Later I heard him recite his poems of love and war. In those lines—I can’t say now how they were or what they said—as if through a curtain of luxurious light, one could hear a moaning, a howling, as if a tender and powerful animal were dying, a bull perhaps, dying in the afternoon, lifting his astonished eyes toward the impassive spectators, made of smoke. And now I don’t want to remember more, now that I remember so much. I know that we were friends; that we walked together in Valencia and in the ruins of Madrid, at night, by the sea, or in intricate alleyways; I know that he liked to climb trees and eat watermelons in the taverns where soldiers went; I know that later I saw him in Paris and his presence was like a flash of sun, of bread, of the black city. I remember everything, but I don’t want to remember...
I don’t want to remember you, Miguel, great friend of a few miraculous days, days out of time, days of passion in which, discovering you, I discovered Spain, I discovered a part of myself, a rough and tender root, that made me larger and more ancient. Let others remember you. Let me forget you, because the oblivion of the pure and the true, the oblivion of the best, is what gives us the strength to keep living in this rotting and malodorous world of appointments and pieties, salutations and ceremonies. Let me forget you, because in this oblivion your voice will keep growing, stolen from your body and from the memory of those who knew you, free and high in the winds, released from this time of misery.
Mexico City, November 1942
translated by Eliot Weinberger
Federico García Lorca
Letter to Hernández
My dear poet:
I haven’t forgotten you. But I’m doing a good bit of living and my pen keeps slipping out of my hand.
I think about you often because I know you’re suffering in that circle of literary pigs, and it hurts me to see your energy, so full of sunlight, fenced in and throwing itself against the walls.
But you’ll learn that way. You’ll learn to keep a grip on yourself in that fierce training life is putting you through. Your book stands deep in silence, like all first books, like my first, which had so much delight and strength. Write, read, study, fight! Don’t be vain about your work. Your book is strong, it has many interesting things, and to eyes that can see makes clear the passion of man, although, as you say, it doesn’t have any more cojones than those of most of the established poets. Take it easy. Europe’s most beautiful poetry is being written in Spain today. But, at the same time, people are not fair. Perito en lunas doesn’t deserve that stupid silence. No. It deserves the attention and encouragement and love of good people. You have that and will go on having it because you have the blood of a poet and even when you protest in your letter you show, in the middle of savage things (that I like), the gentleness of your heart, that is so full of pain and light.
I wish you’d get rid of your obsession, that mood of the misunderstood poet, for another more generous, public-minded obsession. Write to me. I want to talk to some friends and see if they’ll take an interest in Perito en lunas.
Books of poetry, my dear Miguel, catch on very slowly.
I know perfectly well what you are like and I send you my embrace like a brother, full of affection and friendship.
(Write to me)
—Federico
translated by Hardie St. Martin
Note: Lorca wrote this letter in 1933, shortly after the publication of Hernández’s first book, Perito en lunas (Expert in Moons). It is the only known letter from Lorca to Hernández, and shows the great generosity that Lorca felt toward the younger poets. The book Lorca mentions of his own was not his first book of poems, but his book of prose sketches, Impresiones y paisajes. The letter was copied by Concha Zardoya from the original in the house of Josefina Manresa, the widow of Miguel Hernández. It was published first in Bulletin Hispanique, July–September 1958.
Pablo Neruda
On Miguel Hernández
from Confieso que he vivido: Memorias (1974), published in English as Memoirs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977, 2001)
The young poet Miguel Hernández was one of Federico’s and Alberti’s friends. I met him when he came up, in espadrilles and the typical corduroy trousers peasants wear, from his native Orihuela, where he had been a goatherd. I published his poems in my review Caballo Verde (Green horse), and I was enthusiastic about the radiance and vigor of his exuberant poetry.
Miguel was a peasant with an aura of earthiness about him. He had a face like a clod of earth or a potato that has just been pulled up from among the roots and still has its subterranean freshness. He was living and writing in my house. My American poetry, with other horizons and plains, had its impact and gradually made changes in him.
He told me earthy stories about animals and birds. He was the kind of writer who emerges from nature like an uncut stone, with the freshness of the forest and an irresistible vitality. 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 that poet of goats has been able to listen to.
At other times he would talk to me about the nightingale’s song. Eastern Spain, where he came from, swarmed with blossoming orange trees and nightingales. Since that bird, that sublime singer, does not exist in my country, crazy Miguel liked to give me the most vivid imitation of what it could do. He would shinny up one of the trees in the street and from its highest branches would whistle or warble like his beloved native birds.
