Reetika Vazirani

Keep Hunger in Mind

I Have Lots of Heart: Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández, translated by Don Share. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books/Dufour Editions, 1997.

The volumes of poems in Spanish left behind by Miguel Hernández are as short, explosive, and shattering as his life. American poetry fortunately received some of his spirit through the poetry of William Carlos Williams, among others. But considering his stature among readers familiar with Hernández’s work in Spanish, he remains hardly known among English-language readers and writers today.

Hernández came of age during the Spanish Civil War; his poetry launches itself from this particular point, and one could easily say he is an important war poet and be done with it. But if he primarily came out of the experience of civil war in Spain, it is not war that obsesses him. So much of Hernández’s triumph lies in discovering the buoyancy of his spirit and preserving it in his poetry so that all was not to be an erudite pessimism. Hernández’s life and pain resolved into love, and his poetry contains these fierce, remarkable moments. He concerns himself with a liberation from suffering, moving into the world of people, the hungry people of Spain during the time of the Spanish Civil War. From this specific affection, his poetry deploys itself into a place of visions. His life was, in the literal sense, a terrible drama. His poetry went far beyond the literal damages done to him. Don Share’s new translation makes the career of Hernández accessible and undeniable.

I do not speak Spanish. I do not speak Chinese, Tamil, Polish, Portuguese, or Greek, and I still can’t read French poetry in French. And yet I wonder where I would be as a writer without translations: Pound’s Chinese, Ramanujan’s Tamil, John and Bogdana Carpenter’s Herbert, Robert Hass’ Milosz, Keeley and Sherrard’s Cavafy and Seferis. . . . Where would I be without translations of Ahkmatova, Cesaire, Drummond de Andrade, Machado, Pessoa? We read poetry from other languages because we don’t want to miss their gifts. This has been an extraordinary century for innovations in English-language poetry in America; and I believe that many of the great innovators looked to poems from other languages for inspiration and direction. It is in this context that Hernández is an important poet of this century, and Don Share’s is an important translation.

From Willis Barnstone’s moving and illuminating introduction, we know that Miguel Hernández Gilabert was born in 1910 in a small city in southeast Spain. He became a pastor and goat-herd. His family wasn’t rich, but he went to school–and hated it. He was uncomfortable around the trappings of wealthier students. He liked water, loved immersing himself in it. He loved the warmth of his goats. His father beat him for being absentminded. At fourteen, he left school. He read in the fields. He read in his room at night. He filled notebooks. The immensity of his reading found its way into discussions with the local literary circle: the baker who was a poet, and the sons of the baker, and the fiancee of the baker’s son, and the local pastor. Miguel Hernández published poems in little-known Catholic periodicals. He grew ambitious: at twenty he went to Madrid to make his way as a writer. He looked up other writers. Someone tried to get him a job but couldn’t find him one. Things in the big city did not work out for him. He went hungry, but he found the work of Gongora, three-hundred years dead, whom he fully absorbed. He took from Gongora his formal technique and his wild extravagant imagery, ran out of money and went home.

Hernández met a girl named Josefina to whom he declared his love, and then dumped her when stimulated by a return to Madrid (so many prominent writers to meet and so many available city women). When all that searching and carousing had run its course, he sent Josefina more declarations of love. The war broke out. Josefina’s father was killed. Hernández sent what he could to support her family. What money did he have? He had practically nothing, but he married Josefina in 1937. Again he turned away from her, immediately dedicating the focus of his work to the war and to the hungry in Spain. He was a soldier and a traveling poet. Reading his poetry was part of his participation in fighting the war. He was often beaten. He got thrown into prison but kept writing; his imitations had blossomed into a discovery of himself. Writers knew about him. Many intervened and secured his release, but he would get thrown into prison again and again. He was a free-ranging goatherd hunted into the state’s traps–his "tourist" days, as he called them. In 1941 he contracted tuberculosis in prison. Four months later, he died in a prison hospital.

As for his poetry, the first volume, Expert on Moons, showed the promise of a very young craftsman, a book hardly anyone noticed. He was discouraged. In 1933, García Lorca wrote to console him. ("My dear poet: . . .I know you’re suffering in that circle of literary pigs. . . Write to me. . . .") Then came the war and Hernández’s war poems. Then the last poems from prison. The book is set up according to these three periods, ending with four written memories, of García Lorca, Neruda, Alberti, Aleixandre, about Hernández. His life’s small arc has to be seen in the larger arc that was Spanish poetry in the ’30s.

Coming after the famous generation of ’27, what then could a slim life of a self-taught goatherd contribute? Half a dozen giants worked in his midst in Spain–Neruda, García Lorca, Machado, Alberti, and so on in a period of Spanish rebirth. Then came the war. García Lorca died in 1936. Machado died in 1937. Alberti went to Italy and Argentina. Juan Ramon Jimenez left for Florida and Puerto Rico. Guillen and Salinas got teaching jobs in America. Luis Cernuda went to Mexico. Only Vicente Aleixandre remained in Spain, where he lived another forty-five years.

