Gather this voice ...

This is part of a series of posts commemorating Spanish poet Miguel Hernández on the occasion of his centenary (30 October 2010). For more background and previous posts on the man about whom Pablo Neruda said "his was the face of Spain", click on the sketch of him by Benjamín Palencia on the sidebar to the right.

Miguel's poetry and struggle still alive in Spain.
A poster of Miguel Hernández at a Madrid protest against
political, media and judicial persecution of crusading
magistrate Baltasar Garzón, a judge who has vigorously
worked for recovering the memory and rights of victims
of the Franco-era repression (April 2010, photo LLL).

After having mentioned Pablo Neruda's recollections of his friend Miguel Hernández in a previous post in this series, today I want to feature a tribute to Hernández penned by the Mexican writer Octavio Paz, Nobel Laureate for Literature (1990, see his bio at the Nobel Prize website). Octavio Paz first met Miguel Hernández in 1937 when visiting Spain to participate in the International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers in the midst of the Spanish Civil War. This piece was written in November 1942, just a few months after Hernández had succumbed to tuberculosis in woeful conditions in a Spanish penitentiary, while serving out a 30 year prison term, which had been commuted from a death sentence. His 'crime' was none other than his active support for the democratically elected Spanish Republic against the military uprising led by Franco that brought on the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939.

It is titled Recoged esa Voz (Gather this Voice):

In a prison in the village of his birth, Orihuela, Miguel Hernández has died. He died alone, in a hostile Spain that has become enemy of the Spain where he lived out his youth, adversary of the Spain that rang with his generosity. Let others curse his torturers; let others analyze and study his poetry. I want to remember him.

I first encountered him singing songs of the Spanish people, in 1937. He spoke in a low voice, a bit untrained, a bit like an innocent animal: sounding like the countryside, like a deep echo repeating through the valleys, like a stone falling from a cliff. He had dark eyes, hazel and clear, not twisted or intellectual; his mouth, like his hands and his heart, was large and, like them, simple and fleshy, made of mud by pure and clumsy hands; of average height, sort of robust, he was agile, with agility born of the blood and the muscles, with the agile gravity of the earthly; one could see he was more akin to the somber colts and the melancholy bullocks than to his tormented intellectual companions; he kept his head almost shaved and wore corduroy pants and espadrilles; he looked like a soldier or a farmer. In the lobby of that hotel in Valencia, full of smoke, of vanity and, also, of rightful passion. Miguel Hernández sang with his deep voice and his singing was as if all the trees were singing. It was as if one tree, the tree of a nascent and millenary Spain, were beginning to sing its song anew. Not the poplar, not the olive tree, nor the oak, not the apple, nor the orange, but all of those together, fusing their saps, their smells and their leaves in this tree of flesh and voice. It is impossible to remember him in words; more than in memory, “in the flavor of time he is written”.

Later I heard him recite poems of love and war. Through verses —and I cannot say now how they were or what those verses said— as if through a curtain of luxurious light, one could hear a moaning or lowing, one could hear the death throes of a tender and powerful animal, a bull perhaps, dying in the afternoon, raising its eyes astonished toward the passive, ghost-like spectators. And now I don’t want to remember him anymore, now that I remember him so well. I know that we were friends; that we walked amid the ruins of Madrid and of Valencia, at night, near the sea, or the intricate side streets; I know that he liked to climb trees and eat watermelon, in taverns frequented by soldiers; I know that later I saw him in Paris and that his presence was like a ray of sunlight, a shock of wheat, in the black city. I remember everything, but I don’t want to remember … I don’t want to remember you, Miguel, great friend of so few days, miraculous and outside of time, days of passion, when I discovered you, as I discovered Spain, and I discovered a part of myself, a rough and tender root, that made me both larger and more ancient. Let others remember you. Let me forget you, because forgetting is pure and true, forgetting our good times gives us the strength to continue living in this world of compromises and reverences, of salutes and ceremonies, fetid and rotting. Let me forget you, so that in this forgetting your voice can continue to grow, stolen now from your body and in the memory of those of us who knew you, free and tall on the wind, unchained from time and from your misery.

