“You, the strongest building, have collapsed.” Miguel Hernández sang with these words to Federico García Lorca in 1936; Although he was unsettled by the death of the Granada poet, he did not feel that he too would be destroyed by the madness of war and the constant madness of history. Against all this, Miguel Hernández offers his weapons (poetry and lyrics) in the prologue to Teatro en la guerra (1937), one of the five pieces he wrote for the stage. «I fence in war [la poesía] “Like a weapon, and in peace it will be a weapon, even if it is inactive.”
The War Book brings together Hernández’s extensive literary works between 1935 and 1942, the year of his death. Elena Medel divides her book into three parts: “Pre-war”, “War years” and “Post-war” and adds a foreword, bibliography, a selection of poems and a few photographs of the poet from those years. .
Hernández wrote tirelessly, especially in 1936, when expectations of winning the contest were still high. He gradually moves from enthusiasm and optimism to discouragement; Through the texts compiled here, we see what can be followed as well as the development of the war. There are poems, of course, but also plays, articles that encourage republican forces or describe what he saw, and numerous letters that place him on different missions in various parts of the peninsula.
The short play The Tail, a unique tableau set on a Madrid street in the middle of the war, was staged at the front “to encourage the soldiers”. In the film, the character Anne blames the women for the unnecessary commotion because “Madrid cannot present such a worthless spectacle to the world that watches us with excitement.” The year was 1937 and Hernández still believed in victory. During these years, Medel tells us, he wrote several plays that were not premiered during the author’s lifetime.
The same struggle and brave spirit continued until 1938; Now, as food becomes scarce and the strength of the troops diminishes, the problems drift towards food shortages, increased deaths and injuries, and imprisonment. The poem “Hunger”, published in The Man Stalks in 1939, dates from this period, and its last stanza contains an elegy that remains relevant because of its universality: “Help me to be a man: don’t let me be.” fierce/hungry, violent, besieged.”forever”.
The same concerns are expressed in the letters written to his partner Josefina Manresa in the book. On the first of September 12, 1939, he replied: “[e]The smell of the onion you eat reaches here and my child will be angry that he is getting onion juice instead of milk. I am sending you the couplets I prepared for him so that you can console him. [ya está encarcelado] “I have no other duty than to write to you or despair.” Those couplets are from the well-known and appreciated poem “Onion Lullabies”.
Other recurring themes in his writings and poems are the “sun biting the features, hunger, sadness, work” of the proletarian people, field workers, women “victims of the creature’s enslaving regime”. . Without forgetting the relentless struggle on different fronts, Hernández always remembers the people he observed while walking in Spain, those who “fought, dreamed, died and lived.” […] In the steppes of Castile, the stones of Extremadura, the olive trees of Andalusia and the mineral mountains of Asturias. This quote corresponds to the text “Today’s Companion” signed under the pseudonym “Antonio López”.
Political circumstances gave the writer the opportunity to travel to the USSR, via Paris and Stockholm, to Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev in 1937; He commented on this trip in letters to his wife. As befits familiar letters, the poet complains about having to wear a suit and tie as the ambassador of the Spanish Republicans, and especially about the harm of wearing shoes instead of espadrilles. He also doesn’t like to eat and has to constantly deal with politicians and journalists. He also visits a school for evacuated Spanish children in Moscow and notes how well they are treated and that “they lack nothing.”
The War Book contains only two letters that the poet wrote in 1939 to Captain Esteban and José María de Cossío, and in both of them the poet asks them to send him the corresponding money and food. It was during these years of need that he wrote the poems “Mother Spain” and “The Last Song”. In the first, he summarizes his feelings at the end of the war: “Spain, the stone that opens in two pieces / bitter and deep stone, give me: / they will not be able to separate me from your high bowels / mother. / Besides dying for you, I ask only one thing: / Let my wife and son, as they pass by, / go to the corner where they lived in your womb, / Mother.
“The Last Song” is a gentler epitaph of the time, ending with the word “hope” but tempered by the doubt offered by the accompanying command to “let me go.” One of the stanzas summarizes both terms: “And around the bodies / the sheet will rise / its dense vine / night, perfumed.”
In the last part of the book, which corresponds to the post-war period, that is, 1939-1941, Miguel Hernández writes to his friends in the different prisons to which he was sent, either to ask for help or to entrust them with his care. his family in his absence. Although some have fallen by the wayside, Vicente Aleixandre, Pablo Neruda, Carlos Rodríguez-Spiteri, the Chilean poet Juvencio Valle, and José María de Cossío, with whom Miguel Hernández worked before the war, are still among his friends. That he prepared for Espasa-Calpe.
Hernández had at first refused to go into exile in Latin America, later refusing to pay to be released from prison because he did not want to “make moral and material commitments to gain the cooperation of those who lurk in the slightest weakness and loneliness.” ” and died of tuberculosis in Alicante prison, although his death sentence was commuted to thirty years’ imprisonment.
He leaves his son “honor, not money” as an inheritance and asks his wife not to make him “capricious, unwilling, unreasonable or selfish” and “not to despair with him, so that he does not despair.” .
Miguel Hernández’s family letters are a summary of his philosophy of life in the worst possible conditions. His plays and articles prove his enthusiasm and perception of the social reality of the country, and his poems, many of which are included in this War Book, carry a universal message, charged with the lyricism and strength of a peasant. A man who took care of goats, cut down trees, wore espadrilles to walk on the front lines and shoes to represent his country, and managed to move us from the insensitivity of the masters to a life that embraces nature on the same continent.