Miguel Hernández - Part Three - Growth as a Poet 1934-1936
Part Three - Growth as a Poet
A few weeks ago I wrote a quick overview of the life of Miguel Hernández, and how I came to know about him, but didn’t really cover his poetry. I have split this into multiple parts, to make each of the blogs bite sized, and to reflect the phases of his writing, career and life. This one looks at his life and work between his first publication and the start of the Spanish Civil War.
Miguel Hernández Gilabert was born in Orihuela on 30th October 1910 to what Wikipedia coyly describes as a “family of low resources”. He missed much of his formal education as his father withdrew him from school to work with the animals. He was however a voracious reader and was inspired by the 16th century Spanish poet Luis de Góngora. His first collection, Perito en Lunes, was published in Murcia in 1933 and he was up and running as a published poet.
Having failed to make his mark in Madrid on his first spell living there, he moved back in 1934, the year he also published his first play, Quién te ha visto y quién te ve y sombra de lo que eras (They have seen you, who have seen you and the shadow of what you were).
No longer unknown, he returned to Madrid in 1934 where he became friends with writers such as Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Luis Cernuda, and many others. His career as a poet developed quickly with the support of these fine writers, and his politics became increasingly left wing. Hernández and those three named writers all had very different outcomes as a result of the Spanish Civil War, and I’ll revisit that next time.
He worked on the journal Caballo Verde para la Poesía (Green Horse for Poetry) and as an editor of the bullfighting magazine El Toro. He published Imagen de tu huella (Image of your footprint) in 1934, a collection of poems in sonnet form, and he continued with this form in his next published collection El rayo que no cesa (Lightning that never ends) in 1936. In this period he finished around a hundred poems, some published and some not, that seem to show someone in an internal struggle between his Catholicism and his love of his very religious friend Ramon Sije, and the more avant garde life in Madrid (García Lorca and Cernuda were gay). He was devastated when Sije died, penning a long elegy that appeared in El rayo que no cesa and has the dedication “En Orihuela, su pueblo y el mío, se me ha muerto como del rayo Ramón Sijé, con quien tanto quería.” (In Orihuela, your town and mine, his death struck me like lightning, he whom I so loved).
from Elegía No hay extension mas grande que mi herida, lloro mi desventura y sus conjuntos y siento más tu muerte que mi vida. Nothing grows wider than my wound, my misfortune - ours - flows with my tears and I feel your death more than my life
He also includes, in this period, love poems to his future wife Josefina Manresa Marhuenda.
The culmination of this period is his collection El rayo que no cesa, which includes sonnets of unrequited love, and the cruelty of love, but also reflections on death. Natural imagery is prominent, and they have become somewhat less surreal than in Perito en Lunas. Perhaps the most well known poem is Me Tiraste un Limón (You Threw me a Lemon) although they are still untitled, and this one is numbered #4
Me tiraste un limón, y tan amargo, con una mano cálida, y tan pura, que no menoscabó su arquitectura y probé su amargura sin embargo. Con el golpe amarillo, de un letargo dulce pasó a una ansiosa calentura mi sangre, que sintió la mordedura de una punta de seno duro y largo. Pero al mirarte y verte la sonrisa que te produjo el limonado hecho, a mi voraz malicia tan ajena, se me durmió la sangre en la camisa, y se volvió el poroso y áureo pecho una picuda y deslumbrante pena. --- You threw me a lemon, so bitter, from such a warm and pure hand that it lost no structure and I could still taste its sourness. With this yellow punch, from a sweet lethargy, my blood turned to eager warmth. Sensing the bite of a long, firm teat. Observing you and seeing the smile that this acidic act created, so foreign to my voracious guile, my blood turned cold in my shirt, my porous and golden breast became a punctured and stunning sorrow.
His closeness to the poets named above, and their influence on him, places him more with the so-called “Generation of ‘27” than with the later “Generation of ‘36”, even though the latter were closer to his age. His poetry, and he, were maturing, but events in Spain and in the wider world were taking a darker turn that would have a profound impact on his life, and his poetry.
If you want to know more you can comment below, or contact me on thefigtree<at>mail.com, (replace <at> with the “@” symbol) which is also the mailing address of my sister page The Fig Tree, a webzine that is open for submissions at all times, and whose first issue is now available.
You can find out more on figtreepoetry.substack.com
Original poems © Herederos de Miguel Hernández.
Translations by Tim Fellows 2024
I have never heard of this poet - thanks for this great introduction!