Mexico, 1942 (translated by Ted Genoways)

As noted by the translator, Ted Genoways, to understand Paz's statement above that "...I cannot say now how they were or what those verses said", it is important to know that Miguel Hernández's war poems had been banned in Spain and were largely unavailable.

Octavia Paz & Elena Garro, Spain, 1937.

Accompanying Octavia Paz on the 1937 trip to Spain was his 17-year old wife, Elena Garro. In fact, the trip was part of their honeymoon. Sadly, Garro is a rather obscure writer, even though some critics and historians consider her novel Los recuerdos del porvenir (Recollections of Things to Come) as one of the very first works of 'magical realism'. She wrote it in the 1950s and published it in 1963, four years before Gabriel García Marquez's seminal Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude). In 1992, she published a memoir of her time in Spain, Memorias de España 1937, in which she discussed meeting Miguel Hernández, Pablo Neruda, Pablo Casals, Alejo Carpentier and others.

A salt-wizened truth between blue and singing

This is part of a series of posts commemorating Spanish poet Miguel Hernández on the occasion of his centenary (30 October 2010). For more background and previous posts on the man of whom his friend Pablo Neruda proclaimed "his was the face of Spain", click on the sketch of him by Benjamín Palencia on the sidebar to the right.



Prison portrait of Miguel Hernández
by Antonio Buero Vallejo

 The portrait to the left is probably the 'classic' image of the man known in his lifetime as the goatherd poet, the poet of the people, the poet of the revolution. It was drawn while he was in prison, by one of his cellmates, the playwright Antonio Buero Vallejo, who, like Miguel, was sentenced to death for his support for the Spanish Republic before and during the Civil War. Unlike Miguel Hernández, Buero Vallejo did manage to make it out of prison alive, after spending six years behind bars. It is signed and dated (January 25, 1940). Click here for more on Buero Vallejo.


In 1933, Miguel Hernández wrote a short piece entitled Mi concepto del poema ('My Idea of a Poem').

What is a poem? A beautiful affected lie. An insinuated truth. Only by insinuating it will a truth not appear a lie. A truth as precious and hidden as anything from a mine. One needs to be a miner of poems to see in its Ethiopias of darkness its Indias of light. A salt-wizened truth situated between blue and singing. Who sees that the sea in truth is white? Nobody. Nevertheless it exists, it flutters, it alludes in its sculpted spume to the color of the crescent moon. The clear sea — would it be as beautiful as its secret if it were suddenly clarified? Its greater beauty lies in its secrecy. The poem cannot present itself to us as either Venus or naked. Naked poems have only the anatomy of poems. And who could make something more horrible than a bare skeleton? Guard, poets, the secret of the poem: a sphinx. Let them learn to tear it away like bark from a tree. Oh, like the orange: what a delicious secret under its planetary circumference! Except in the case of prophetic poetry for which clarity is essential [...] guard yourselves, poets, against fruits without skins, seas without salt. The poem has to work as with the Holy Sacrament .... When will the poet come with a poem in his fingers, like a priest with the host, saying "Here is GOD" and we will believe it? (translated by Ted Genoways)

Milking a goat and a dream ...

Yesterday was the 100th birthday of Spanish poet, Miguel Hernández, born October 30, 1910. I discussed this much loved goatherd-cum-poet in an earlier post featuring one of his poems. For more background, the Poetry Foundation has an excellent biographical essay, including links to English translations of several of his poems.

Hernández is not as widely known outside of Spain as his contemporaries and fellow poets Federico García Lorca, Antonio Machado, Rafael Alberti, who like him, were supporters of the Spanish Republic in the 1930s and victims, in one way or another, of the Franco-led military coup that overthrew the Republic and imposed a 40 year dictatorship. It is no accident that Miguel Hernández is not well known outside Spain. It was meant that way. His life was taken away cruelly soon in 1942 and many of his works were routinely censored until after the dictator’s death in 1975.

The triumphant Franco forces initially condemned him to death for his open and active support for the Republic ('adhesion a la rebelión' read the death sentence), but then commuted his sentence to 30 years imprisonment. The poet did not last more than three, however, and died of tuberculosis in hideous conditions in 1942 at the age of 31. The harrowing tale of his three years in jail, malicious neglect, lack of medicine and adequate medical care is one of the most heartbreaking and infuriating stories in the history of Spanish letters, woefully emblematic of the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War and its long miserable aftermath.

Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda was a close friend of Hernandez’s and worked to ensure the man and his poetry would not be forever swallowed up in the dark pit of Francoism. In his words, “Miguel Hernández disappeared in darkness; to remember him and to do so in the full light of day is Spain’s duty, it is a duty of love”.


So in that spirit of dutiful love, I will do a series of posts on Miguel Hernández, largely based on the current centenary exhibition at the National Library of Spain in Madrid. It is the most complete such collection of materials on the poet ever, with scores of manuscripts of his poems, including some of the very earliest, many other documents (from his school report cards to his arrest record, death sentence, death certificate, censorship orders decades after his death), photographs, paintings, testimonials from Neruda and others, and much more. Many of the images in the series are taken from the catalogue for the show, Miguel Hernández: La Sombra Vencida (The Defeated Shadow), published by the Spanish Ministry of Culture.

I am inserting here a photo of what may be the earliest poem for which a manuscript survives, written in 1924 at the age of 13 or 14. It is hard to describe the knotted-throat silence with which most people react to seeing this scrawled manuscript on one of the first walls in the exhibition. I had certainly never seen it before and cannot imagine any one short verse that could tell more about who Miguel Hernández was, his life and his poetry than that very first line written as a schoolchild:

En cuclillas, ordeño

una cabrita y un sueño

(Crouching, I milk

a goat and a dream)

And here is a photo of the boy poet taken in the same year as he milked those lines and dreams from his chores as goatherd.

I will close with some more quotes from Pablo Neruda on Miguel (you will please excuse the intimacy here, but that is how he is known in Spain, by his first name, just as his friend Lorca is known simply as Federico). In his Memoirs, Confieso Que He Vivido (I Confess that I Have Lived), Neruda recalls his first impression of the poet from Orihuela. “The young poet Miguel Hernández was one of Federico and Alberti’s friends. I met him when he came up, in espadrilles and the typical corduroy trousers peasants wear, from his native Orihuela”. He describes Miguel as having an “aura of earthiness” with “a face like a clod of earth or a potato that has just been pulled from among the roots and still has its subterranean freshness”.

In a 1966 interview with poet Robert Bly, Neruda recalled a telling incident from a night in 1934 when taking a walk with Miguel in Madrid:

I said to him that I had never heard a nightingale, because no nightingales exist in my country. You see, it is too cold for nightingales in my country; and then he said, “Oh, you’ve never heard …” and he climbed up a tree and he whistled like a nightingale from very high up. Then he climbed down and ran to another tree and climbed up and made another whistle like a nightingale, a different one.

This seemingly visceral and spiritual connection to the earth, nightingales, trees and goats projected by Hernández was memorably and movingly recalled by Neruda in another anecdote from his memoirs about this newfound friend:

He would tell me how exciting it was to put your ear against the belly of a sleeping she-goat. You could hear the milk coursing down to the udders, a secret sound no one but the poet of goats has been able to listen to.

I’ll close with Estrella Morente singing this beautiful 'Tangos del Chavico' about a certain little goat (un cabrito):



The Neruda quotes are taken from The Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández, Bilingual Edition, edited by Ted Genoways and published by The University of Chicago Press in 2001.

Summer snippets — Cádiz



Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Augusto 2010, sandcombers, horses and jockeys.



hooves churning foamed sand

the sea pulls away from shore

gulls cry songs of salt

The photo is from a horse race I saw this August on the beach in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, where the Guadalquivir river flows into the Atlantic. Sanlúcar is a delightful town in the Andalusian province of Cádiz, in southern Spain. In addition to these waterfront competitions that it has been hosting for nearly 180 years, the town is famed for its wonderful manzanilla (the delicate local variety of the pale dry fino sherry), stately mansions and great cuisine, highlighted by perhaps the best prawns your teeth and taste buds could ever tuck into. I was able to sample generous helpings of all of these on a brief but rewarding visit this summer while getting acquainted with the ancient city of Cádiz and its surrounds.

A few more photos ...


Both of these photos are from last year's races and are taken from the e-quinos.net website (Spanish).



