Miguel Hernandez

Miguel Hernández Gilabert (Orihuela, October 30, 1910-Alicante, March 28, 1942) was a poet and playwright of special relevance in Spanish literature of the XX. Although traditionally he has been framed in the generation of '36, Miguel Hernández maintained a closer relationship with the previous generation to the point of being considered by Dámaso Alonso as a "genial epigone" of the generation of '27. Currently - and after the interesting contributions from A. Sánchez Vidal— is associated with the Escuela de Vallecas.

Remembering Miguel Hernández who disappeared in the dark and remembering him in full light, is a duty of Spain, a duty of love. Few poets as generous and luminous as the crowd of Orihuela whose statue will one day rise among the sahars of his dormant land. Michael did not have the cenital light of the South as the recital poets of Andalusia, but a light of land, of tomorrow stony, thick light of the panal waking. With this hard matter like gold, living like blood, he translated his lasting poetry. And this was the man that that moment in Spain banished in the shadow! It is up to us now and always get him out of his mortal prison, enlighten him with his courage and martyrdom, teach him as an example of a pure heart! Give it to him the light! Give it to remembrance, to pales of clarity that reveal it, archangel of an earthly glory that fell in the night armed with the sword of light!

Pablo Neruda

Biography

Childhood and youth

Miguel Hernández was born on October 30, 1910 in Orihuela. He was the third child of the four that Miguel Hernández Sánchez and Concepción Gilabert had, and the second son. His family was dedicated to raising goats, which motivated them to move from the house where Miguel was born (San Juan street, no. 82) to a larger one and in keeping with the family business (Arriba street, no. º 73), located on the outskirts and converted into a museum house. His father aspired to ascend socially, managing to be named "neighborhood mayor"; his mother, for her part, was a sickly woman (she suffered from chronic bronchitis) and often had to stay in bed.

Miguel was a goat herder from an early age. He was educated from 1915 to 1916 at the “Nuestra Señora de Monserrat” teaching center and from 1918 to 1923 he received primary education at the Amor de Dios schools. In 1923 he went on to study high school at the Santo Domingo de Orihuela school, run by the Jesuits, who offered him a scholarship to continue his studies, which his father rejected. In 1925 he abandoned his studies by father's order to dedicate himself exclusively to shepherding. While tending the herd, Hernández avidly read and wrote his first poems.

At that time, the canon Luis Almarcha Hernández began a friendship with Hernández and made available to the young poet books on San Juan de la Cruz, Gabriel Miró, Paul Verlaine and Virgilio among others. His visits to the public library were more and more frequent and he began to form an improvised literary group with other young people from Orihuela around the bakery of his friend Carlos Fenoll. The main participants in those meetings were, in addition to Hernández and Carlos Fenoll himself, his brother Efrén Fenoll, Manuel Molina and José Marín Gutiérrez, a future lawyer and essayist who would later adopt the pseudonym "Ramón Sijé" and to whom Hernández dedicated his famous Elegy. From that moment on, Ramón Sijé became not only his friend, but also his literary companion.

Books were his main source of lyrical education, becoming a totally self-taught person in this regard. The great authors of the Golden Age: Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Garcilaso de la Vega and, above all, Luis de Góngora, officiated as his main teachers.

His growing passion for writing leads him to think about buying a typewriter and stop bothering the vicar, who was the one who printed his verses for him. Eladio Belda, administrator of the social and agrarian weekly El Pueblo de Orihuela, advises him to buy a second-hand, portable, Corona brand, whose price is 300 pesetas. Miguel Hernández debuts his typewriter on March 20, 1931. From then on, he will go up the mountain every morning, to the Cruz de la Muela, with the bundle on his shoulder and the typewriter to compose poems until the wee hours of the morning. late.

On March 25, 1931, when he was only twenty years old, he won the first and only literary prize of his life awarded by the Artistic Society of the Orfeón Ilicitano with a poem of 138 lines called Canto a Valencia, under the motto Light..., Birds..., Sun... The main theme of the poem was the landscape and the people of the Levantine coast, in which the Mediterranean Sea, the Segura River and the cities of Valencia, Alicante and Murcia. When Hernández received notification of the achievement of the prize, he hurried to travel to the city of Elche, believing that he would receive a financial prize, but he was only a recipient of a silver notary.

First trip to Madrid

Due to the reputation he achieved thanks to publications in various magazines and newspapers, on December 31, 1931 he traveled to Madrid, seeking to consolidate himself on the scene, accompanied by a few poems and recommendations. Introduced by Francisco Martínez Corbalán, the literary magazines La Gaceta Literaria and Estampa helped him find a job, but the attempt was unsuccessful and he was forced to return to Orihuela on the 15th of May 1932. However, this trip was of great importance, as it allowed him to see first-hand the work of the generation of '27, as well as the theory necessary for the composition of his work Perito en lunas.