Since he had nothing to live on, I tried to get him a job. It was hard to find work for a poet in Spain. At last a viscount, a high official in the Ministry of Foreign Relations, took an interest in his case and replied that yes, he was all for it, he had read Miguel’s poems, admired them, and Miguel just had to indicate what position he preferred and he would be given the appointment.
I was jubilant and said: “Miguel Hernández, your future is all set, at last. The viscount has a job for you. You’ll be a high-ranking employee. Tell me what kind of work you want, and your appointment will go through.”
Miguel gave it some thought. His face, with its deep, premature lines, clouded up with anxiety. Hours went by and it was not until late in the afternoon that he gave me his answer. With the radiant look of someone who has found the solution to his whole life, he said to me: “Could the viscount put me in charge of a flock of goats somewhere near Madrid?”
The memory of Miguel Hernández can never be rooted out of my heart. The song of the Levantine nightingales, their spires of sound soaring between the darkness and the orange blossoms, was an obsession with him. They were in his blood, in his earthy and wild poetry, where all the extravagances of color, of perfume, and of the voice of the Spanish Levant came together, with the exuberance and the fragrance of a powerful and virile youth.
His face was the face of Spain. Chiseled by the light, rutted like a planted field, it had some of the roundness of bread or of earth. Filled with fire, burning in that surface scorched and made leathery by the wind, his eyes were two beams of strength and tenderness.
I saw the very elements of poetry rise out of his words, altered now by a new greatness, by a savage light, by the miracle that converts old blood into an infant son. In all my years as poet, as wandering poet, I can say that life has not given me the privilege of setting eyes on anyone with a vocation and an electrical knowledge of words like his.
translated by Hardie St. Martin
Rafael Alberti
First Impression of Miguel Hernández
It was Pablo Neruda who saw him most clearly. He used to say: “Miguel with that face of his like a potato just lifted from the earth.”
From the earth...If I have ever known a boy with his roots showing, the pain of being pulled up still on them, pulled up at daybreak, it was he. Root, roots, deep sprouts, a framework of them clinging still to the wet earth of the flesh, the sheath of bones, the roots grew out of the flat potato of Miguel’s face, and turned his whole earth-body into a tangle of
roots. But on the other hand, when he bent forward, without elegance, with a kind of sad animal’s sluggish dipping of the head, to join your hand with his, his head always threw off a sound of green leaves covered with flashes of light.
Yes, Miguel came from the earth, natural, like an immense seed that has been scooped out of the ground and placed on the soil. And his poetry never lost this feeling, the sense of a spirit and body that had come from the
clay.
Me llamo barro aunque Miguel me llame...
My name is clay even if I am named Miguel...
The sound of a pick and shovel grinding on him, pounding on the rough stone of his bones, but at the same time, woven into it, a song plowmen and laborers sing in the fields.
Like so very many Spaniards today, Miguel was of a Catholic turn of mind. Hence, in his prematurely ended work, curiously detached, sometimes coarse and hard, one finds that fluttering preoccupation with death, where matter is always remembered as perishable at any moment. When I met him in Madrid, José Bergamin’s little review, Cruz y Raya, had just brought out Miguel’s religious play, in the manner of Calderón, filled with the power to absorb and with original strength. Shortly afterward, in 1936, his first book, El rayo que no cesa (Lightning that never ends), came from Manuel Altolaguirre’s printing press. A genuine lightning bolt with the clear, revealing light of a natural, wise poet. Miraculous lightning, for one thought of it in reverse, leaping out of a stone toward the sky, escaping with its light from that earthy being, awkward and dark.
And July 18, 1936, also was like lightning—it uprooted, swayed, and blinded him until it opened his eyes. It was a day of challenge and reply, of attack by the dirtiest and lowest side of Spain against its noblest and most promising side. An eye-opening date. At that moment Miguel saw his roots better than ever, he understood as he never had that he was clay.
And he exchanged his peasant’s everyday corduroy trousers for the brave blue overalls of the army volunteer. And so, then, it was to the war, to his life and contact—“bleeding in trenches and hospitals”—with those heroic people, alive and simple as wheat, that Miguel Hernández owed the whole discovery of himself, the complete illumination of his native, true self. He finally tore out of himself, in his Viento del pueblo (Wind from the people), a crushing landslide of epic and lyric things, poems of head-on clash and follow-through, of gnashing of teeth and pleading cries, rage, weeping, tenderness, care. Everything that was trembling in him was now interwoven with his profound roots.