The races must be held at low tide, so the starting times vary.


Where horses race, gamblers follow. One tradition associated with these races is to have children organize and run betting stands for other children. Yes, that is how we encourage the entrepreneurial spirit amongst the young here in Spain. These two sisters are taking bets on the next race. When is the last time you saw a bookie with a lollipop?



There is a love of horses and horsemanship in this part of Spain. Even the merry-go-rounds are low-tech and labor intensive. Why use plastic horsies when the real things are so abundantly available?

Let's leave Sanlúcar and head off to the provincial capital, Cádiz, founded by the Phoenicians around 3000 years ago, making it the oldest continuously lived in city on the Iberian peninsula and probably all of southwestern Europe. The old quarters stand on a narrow peninsula jutting out into the sea, so there are fabulous views of the ocean and the bay from all over the city. The sky, sea and sun-ripened horizon seemingly permeate everything in and about the city, its whitewashed homes, art, music, food, the laughter of its residents. The light and the air it inhabits seem different in Cádiz than anywhere else, tinged gold and silver, depending on the time of day and slant of eyes and mood, scented with sea salt or jasmine, depending on the season and direction of the wind. I can think of no better place to become schooled and wise in the ways and nuances of sea breezes. Sailing is key to the city’s history and sails and zephyrs waft constantly through the popular imagination, speech and songs of its people. Indeed, Columbus set out for the New World just around 60 miles northwest from here, and the city had its golden age in the 18th century when the Guadalquivir river passage to Sevilla silted up and Cádiz inherited the Andalusian capital’s place as main port for trade with the Americas.

A zen master of Cádiz sea breezes ...

One of the best known gaditanos, as the people of Cádiz are known, is the poet Rafael Alberti, born just across the bay in El Puerto de Santa María in 1902. At the time of his death on 28 October 1999, Alberti had become the last surviving member of the group of poets known as the “Generation of ‘27”, which included Federico García Lorca, Jorge Guillén, Vicente Aleixandre, Luis Cernuda, along with fellow travelers painter Salvador Dalí, filmmaker Luis Buñuel, poet Miguel Hernandéz and, farther afield, Chile’s Pablo Neruda and Argentina´s Jorge Luis Borges. Rafael Alberti fled the country in 1939, driven out by Franco’s victory in the Civil War, and spent nearly four decades in exile in Argentina, Paris and Rome before returning to Spain in 1977 after the dictator’s death.

Below you will find an Alberti poem about a wayward dove, Se equivocó la paloma, side-by-side with an English translation. As you will see, it is one of his simpler poems; but simple does not mean easily translatable, as you will also find. Its gentle musicality is nearly impossible to render in English.
 


The translation is largely based on the one published by José A. Elgorriaga & Martin Paul in the book: The Other Shore: 100 Poems by Rafael Alberti, Kosmos. I have made some changes to the translation, not with the pretence of improving it, but with the desire to personalize it, to make the poem 'mine' so to speak. I think all poems that touch us call on us to make them 'ours', to read them as if we wrote them, as if we are writing them with each reading and hearing. Perhaps it is just a matter of being open to having the poems write themselves into us. I have gotten helpful input on the translation from a friend whom I will leave unnamed here but not unthanked.

 

As an added treat, you get to hear Rafael Alberti himself reciting it. The poem has been set to music by Carlos Guastavino and the singer Rosa León chimes in movingly at the end. I encourage you to reread the poem, while listening to Alberti’s warm burnished recital.


And for an even more musical treatment, I am embedding below a version of the song by the much loved singer and songwriter Mercédes Sosa, la Negra, the "voice of the voiceless", whose own voice sadly left us just over a year ago now.

In closing, I will post links to two other moving versions of the poem-song, which I would embed here but do not wish to abuse your patience. For a more ‘classical’ treatment click here for a stirring rendition by tenor Martias Mariani, with Valerie MacPhail on piano, accompanied by a sumptuous slideshow. And for my personal favorite, you can find here the audio of a powerful rendering of Alberti’s serendipitous dove by one of the great flamenco voices of our time, Carmen Linares. I suggest you open Carmen's audio in a separate page by pressing the Ctrl key while clicking on the link, starting the audio and then reading the poem again.