According to Carlos Rodríguez Eguía, Miguel Hernández lived poorly from mid-December 1931 to mid-May 1932, at number 4 Francisco Navacerrada street in the La Guindalera neighborhood, in the area closest to Cartagena street. There was the Morante Academy, where Miguel Hernández occupied a room, managed by his Oriolano friend Alfredo Serna García, a professor at the Academy. In exchange for the room without the right to eat, the poet worked as a concierge.

Second trip to Madrid

Monument to fraternitywhich highlights the registration of a section Drought whistle, poem that composes the collection of the whistle by Miguel Hernández. In the words of Ricardo Gullón: «Drought whistleanother form of silence, that of not giving the rain, what the earth asks."

In 1933, Perito en Lunas, his first book, was published. Hernández was invited to give readings of his work at the University of Cartagena and at the Ateneo de Alicante on April 29, 1933.

After that promising beginning, he went to Madrid for the second time to get a job, this time with better fortune, as he managed to be appointed as a collaborator in the Pedagogical Missions. Later he was chosen as secretary and editor of the encyclopedia Los toros by its director and main editor, José María de Cossío, who became his protector and most fervent supporter of his work. He also collaborated regularly with Revista de Occidente and maintained a relationship with the painter Maruja Mallo, who inspired him part of the sonnets of El rayo que no cesa. Vicente Aleixandre and became friends with him and with Pablo Neruda; this was the origin of his brief period within surrealism, with torrential breath and telluric inspiration. His poetry at that time became more social and clearly manifested a political commitment to the poorest and most disinherited. In December 1935, his fraternal lifelong friend, Ramón Sijé, died, and Hernández dedicated his extraordinary Elegy to him, which provoked the difficult enthusiasm of Juan Ramón Jiménez in a chronicle in the newspaper El Sol .

Civil War

II International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture.

When the Civil War broke out, Miguel Hernández was in Orihuela. In a letter dated August 25, he asked his friend José María de Cossío, with whom he had so much contact in Espasa-Calpe for the joint writing of the encyclopedia Los Toros, that he arrange for him to be able to collect the half of his monthly salary when the father of his girlfriend, Josefina Manresa, was assassinated in Elda, for being a civil guard. It is & # 34; enormous misfortune, by mistake & # 34;, and to leave his wife and several of his children, he affirms in that letter. Hernández enlisted at that time on the Republican side. In the summer of 1936 he also joined the Communist Party of Spain and since the beginning of 1937 he has been a political-military commissar. Hernández was in the 5th Regiment, serving as a political commissar and went on to other units on the front lines of the battle Teruel, Andalusia and Extremadura. His activity as a communist political commissar in the Army would earn him the death sentence after the war, later commuted. In the midst of the war, he managed to briefly escape to Orihuela to marry Josefina Manresa on March 9, 1937. A few days later he had to march to the front of Jaén. In the summer of 1937 he attended the II International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture held in Madrid and Valencia, where he met the Peruvian César Vallejo.

Trip to the USSR

In 1937 he traveled on behalf of the government of the republic to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, where he stayed from September 1 to October 5, and where he wrote three poems: “Spain in absence”, “Russia” and “La Factory-City”, the latter written in Kharkov and similar to the work of Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Leninist poet. He returned in October to write the drama Shepherd of Death and numerous poems later collected in his work Man lies in wait. On December 19, 1937, his first son, Manuel Ramón, was born, who died a few months after birth, on October 19, 1938, and to whom he dedicated the poem Son of Light and Shadow and others collected in the Cancionero y romancero de ausencias. On January 4, 1939, his second son, Manuel Miguel, was born, to whom he dedicated the famous Nanas de la cebolla He wrote a new book: Viento del pueblo . Destined for the 6th division, he went to Madrid.

Prison and death

In April 1939, just after the war, printing in Valencia had finished El hombre acecha. Still unbound, a Francoist cleaning commission chaired by the philologist Joaquín de Entrambasaguas ordered the complete destruction of the edition. However, two copies that were saved allowed the book to be reissued in 1981.

His great friend Cossío offered to welcome the poet in Tudanca, but he decided to return to Orihuela. But in Orihuela he ran a lot of risk, so he decided to go to Seville via Córdoba, with the intention of crossing the Portuguese border through Rosal de la Frontera (Huelva). In Portugal, he tried to sell a gold watch that Vicente Alexaindre had given him to pay for his trip to America, but the jeweler turned him in to the border police. The police of Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, arrested him in Moura on 30 April for crossing without authorization and handed him over to the Investigation and Surveillance Corps, in charge of monitoring the borders.

He was taken to a cell at the Rosal de la Frontera post on May 3. On May 9, he was transferred to the Huelva provincial prison.

