Miguel Hernandez Read online

  MIGUEL HERNÁNDEZ GILABERT (1910–1942) was born into a poor family in the city of Orihuela in southern Spain. His father raised goats and sheep, and Hernández was brought up to be a shepherd. At age eleven, he entered the Jesuit Colegio de Santo Domingo, where he learned to read and write, and started to compose poems whose uncanny virtuosity and wild inspiration earned the admiration of Pablo Neruda and Federico García Lorca. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, his poetry took on a new public dimension, and Hernández would soon enlist in the Republican Army. In 1937, he married Josefina Manresa Marhuenda, the love of his life. The couple lost their first son to malnutrition; a second, Manuel Miguel, was born in 1939. After the defeat of the Republic, Hernández was condemned to death for his poetry by Francisco Franco, who called him “an extremely dangerous man,” a sentence that was subsequently reduced lest he become a martyr like Lorca. Hernández, imprisoned under brutal conditions and suffering from an advanced case of tuberculosis, continued to write until his death on March 28, 1942; he was thirty-one years old.

  DON SHARE is the senior editor of Poetry magazine. His books of poetry include Squandermania, Union, and most recently, Wishbone. He is the editor of Seneca in English, Bunting’s Persia, and with Christian Wiman, The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine. His translations of Miguel Hernández were awarded the Times Literary Supplement Translation Prize and the Premio Valle Inclán.

  Miguel Hernández

  SELECTED AND TRANSLATED FROM

  THE SPANISH BY DON SHARE

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Translation and preface copyright © 1997, 2013 by Don Share

  “Remember That Voice” by Octavio Paz copyright © 2013 by Marie José Paz; translation copyright © 2013 by Eliot Weinberger

  All rights reserved.

  The translator is grateful to the editors of the following periodicals, in which some of the translations in this book first appeared: AGNI, The Brooklyn Rail, MAGGY, The Paris Review, Partisan Review, and Salamander.

  The prose pieces by Federico García Lorca, Vicente Aleixandre, and Rafael Alberti were originally published in Miguel Hernández and Blas de Otero: Selected Poems, edited by Timothy Baland and Hardie St. Martin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972).

  Cover design by Emily Singer

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

  [Poems. English. Selections]

  Miguel Hernández / by Miguel Hernández ; selected and translated by Don Share.

  pages cm. — (New York Review Books Poets)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-629-0 (alk. paper)

  I. Share, Don, 1957- translator. II. Title.

  PQ6615.E57A27 2013

  861'.62—dc23

  2012048408

  eISBN 978-1-59017-714-3

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB/Poets series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  Contents

  Preface

  EARLY POEMS (1934 - 1936)

  A Man-Eating Knife

  Lightning That Never Ends

  Your Heart Is a Frozen Orange

  You Threw Me a Bitter Lemon

  I Know Enough

  No I Won’t Go Along

  Like the Bull

  Gardeners Go Down the Path

  Death, in a Bull’s Pelt

  Elegy

  Bloody Fate

  I Have Lots of Heart

  POEMS OF WAR (1936 - 1939)

  Sitting Upon the Dead

  Sweat

  Hunger

  First Song

  Soldiers and the Snow

  The Wounded Man

  Letter

  Train of the Wounded

  July 18, 1936–July 18, 1938

  Last Song

  LAST POEMS FROM PRISON (1939 - 1941)

  Child of Light and Shadow

  To My Son

  The World Is as It Appears

  The Cemetery Lies Near

  Waltz of the Lovers Who Will Always Be Together

  You Were Like the Young Fig Tree

  The Sun, the Rose, and the Child

  The Grasses, the Nettles

  Love Rose Up Between Us

  Humming Eyelashes

  All the Houses Are Eyes

  In the Depths of Man

  The Last Corner

  To Sing

  Before Hatred

  After Love

  War

  War

  Everything Is Filled with You

  Daytime’s Animal

  Child of the Night

  Imagination’s Tomb

  Ascension of the Broom

  Eternal Darkness

  I Move Forward in the Dark

  Lullaby of the Onion

  Goodbye, Brothers

  POETS ON HERNÁNDEZ

  Octavio Paz: Remember That Voice

  Federico García Lorca: Letter to Hernández

  Pablo Neruda: On Miguel Hernández

  Rafael Alberti: First Impression of Miguel Hernández

  Vicente Aleixandre: Meeting Miguel Hernández

  PREFACE

  Miguel Hernández Gilabert was born on October 30, 1910, to an impoverished family in the old Visigothic capital Orihuela, in the south of Spain. Of seven children, Miguel was one of only four who survived. His father raised goats and sheep, and for most of his life Miguel worked in the family business as a shepherd. It was hard and lonely work, which he continued to do until his early twenties.

