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| Miguel Hernández Orihuelha 1910 - Alicante 1942 | ||
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'Poetry is not a matter of rhyme; it is a matter of courage' (Miguel Hernandez) Miguel Hermindez, born on 30th October 1910 in C/ San Juan in Orihuela, was a Spanish poet, born to a poor family and given little formal education. His family moved to what is now known as the Casa Museo Miguel Hernandez in the C/ de Arriba when he was four years old. He published his first book of poetry at the age of 23 and gained considerable fame before his untimely death in 1942. He spent his childhood working as a goatherd and farmhand and was, for the most part, self-taught, although he did attend the Colegio Santo Domingo just for one year, before leaving to work in the surrounding pastures tending his father's goats. His first poem was published in 1930. As many Spanish poets of his time, he was greatly influenced by the European modernist movements, particularly by Surrealism and was part of the literary movement known as the Generation of 1936, However, although he used novel images and concepts in his verses, he never abandoned the classical, popular and traditional rhythms and rhymes of his heritage. Two of his most famous poems were inspired by the deaths of his close friends Ignacio Sanchez Mejias and Ramon Sije. On his various visits to Madrid he forged some lasting friendships with other poets such as Vicente Aleixandre, Pablo Neruda, Rafael Alberti, Antonio Machado and Federico Garcia Lorca. During the Spanish Civil War, Miguel Hernandez enlisted and fought with the Republicans, writing poetry and addressing the troops deployed to the front as well as defending Madrid itself. He married Josefina Manresa in Orihuela in 1937 and subsequently travelled to the USSR. After the Republican surrender, he tried to cross into Portugal but was turned back, then jailed, and eventually sentenced to death. However, his death sentence was commuted for a prison term of 30 years, which led to him living in multiple jails around the country for three years, under extraordinarily harsh conditions, until he eventually succumbed to tuberculosis in 1942. Just before he died, on 28th March 1942 at the age of 31, he scrawled his last verse on the wall of his prison hospital in Allcante: '¡ Adios, hermanos, camaradas, amigos: despedidme del sol y de los trigos!' ('Goodbye, brothers, comrades, friends: let me take my leave of the sun and the fields'.) Some of his verses were kept by his jailors. It was reported that they could not close his eyes. While in jail, the poet produced an extraordinary amount of poetry, much of it in the form of simple songs, which he collected together and sent to his wife and others. These poems are now known as his 'Concionero y romancero de ausencia' (Songs and BalIods of Absence). In these works the poet writes not only of the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War and his own incarceration, but also of the death of his first son at the age of 10 months, and the struggle of his wife and his other son to survive in poverty. The intensity and simplicity of the poems, combined with the extraordinary situation of the poet, give them remarkable power. Perhaps the best known work of Miguel Hernandez is a poem called 'Nanos de cebolla' (Onion Lullaby), a poem in which Hernandez replies to a letter from his wife in which she told him that she was surviving on bread and onions. In the poem, the poet envisions his son breastfeeding on his mother's onion blood (sangre de cebolla) and uses the child's laughter as a counterpoint to his mather's desperation. In the poem, he turns his wife's body into a mythic symbol of desperation and of hope, of the regenerative power desperately needed in a broken Spain. Back to top Back to Articles page |
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