When he was in prison, his wife Josefina Manresa sent him a letter in which she mentioned that they only had bread and onions to eat; In response, the poet composed the Nanas de la cebolla. brutally. They wanted him to confess that he had killed José Antonio Primo de Rivera, leader of the Falange.

From the Huelva prison they transferred him to Seville and later to the Torrijos street prison in Madrid (today Conde de Peñalver street), from where, thanks to the efforts made by Pablo Neruda before a cardinal, he was unexpectedly released, without being prosecuted, in September 1939, although the parallel efforts of Cossío also had an influence. While imprisoned in the Torrijos street prison, he wrote her a dramatic postcard: «Dear cousin José María: [...] you can help me get out quickly and you must not stop doing it. I did not have the necessary documentation and they arrested me in Portugal, and they took me here. On the recto of the postcard, on Cossío's address, aware of the extreme personal gravity of his situation, he even put, by his hand: "Up Spain! Long live Franco!" (Photographic reproduction of the postcard in Ignacio de Cossío, Cossío and the bulls. [S.l.], Ministry of Culture of Cantabria, 2008, between pp. 232-233).

But when he returned to Orihuela, he was betrayed and arrested and already in the prison of the Plaza del Conde de Toreno in Madrid, he was tried and sentenced to death in March 1940 by a court martial presided over by Judge Manuel Martínez Gargallo and in which Ensign Antonio Luis Baena Tocón acted as secretary. José María de Cossío and other intellectual friends, among them Luis Almarcha Hernández, friend of youth and vicar general of the diocese of Orihuela (later Bishop of León in 1944), interceded for him and his death sentence was commuted to thirty years in prison. Also then, the management of Cossío himself had a great influence, who went to the secretary of the Political Board of FET and the JONS, Carlos Sentís, and Rafael Sánchez Mazas, vice-secretary of the same, but who was related to General José Enrique Varela, minister of the Army, which in a letter replied to Sánchez Mazas in the middle of 1940: "I have the pleasure of informing you that the capital sentence that weighed on Don Miguel Hernández Gilabert, in whom he is interested, has been commuted to the immediately inferior, Hoping that this act of generosity by the Caudillo will force the winner to follow a conduct that is a rectification of the past" (These documents are photographically reproduced in Ignacio de Cossío, op. cit., between pp. 232-233).

He then went through the prison of Palencia (he arrived on September 23, 1940, after a sixteen-hour journey made in freight wagons along with 244 other prisoners), where he said that he could not cry because tears froze for cold; also at the Yeserías prison, and in November at the Ocaña prison (Toledo). In June 1941, he was transferred to the Alicante Adult Reformatory, where he shared a cell with Buero Vallejo. There he fell ill: he suffered first from bronchitis and then from typhus, which was complicated by tuberculosis. The intervention of the painter Miguel Abad Miró, a friend since before prison, was decisive in receiving specialized medical care from the director of the Anti-Tuberculosis Clinic in Alicante, Antonio Barbero Carnicero, who was able to improve the poet's situation with two interventions, but unfortunately permission to transfer to the "Porta Coeli" Tuberculosis Hospital in the province of Valencia arrived too late. In the last moments and to his regret, Miguel agreed to marry Josefina in the prison infirmary, in order to facilitate the things to his wife since their previous civil union had no legal validity for the new Franco regime.

He died in the infirmary of the Alicante prison at 5:32 in the morning on March 28, 1942, when he was only thirty-one years old. It is said that they could not close his eyes, a fact about which his friend Vicente Aleixandre composed a poem. Abad Miró was part of the small funeral entourage that, with the widow, accompanied the mortal remains of the poet to the cemetery and paid the expenses of the burial. He was buried on March 30, in niche number one thousand and nine of the cemetery of Nuestra Señora del Remedio in Alicante.

Posthumously

Tomb of Miguel Hernández in the cemetery of Alicante, Spain

His remains were exhumed in 1984 due to the death of his son Manuel Miguel Hernández Manresa the same year. That exhumation caused a stir among a small group of Hernández supporters, who crowded together on the day of his son's burial, even kissing his skull or trying to steal a bone. The coffin was preserved to be exhibited at the Miguel Hernández de Orihuela House-Museum.

In December 1986, the remains of both were transferred to land ceded by the Alicante City Council located in the same cemetery and in February 1987 the wife of Miguel Hernández, Josefina Manresa, was buried next to them.

The foundation that bears the poet's name was created on July 13, 1994, to preserve and disseminate the heritage and memory of the poet. In addition to his successors, it was made up of the Generalitat Valenciana, the Provincial Council of Alicante, the Town Halls of Alicante, Elche and Orihuela. Subsequently, the Elche town hall was replaced by the Cox Town Hall, and Caja Mediterráneo was added, and the universities of Alicante and the Miguel Hernández University.

