Miguel Hernández - poet and revolutionary
Part One - How I discovered a child of rural Spain and why his poetry lives on
Not many of you will have heard of Miguel Hernández. Unless you have been a member of Read To Write in Doncaster, where I have been banging on about him for a few years now. So, who was he, and what has made me so obsessed about spreading the word?
To answer this, I will spread the blogs out in some manageable chunks, and hopefully you will follow the story over the next couple of months as I examine his life and work.
I thought I would start today with an overview of his life, then in future weeks I will look in more detail at his poetic development. Life dealt him many blows, or as he may put it, muchas heridas, but this is part of my fascination with him. There are many poets with tragic lives, and lives that ended too soon. Poets that engaged with politics, that were visionary, charismatic, passionate, and flawed. Hernández was all of these. But let me start at my beginning, rather than his.
Rewind to before the pandemic. I am in Spain, south of Alicante, on the Orihuela Costa, playing tennis with my international “club” of social players in the pleasant surroundings of the Orihuela Costa Club. Sheltering in the shade of palms between games, I am discussing poetry with Mike, a Mancunian who was, and still is, attempting to get full residency over there. He said, “You do know there’s a famous poet who came from round here? Miguel Hernández. He was from Orihuela.” Well, not famous enough for me to have heard of him. So, I looked him up, and sure enough there he was, information in Wikipedia, some of his poems online, all of it. His former house in Orihuela is a museum of his life and works. An entire area of the town is an open-air art installation inspired by him (though that’s just the beginning of the things that he inspired or are dedicated to him.) I was instantly fascinated by his story, before I read his poems, and I will begin with this.
Miguel Hernández Gilabert was born in Orihuela on 30th October 1910 to what Wikipedia coyly describes as a “family of low resources”. The family income was largely earned by trading cattle and herding goats. He missed much of his formal education as his father withdrew him from school to work with the animals. This wasn’t legal, but as with many such situations, people ignored it. He was fortunate to receive additional education from his priest, Luis Almarcha. He befriended an educated boy, Ramon Sijé, who also provided guidance. However he was also a voracious reader and was inspired by the 16th century Spanish poet Luis de Góngora. His father beat him for being distracted by poetry to such an extent that he suffered headaches for the remainder of his life. He began submitting poetry to local newspapers as a teenager, and was eventually published in 1933. His collection of imagistic poems Perito en lunes (Expert in Moons) wasn’t successful, so he moved to Madrid where he worked as an editor of a bullfighting magazine and managed to become part of a circle of poets and other creatives that included Federico García Lorca and the Chilean Pablo Neruda, both of which are definitely more widely known than Hernández.
His poetry had started to change from focusing on tight standard forms like 8 line with fixed syllable count and Sonnets to free verse and longer rhymed forms. But, significantly, he began to switch from personal lyric, elegeic and natural themes to more didactic and public poems. This coincided with his embracing of left wing politics. He had joined the Communist party amidst rising tensions in Spain and when the Civil War broke out in 1936 he joined up with the Republicans, fighting on the front line and using his poetry as direct propaganda. These war poems are vivid and unflinching, and written in accessible language. He suggested that Hitler and Mussolini should be “plunged into a toilet of worms”. I think history has taught us that it would have been a good idea.
The war went badly for the Republicans and the armies associated with the fascist general Francisco Franco gradually wore them down. Tragedy had struck in his home life too. Hernández had married his lover Josefina Manresa in 1937 and they had a son, Manuel Ramón, who died after a few months of life, probably as a result of malnutrition. By now he had also published El rayo que no cesa (Lightning That Never Ends, 1936) and Viento del pueblo (The Wind of the People, 1937) but as the war reached its conclusion he realised he would be in major difficulty with Franco’s regime and he attempted to leave the country. He crossed into Portugal to seek asylum in the Chilean embassy but was captured and returned to Spain. He was imprisoned multiple times and eventually sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. In this period he wrote some heartbreaking personal poems, including his most famous poem Nanas de la cebolla (Onion Lullabies), written in response to a letter from his wife saying that she and their second son were surviving only on onions. In prison he could often only write fragments of poems on scraps of paper provided by the guards - often these were throwaway or partial ideas that never had chance to become fully formed. In the end, once he had caught typhoid, suffered from bronchitis and eventually also caught tuberculosis, he couldn’t write at all. Whatever treatment he got came too late for his ravaged lungs and he died on March 28th, 1942 in Alicante prison at the age of 31. His final words were scrawled on the prison wall:
‘Goodbye, brothers, comrades, friends; let me take my leave of the sun and the fields.’
I will dive into the poetry itself, from his early work to his final suite of posthumously published poems, in future blogs. My journey took me from my initial conversation with Mike to Orihuela, to his house and the San Isidro murals, to reading as much of his poetry as I could lay my hands on. Fast forward past the pandemic to arriving at Alicante airport and taxiing past the terminal. The name of the airport is in large letters across the length of the glass terminal building. Instead of just saying “Alicante-Elche” it now said “Alicante-Elche Miguel Hernández’'. I have to admit that this made me cry a bit.
His legacy lives alongside the legacy and memories of the Civil War. Alicante was a strong republican area and was the final city to fall in 1939, having been bombed by the Italians in 1938 in an attack that left over 300 dead and over a thousand injured.
I have subsequently been attempting to translate as much of his work as possible with my limited Spanish. In fact, some of his imagism is so strong and the language so tight that I would call some of them interpretations rather than pure translations. The pamphlet is ready and searching for a publisher. The best current translations in published form are in Don Share’s collection I Have Lots of Heart, available from Bloodaxe Books. I hope mine can add to that fine selection and translation of Hernández’s work.
So, that’s the introduction and there’s more to come. If you want to know more you can comment below, or contact me on thefigtree@mail.com, which is also the mailing address of my sister page The Fig Tree, a webzine that is open for submissions for its first issue now. You can find out more on figtreepoetry. substack.com