Come and see the blood in the streets - notes on Miguel Hernández, Pablo Neruda, and the poetry of the Spanish Civil War

Months ago, I was reading quite a bit of the literature of the Spanish Civil War, especially the poetry but also George Orwell’s clear-eyed Homage to Catalonia (1938, a good sequel to Joseph Kessel’s 1934 reporting from an abortive start to the war).  Also a single Hemingway story, come to think of it, “Old Man at the Bridge” (1936), a sad little sketch of a refugee.  I guess I should read For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a famous book.

Mostly poets, though: Rafael Alberti, Pedro Salinas, Vicente Aleixandre, Federico García Lorca (I read his best-known plays, too), and the astounding Miguel Hernández.  Alongside them, Pablo Neruda’s surrealist book, Residence on Earth, which incorporates Spain in Our Hearts (1937).

Neruda was working in the Chilean consulate in Spain during the Civil War, helping poets escape the country, that sort of thing.  In his poetry, he had been working in asurrealist mode during the 1930s, but not surprisingly Spain in Our Hearts is political and direct.  Some titles: “Spain Poor through the Fault of the Rich,” “General Franco in Hell” (some other politicians are also assigned to their infernal spots), “The Victory of the Arms of the People.”  Poems as propaganda, some more than others.

from I Explain a Few Things

You will ask: why does your poetry
not speak to us of sleep, of the leaves,
of the great volcanoes of your native land?
Come and see the blood in the streets,
come and see
the blood in the streets,
come and see the blood
in the streets!  (tr. Donald Walsh)

I wish I had something to say about Lorca.

Miguel Hernández, he just overwhelmed me.  Years ago, I wrote about Don Share’s translations of his poems, and this time I supplemented that book with the peculiar Selected Poems: Miguel Hernández and Blas de Otero (1972, ed. Timothy Baland and Hardie St. Martin, tr. many hands), peculiar because Hernández and Blas de Otero have nothing to do with each other, so this book is just two separate shorter books under one cover.  I knew nothing about post-Civil War Spanish poets, religious and reactionary compared to the great generation that preceded it, so I was glad to read some of Bras de Otero’s poetry.

But, Hernández.  The book’s section titles are painful enough.  “Poems Written During the Civil War,” “Poems Written in Prison,” “Last Poems before Death” (age 31).  Forget that, how about something from the “Early Poems” section, when Hernández was the “shepherd poet,” self-educated, sponging up five hundred years of Spanish poetry:

Your heart? – it is a frozen orange,
inside it has juniper oil but no light
and a porous look like gold: an outside
promising risks to the man who looks.

My heart is a fiery pomegranate,
its scarlet clustered, and its wax opened,
which could offer you its tender beads
with the stubbornness of a man in love.

Yes, what an experience of sorrow it is
to go to your heart and find a frost
made of primitive and terrifying snow!

A thirsty handkerchief flies through the air
along the shores of my weeping,
hoping that he can drink in my tears.  (tr. Robert Bly)

The Spanish sonnet, of course, is composed of more than imagery but also rhymes and flows and so on.  If only Hernández had been allowed to write more of this kind of sad poem, and fewer about the death of his son from wartime malnutrition.

I meant to write this up for for Stu and Richard’s Spanish Literature Month(s), and now I have.

Don’t let go, don’t find out what’s happening - some poems of Miguel Hernández

The book I will write about now, which might as well be part of Spanish Literature Month, is Miguel Hernández by Miguel Hernández (1910-42), published in 2013 as the first of the NYRB/Poets line.  I feel the title is a mistake, since that should be the title of a book about Miguel Hernández, or else the title of an old-fashioned novel.  This is a book of selected poems by one of the great Spanish of the twentieth century.  One of the many great Spanish poets etc.

Hernández was a rare creature, an actual, in the flesh shepherd poet, not a literary creation but a shepherd who fell in love with poetry and wrote it himself.  The usual literary conceit is that the shepherd poet is naïve and untutored, but Hernández was sophisticated and well-read, in poetry, at least.

Before the war, Hernández was something of a formalist, writing numerous sonnets, for example:

Death, in a Bull’s Pelt

Death, in a bull’s pelt,
full of the holes and horns of its own
undoing, grazes and tramples
a bullfighter’s luminous field.

Volcanic roaring, ferocious snorting
all from a general love for everything born –
Yet the eruptions that flare
kill peaceful ranchers.

Now, ravenous love-starved beast,
you may come graze my heart’s tragic grasses,
if you like its bitter aspects.

Like you, I am tormented by loving so much,
and my heart, dressed in a dead man’s clothes,
winds over it all.

The original lines should rhyme; the translator abandons that.  Supposedly professional book reviewers have so abused the word “luminous” that I distrust it, but I remember being inside the bullfighting ring in Ronda on a sunny day; the metaphor is accurate.  As for the love-starved bull, that is hilarious.

The war jolted him into free verse, and wilder imagery – more death, wounds, and blood.  “And wounds make sounds, just like conch shells,” (from “The Wounded Man”), more like that.

The dates of his birth and death are almost a sufficient biography.  Hernández died in prison of tuberculosis, another victim of Franco.  The third, and longest,  section of the tiny NYRB book is titled “Last Poems from Prison (1939-1941).”  The civil war, in which he fought, turned Hernández’s poems to death:

The Cemetery Lies Near

The cemetery lies near
where you and I are sleeping,
among blue nopals,
blue pitas, and children
who shout at the top of their lungs
if a corpse darkens the street.

From here to the cemetery everything
is blue, golden, clear.
Four steps away, the dead.
Four steps away, the living.

Clear, blue, and golden.
My son grows remote there.

Blue, blue, blue.  During the war Hernández lost a young son to malnutrition.  His most famous poem, “Lullaby of the Onion,” is “dedicated to his son,” his second son, an imprisoned father’s love song in a world of deprivation.  The mother only has bread and onions to eat;  boy is “nursed \ on onion blood”:

Fly away, son, on the double
moon of the breast:
it is saddened by onion,
you are satisfied.
Don’t let go,
don’t find out what’s happening,
or what goes on.

The books in the NYRB series are quite small, as well as short; it turns out all of the other selections of Hernández  in English are similarly short, or shorter.  This translation, by Don Share, seemed good.  Someday I will test it against some of the others.  A University of Chicago edition has facing-page Spanish, so that’s where I will go first.