Hernández didn’t have much time, but nothing went to waste. When almost everybody was writing in a freer form, looking towards France for direction, Hernández was absorbing all of the dazzling Gongora, all of Quevedo. By the luck and intelligence of his reading, he looked where others were not looking. His absorption of the shapes and range of poems that came before his time was nothing less than astonishing. By the time he finished his early poems he had an understanding of timing, intensity of empathy, the shattering intimacy and rightness of rhythm, combining beats and stops which are terribly moving.

In any translation there is the given irritation of having to be approximate and wrong; sometimes it’s the diction, sometimes it’s the timing, or both. If Don Share’s translation errs, it is occasionally on the side of diction. For example, how can Hernández’s line: "con una obstinacion enamorada" become "lovingly, persistently"? The sting and spit have been tamed into a pretty sigh. How does "esclarecio los huesos inflamados" become "lit up the kindled bones"? This is timid. The vowels are wrong. Where is the heat? Perhaps the explosion and generosity of the "o" sound in Spanish gets lost in English anyway, no matter how you slice it. We are cheated. We blame the translator or we lament the narrowness of our language, or both.

But by the time you get to the poem "I Have Lots of Heart," Don Share and the English hit their stride. What is achieved and successfully translated is the flat guileless understanding of a man near death:

Today I am, I don’t know, I don’t know how,
today I am here only to suffer,
today I have no friends,
today I have only the desire
to rip my heart out by the roots
and crush it under my shoes. . .
I was born under a bad moon...
I have lots of heart.

The fearless clarity comes through, the piercing caesuras. The intelligent unadorned force of Hernández’s temperament presides. No affectation, no nervous posturing. We are in Share’s good hands. From Poems of War, see "Letter" and "Last Song," among others. From Last Poems from Prison, see "The Last Corner," "After Love," "War." In "Lullaby of the Onion," I hear a heartbreaking extension and insistence of a two beat drumbeat rhythm that is almost too much to take in: it is earned, we cannot let go of it.

Hernández’s whole life was lived with his father beating him to the ground; after his father, policemen left him hemorrhaging. And if it wasn’t them, there were others enforcing Franco’s stupid and literal view of power ("I wish I could haul myself away from its blows. . . wound, corpse, foam; wind and nothing"). Hernández comes out of Spain’s wartime sequence of deathtraps not only scarred but still free, in love with a spirit world that he never lost touch with: "Letters, stories, letters; / postcards, dreams, / bits of tenderness / tossed into the sky." Rafael Alberti wrote of Hernández’s wartime poems, "He finally tore out of himself in his Wind From the People, a crushing landslide of epic and lyric things, poems of head-on clash and follow-through, of gnashing teeth and pleading cries, rage, weeping, tenderness, care." I think this spirit rages through to the end of his last poems. Read "War": "Passions like bugles, / ballads, trumpets that tell / the living to consume the living, / . . . / Spit. Kisses. Wheels. / Spurs. Crazy swords / . . .And a lovesick drum, / like a tense womb, beats / behind the uncounted / dead man who never gets away."

Capturing a raw purity of expression that is both uncooked and tender, shatteringly close to the bone and elegant, Don Share brings Hernández into English. In "Lullaby of an Onion" to his starving son who was given onion juice to drink when there wasn’t any milk, Hernández wrote, "Fly away, son, on the double / moon of the breast! . . . . Don’t let go. / Don’t find out what’s happening / or what goes on." Hunger goes on, treachery, the literal billystick blows to the head, the world that did Hernández in, the world he loved, to which he abandoned his son, "Lark of my house, / keep laughing / . . . / Laugh so much / that my soul, hearing you, will beat in space."

With the best writing from Spain, you get unpretentious, earthy writing, and at the same time, elegant–simple and dazzling, even when the verse is totally materialist, totally literal about the horrors of war, for example. Where being too literal is often a mistake in poetry–where the straight-on confession is too touchingly sweet to be moving and becomes a fatal flaw–where dazzle for its own sake is pompous–Hernández can be literal and dazzling and make it work. He can be blunt and moving. Machado can do both. Aleixandre can do both. A lot of Spanish writers have an extraordinarily flat yet resonant tone. Flat and intimate. This is not a peculiarly Spanish quality, but it’s one that the Spanish are good at. When this tone, this courage, made its way into English-language poetry, through Carlos Williams or James Wright, for example, more greatness came into American poetry. At this moment of international encounter, movements through more than one language, communication becomes truly ambitious, as is the dialogue between Share and Hernández; the jam sessions between Hernández and his antecedents, Gongora, Quevedo, Guillen, Valéry. . .as rendered by Share. What terrific combinations, these new fusions across borders.