But now, after having made his voice heard, like a happy bean field in the wind, after having been imprisoned, beaten, his chest punished until it hemorrhaged through concentration camps and dungeons, once more Miguel, a discouraged Miguel, returned to the earth, to the black, final hole. The hole had not been opened by laboring peasant hands, happy farm hands, alive with peace and night-dew. Slow, cold hands dug it, and stuck him into it; jealous, violent hands who were convinced he was a bad, dead seed, a dry rootstock without sap for growing. But those despicable people didn’t know that there are sweeping winds, helpful rains, soils that revive certain roots that seem to be dried up, that there are nourishments for certain soils they thought were already exhausted.
Meanwhile, we must let some serious boy from Miguel’s own foothills mourn for him on a reed-flute with such powerful sorrow that all the scattered flocks will turn for the green ground of the day of hope sure to come.
translated by Hardie St. Martin
Vicente Aleixandre
Meeting Miguel Hernández
I don’t have the letter, which is missing like so many other valued papers, but I remember it perfectly. It was a small sheet of coarse paper and on it some compact lines, written in a round, energetic hand. I don’t want to put words into his mouth, but I have a very clear memory of what he said: “I’ve seen your book La destrucción o el amor [Destruction or love] which has just come out...It’s impossible for me to buy it...I’d be very grateful if you could let me have a copy...From now on I’ll be living in Madrid, where I am now...” And he signed it exactly this way:
Miguel Hernández
shepherd from Orihuela
From then on he began coming to my place often. At that time Miguel was the author of Perito en lunas [Expert in moons], a book which had been printed in a very limited edition in Murcia two years earlier. The book had made no great stir. What stood out most clearly in the book was the promise of this young craftsman; his eight-line stanzas had been formed under the influence of Góngora. The tricentennial celebration of Góngora’s death had just ended, and its final waves had reached Hernández’s young and vigorous intelligence.
He no longer spoke of Perito en lunas now. During those days he seemed like some spring energy closely linked to spring: April, May, June. A country spring. Then with summer almost on us, as the trees were leafing and the sky made the air incredibly brilliant, as nature seemed about to overwhelm the city, Miguel seemed more than ever himself. He too, moving as the seasons moved, seemed to arrive along with that wave of true things that first gave its green to Madrid, then added other colors on.
During that time something about him made him look as if he just came from a swim in the river. And there were many days when that actually happened. My house was on the edge of town. “Where have you been, Miguel?” “In the river!” he answered, his voice fresh. And there he was, just emerged from the river, laughing, his white teeth shining, his tanned and serious face, his hair cut short, one lick of hair over his forehead.
He wore rope-soled shoes then, not only because of his poverty, but also because they were what his feet had been accustomed to since childhood; he brought them out as soon as the Madrid weather permitted. He would arrive in shirtsleeves, without tie or collar, virtually still wet from his plunge in the river. Blue eyes like two transparent stones over which water had been passing for years glittered in his earth-like face, made of pure clay; there the tremendous whiteness of his teeth clashed like leaping sea foam with dark brown soil.
His head—he had cut off the hair others hoarded—was round, and his short hair had a steely luster; there was energy in the twisted cowlick on his forehead; his strong temples supported that impression, though it was contradicted again by the open space between the eyebrows, as if he wanted to turn an honest look on everyone he came in contact with.
Sometimes he and Pablo [Neruda] and Delia [Neruda’s wife] and I used to go out to the neighborhood woods of Moncloa Park; on the way back, while we were still inside the park, someone would say: “Where is Miguel?” We might hear him answer us and there he was, lying on his stomach beside a small stream, drinking. Or else he would call to us from a tree into which he had climbed, where he raised his coppery arms into the failing light.
He was always on time, with a punctuality we might say came straight from the heart. Whenever someone needed him, at a time of grief or trouble, he would be there, at the right moment. Silent then, he seemed to radiate a will for good; the honest words he spoke, sometimes only a single word, created a brotherly atmosphere, an air of understanding where the person who was disturbed could rest and breathe. Although he was rough on the outside, he possessed the infinite delicate feelings of those whose spirit not only sees a great deal but is kind as well. When he stood on earth he was not like the tree that only gives shade and coolness. His sense of people was even stronger than his relationship to nature, which was such a beautiful thing.
He was trusting and did not expect to be harmed. He believed in men and hoped in them. The light never went out in him, not even at the last moment, the light that, more than anything else, made him die tragically with his eyes open.
translated by Hardie St. Martin
OTHER NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS / POETS TITLES
MIGUEL HERNÁNDEZ Selected and translated by Don Share
A.K. RAMANUJAN The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from the Classical Tamil
PIERRE REVERDY Edited by Mary Ann Caws
ALEXANDER V
VEDENSKY An Invitation for Me to Think Selected and translated by Eugene Ostashevsky
Miguel Hernandez Page 6