  At age eleven, Hernández entered the Jesuit Colegio de Santo Domingo, where he learned to read and write, and started to compose poems, mostly religious poems. He was poorer than his fellow students and therefore uncomfortable among them; at home, his father, who did not approve of bookish pursuits, beat him for neglecting the flocks. When he was fourteen he left school, but he had a keen memory and read well into the night when all his pastoral duties were done; in this way, Hernández taught himself Spanish literature: the poetry and drama of the Golden Age, the poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez, Antonio Machado, and the writers of the Generation of 1927. His first publications were short poems in local newspapers. When he was twenty-one, already known around the province as a shepherd-poet, he decided to move to Madrid.

  Though he made several literary friends in the capital, Hernández was unable to find a job and soon was destitute. Before long, he was forced to return home. Along the way, he was stopped by the police and jailed for not having an identity card. His attempt to establish himself in the capital ended with his family and friends collecting money for his release. Returning to the pastoral fields, Hernández was determined to continue his studies, reading St. John of the Cross, Jorge Guillén, Paul Valéry, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and the poet who perhaps left the strongest impression on him, Luis de Góngora. With his good friend Ramón Sijé, he started a small literary magazine, El Gallo Crísis (The Rooster Crisis), and published his first book of poems in 1933, Perito en lunas (Expert in Moons), which was heavily influenced by Gongorism. He sent a copy to Federico García Lorca, who responded with a powerful letter of encouragement and endorsement. Around this time he met his future wife, a young seamstress, Josefina Manresa Marhuenda, whose father was an officer in the Guardia Civil. In 1934, Hernández moved back to Madrid on his own and found work at a publisher of an encyclopedia of bullfighting. He became friends with Lorca, as well as with other writers such as Vicente Aleixandre and Pablo Neruda, while continuing an intense corres
pondence with Josefina, writing poems to her, trying to bridge the distance of their physical separation. In 1935, Hernández published an auto sacramental in the Catholic journal Cruz y Raya and a play, Los hijos de la piedra (Sons of Stone).

  By the beginning of 1936, things took a dark turn. While on an outing near Madrid, Hernández was arrested again for not having proper documentation. At the police station he was beaten and interrogated. His one phone call he made to Neruda, who was serving as the Chilean consul in Madrid. Hernández was then released without explanation. Shortly after the incident, he published another play, El labrador de más aire (The Most Vital Villager), as well as his second collection of poems, El rayo que no cesa (Lightning That Never Ends). The latter was mainly composed of sonnets, as well as a few longer poems, including his elegy to his friend Sijé, who had died at the age of twenty-two from septicemia. Hernández continued to publish his work, and José Ortega y Gasset solicited some poems for his renowned literary journal in Spain, La Revista de Occidente (Magazine of the West).

  On July 18, 1936, everything changed. Generalissimo Francisco Franco led a military uprising in North Africa that resulted in the disruption of daily life in Spain. Mail and train service were discontinued; jailings and executions ensued. Lorca, who had fled Madrid for what he hoped would be a more peaceful Andalusia, was detained and later murdered by nationalists in Granada. Hernández returned to Orihuela to see Josefina and then headed back to Madrid, where he enlisted in the Republican Army’s Fifth Regiment. Josefina’s father, fighting for the Guardia Civil, died on the front lines. Miguel and Josefina married on March 9, 1937, though he and the man who would have been his father-in-law had been on opposite sides of the war. That same year his first son, Manuel Ramón, was born, but he would die of malnutrition only a few months later.

  The war drastically changed Hernández’s poetry, as evident in his next two books, Viento del pueblo (Wind from the People, 1937) and El hombre acecha (The Man Who Lies in Wait, 1939). The neat sonnets of his earlier work were superseded by far less tidy but vivid, almost nightmarish, free-verse poems. Hernández was immersed not only in the war, but in politics as well: He joined the First Calvary Company of the Peasants’ Battalion, reading his war poetry to soldiers on the front lines and on the radio; wrote several one-act propaganda plays, adopting the term coined by Rafael Alberti, “theater of urgency”; and was appointed a delegate of the Second International Congress of Antifascist Writers in Valencia. Hernández also traveled to Moscow to attend the Fifth Festival of Soviet Theater. In 1938 he was awarded the National Prize for Literature, sharing it with Germán Bleiberg.

  Madrid fell on March 28, 1939, and Hernández found himself on the losing side of the war. In desperation, he fled to Seville to find a friend with whom he could hide but failed to locate him. While crossing the border into Portugal to seek refuge in the Chilean embassy in Lisbon, he tried to sell his suit for money but was betrayed by the buyer and arrested by the Portuguese police. The police took him back to the Spanish border despite the poet’s protests that he was a political prisoner. The Guardia Civil took custody of him at Rosal de la Frontera. From there he was sent to Madrid, and after being moved between makeshift prisons, on May 18 he was crammed into the attic of the Fundación Doña Fausta Elorz, which was turned into the Prisión Celular de Torrijos. All in all, he passed through a total of thirteen different prisons before landing at the Reformatorio de Adultos de Alicante close to home, where he was allowed visits from his family, though his father, stern as ever, refused to come.

