March, and by then no one was willing to move a body oozing pus from every orifice. Miguel Hernández died in the infirmary of the Alicante prison at 5.32 am on 28 March 1942, aged just 31.

Miguel Hernández was buried in niche number 1,009 at the Nuestra Señora del Remedio cemetery in Alicante on 30 March. His remains now rest in a grave in the same cemetery, alongside those of his wife, Josefina Manresa, and his son. This grave, which is easily identifiable, is frequently visited.

In a letter dated 3 September 1946, Vicente Aleixandre wrote the following words about Miguel Hernández to the Canarian poet Juan Maderos:

“I do not know if you are aware that Miguel was like a brother to me, a younger brother, enthusiastic and deeply close to me, with whom I spent all my time. He had an enormous heart, blindly generous, beating through all his poetry and visible in his eyes, just as in his poetry. The fire of life burned in his soul, and he was understanding of everything. Capable of passion, passionate, capable of that nakedness of the soul,
that throb of the blood which the true poet reaches, and which makes all that is human understood, attaining that effortless generosity which fears nothing because all that is human touches him and nothing can frighten him. That is why there was in him neither childishness nor intransigence. He was a free soul who looked upon mankind with a clear gaze. He was the poet of a tragic fate, who died before he could fulfil his potential as a great artist—one who would have been, and indeed already is, a source of honour for our language.”

2.2. HIS LEGACY AFTER HIS DEATH AND TODAY

During the Franco dictatorship, it was not possible to rehabilitate the figure and work of Miguel Hernández, despite the attempts that were made.

With the advent of democracy, recognition gradually began to emerge. In 1976, the first secondary school in Spain to bear the name of Miguel Hernández was established in Alicante; a request to name it thus had already been submitted and rejected in 1974. In 1981, Orihuela Town Council purchased Miguel Hernández’s former home and began restoring it in 1985. In July 1994, the Miguel Hernández Cultural Foundation was established and in 1996 the Miguel Hernández University was established in Elche.

It was not until as late as March 2010 that the ‘Ceremony to Present the Declaration of Reparation and Personal Recognition to the Relatives of Miguel Hernández’ took place in Alicante, as provided for in Law 52/2007 of 26 December on Historical Memory.

It was the poet’s daughter-in-law, Lucía Izquierdo, who held all the copyright to the poet’s works and who brought the poet’s legacy to Elche, the city where she lived. However, a change in the local government and the Popular Party’s rise to power led to disagreements in 2012, and it was Ques in Jaén—the birthplace of Josefina Manresa, Miguel Hernández’s wife—that has ultimately become the home of the poet’s legacy. It is a pity that politics has prevented the poet’s memory from being honoured as one might have wished, and that the family is not part of the Foundation bearing the poet’s name.

In terms of raising awareness of his life and work, the two-part miniseries on Miguel Hernández directed by Licardo Larranz for TVE, which premiered on 28 February 2002 and starred Liberto Rabal and Silvia Abascal, is particularly noteworthy. Likewise, it is also worth highlighting the work of singer-songwriter Joan Manuel Serrat, who released his first album of songs by the poet back in 1987 and, in 2010, brought out a second album, the tour for which began in Elche on 23 April.

 

3. CONCLUSION

In 2010, to mark the 100th anniversary of the poet’s birth, a host of activities took place; and Miguel was re-read and rediscovered.
Mariano Abad and José Antonio Torregrosa, in an ‘Anthology of 40 Illustrated Poems’ published in 2010 to mark the centenary, call upon us – and I join them in this – to lay to rest once and for all the stereotypes into which the figure and work of Miguel Hernández have been pigeonholed.

The stereotype of the poet as a ‘natural being’, with his spontaneity, primitivism and authenticity, echoing clichéd images of the ‘noble savage’ or ‘untrained genius’—stereotypes which Miguel himself cultivated during his lifetime as his own ‘marketing strategy’— does not do justice to the truth.

Miguel maintained a repeated and sustained commitment right up to the end to understanding, embracing and mastering all the literary conventions that preceded his era and were predominant in his time; consequently, his aesthetic trajectory does indeed have a cultural character. As Abad and Torregrosa rightly say, ‘if there is one constant to be highlighted in his biography, it is his sustained commitment to uniting life and literature’.

My final hope, therefore, is that these stereotypes will be laid to rest and that Miguel Hernández will come to be appreciated in the full breadth of his commendable struggle for creative self-improvement.