  During all of this, Hernández did not give up. He made drawings and paper cutouts of birds; he mended his tattered clothes, and wrote many letters and poems, one of which, “Lullaby of the Onion,” would become his most famous poem. Written for his second son, Manuel Miguel, who was born earlier that year, in January 1939, the poem would be included in his heartbreaking, posthumously published collection, Cancionero y romancero de ausencias (Songs and Ballads of Absence).

  By November 1941, having contracted typhus in prison yet receiving minimal medical care, Hernández was in poor health. At the turn of the year, suffering from tuberculosis, he was nearing the end of his life. In the spring of 1942, he wrote in his last letter:

  Josefina,

  The hemorrhaging has stopped. But you must tell Barbero that the pus is not draining through the tube he put in, for the opening has enlarged, the pus is building up and spills on the bed with any coughing fit. This is a bother and an obstacle to my rate of recovery from the disease. I want to get out of here as soon as possible. They are curing me by stops and starts through their bright ideas, sloppiness, ignorance, negligence. Well, love, I feel better, and as soon as I get out, my recovery will be like lightning. Kisses for my son. I love you, Josefina,

  Miguel*

  At five thirty on the morning of March 28, 1942, at age thirty-one, Hernández died. Inscribed on the wall above his cot were his last lines of poetry:

  Goodbye, brothers, comrades, friends,

  let me take my leave of the sun and the fields.

  Observers reported that his eyes could not be closed.

  Don Share

  *Translated by Willis Barnstone in Six Masters of the Spanish Sonnet (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997).

  Early Poems (1934–1936)

  INCLUDING POEMS FROM

  Expert in Moons

  (Perito en lunas, 1933)

  The Wounded Whistle

  (El silbo vulnerado, 1934)

  Lightning That Never Ends

  (El rayo que no cesa, 1936)

  A Man-Eating Knife

  A man-eating knife

  with a sweet, murdering wing

  keeps up its flight and gleams

  all around my life.

  A twitching metal glint

  flashes quickly down,

  pricks into my side,

  and makes a sad nest in it.

  My temples, flowery balcony

  of a younger day,

  are black, and my heart,

  my heart is turning gray.

  Such is the evil ability

  of this enveloping beam

  that I go back to my youth

  like the moon goes to a city.

  I gather with my eyelashes

  salt from my soul, salt from my eye,

  and gather blossoming spiderwebs

  of all my sadnesses.

  Where can I be

  that I will not find loss?

  Your destiny is the beach,

  my calling is the sea.

  To rest from this hurricane

  work of love or hell

  is impossible, and the pain

  makes sorrow last and last.

  But at last I will win out,

  worldly bird and ray,

  heart, because in death

  there is no doubt.

  So go on, knife, and slash

  and fly: and then one day

  time will yellow

  on my photograph.

  Lightning That Never Ends

  Will this lightning never end, that fills

  my heart with exasperated wild beasts

  and furious forges and anvils

  where even the freshest metal shrivels?

  Will it never quit, this stubborn stalactite,

  tending its stiff tufts of hair

  like swords and harsh bonfires

  inside my heart, which bellows and cries out?

  This lightning never ends, or drains

  away: from me alone it sprang, it trains

  on me alone its madness.

  This obstinate rock sprouts

  from me, and turns on me the insistence

  of its rainy, shattering bolts.

  Your Heart Is a Frozen Orange

  Your heart is a frozen orange.

  No light gets in; it is resinous, porous,

  golden: the skin promises

  good things to the eye.

  My heart is
a feverish pomegranate

  of clustered crimson, its wax opened,

  which could offer you its tender pendants

  lovingly, persistently.

  But how crushing it is to go

  to your heart and find it frosted

  with sheer, terrifying snow!

  On the fringes of my grief

  a thirsty handkerchief

  hovers, hoping to drink down my tears.

  You Threw Me a Bitter Lemon

  You threw me a bitter lemon

  from a hand so warm and pure

  that I tasted the bitterness

  without spoiling its architecture.

  With a yellow jolt, my sweet

  and lazy blood turned hot, possessed,

  and so I felt the bite

  of the tip of that long, firm teat.

  But glancing at you and seeing the smile

  that this lemon condition produced

  (so at odds with my greed and guile),

  my blood blacked out inside my shirt,

  and through that porous golden breast

  I felt a pointed, dazzling hurt.

  I Know Enough

  I know enough to see and hear a sad exasperation

  when one comes to and leaves behind happiness

  the way a meridian sea comes to a bay,

  to a shunned, desolate place.

  What I have suffered is nothing

  compared to what will happen next—

  suffering the rigorous agony

  of walking from this knife to that sword.

  I’ll be still, separate myself if I can

  from this constant, full, urgent pain,

  go where I won’t see you, and you won’t hear me.

  I’m going, I’m going, I’m going, but I stay,

  but I’m going, dry as a sandless desert,

  goodbye, love, goodbye till I die.

  No I Won’t Go Along

  No, I won’t go along: I despair

  as if I were a hurricane of lava