In February 2011, the Military Chamber of the Supreme Court of Spain denied the possibility of an extraordinary appeal to review the sentence requested by the family, considering that it was imposed for ideological or political reasons and that it had already It was annulled with the Historical Memory Law approved during the Government of J.L. Rodríguez Zapatero, which declared this type of sentence radically unfair and illegitimate.

In 2018, coinciding with the commemoration of the seventy-five years since the death of the poet, various activities were held. Among others, the celebration in Orihuela, Alicante and Elche of the IV International Congress "Miguel Hernández, poet of the world" on November 15, 16, 17 and 18. The second thematic axis of the congress deals with the work of Miguel Hernández in other languages. As well as an exhibition to publicize the experience lived by the poet in the jail of Alicante.

In June 2019, at the request of the son of Antonio Luis Baena Tocón, which was based on the Data Protection Law and the so-called digital right to be forgotten, the University of Alicante deleted from its digital files the references that the professor Juan Antonio Ríos Carratalá had included in some of his articles referring to the performance of Baena Tocón as judicial secretary in the trials against the poet. A Streisand effect was quickly generated, turning the name of Baena Tocón into a trending topic. A month later, the University of Alicante announced its decision to restore the academic articles, considering the role of Baena Tocón to be of public interest.

Literary work

Bust by Miguel Hernández on the Paseo de los Poetas, El Rosedal, Buenos Aires.

Poetry

• The soldier and the snow
• Perito on moons, Murcia, La Verdad, 1933 (Prologist of Ramon Sijé).
• The lightning that does not cease, Madrid, Hero, 1936.
• Wind of the village, Valencia, International Red Relief, 1937 (Prologist of Thomas Navarro Tomás).
• Songbook and romance of absences (1938-1941), Buenos Aires, Lautaro, 1958 (Prologist for Elvio Romero).
• The man lurking (1937-1938), Department of Santander, Cantabria, 1981. First edition kidnapped in print in 1939 and never published.
• Nanas of the onion1939
• Elegía (1910-1942)

Theater

• Who has seen you and who sees you and shadows what you were1933.
• The bravest bullfighter1934.
• The children of the stone1935.
• The more air-wrapper, Madrid - Valencia, Our Village, 1937.
• Theatre in the War1937.

Anthologies

• Six unpublished poems and nine more, Alicante, Col. Ifach, 1951.
• Choice work, Madrid, Aguilar, 1952 (includes unpublished poems).
• AnthologyBuenos Aires, Losada, 1960 (selec. and prologue of María de Gracia Ifach. Includes unpublished poems).
• Complete works, Buenos Aires, Losada, 1960 (ordered by E. Romero. Prologue of Ma de Gracia Ifach).
• Full poetic work, Madrid, Zero, 1979 (introduction, study and notes by Leopoldo of Luis and Jorge Urrutia).
• 24 unpublished sonnets, Alicante, Instituto de estudios Juan Gil-Albert, 1986 (editation of José Carlos Rovira).
• Poetry anthologyed. critique by Agustín Sánchez Vidal, Barcelona, Vicens-Vives, 1993.
• Poetry anthology, ed. critique by José Luis Ferris, Madrid, Espasa-Calpe, 2000.
• Poetic anthology commenteded. de Francisco Esteve y Jesús Riquelme, Madrid, Editions de la Torre, 2002.
• Complete work of Miguel Hernández. 2 vols.S.L.U. Espasa Libros, Madrid, 2010.
• Miguel Hernandez and the commanders of death. Madrid, Taurinos Bibliophiles Union, 2014. José María Balcells Domenech (edit. lit., meeting of his taurine poetic production, includes unpublished).
• The complete work of Miguel Hernández, ed. critique of Jesus Christ Riquelme, Madrid: Edaf, 2017 (with numerous corrections and unpublished).

Epistolary

• General Epistle of Miguel Hernández, edition of Jesus Christ Riquelme Pomares and C. R. Talamás, Madrid, Edaf, 2019, 1152 p.

Mentions and awards

• Predilect son of the province of Alicante.
• Adoptive son of the city of Murcia.

Poems set to music

• Flamenco Homenaje a Miguel Hernández by Enrique Morente, Hispavox, 1971.
• Miguel Hernández by Joan Manuel Serrat, Zafiro/Novola, 1972.
• Tribute to Miguel Hernández by Adolfo Celdrán, Movieplay-Fonomusic, 1976.
• Elegía included in the 1976 album Freedom without Ira of the Andalusian group Jarcha.
• Son of light and shadow, by Joan Manuel Serrat, Sony Music, 2010.
• Today I convert with MiguelNach. Canción tribute to the centenary of the poet's birth.
• People’s Winds by Ebri Knight, Maldito Records, 2018.
• “Nanas de la onion” musicalized by Alberto Cortez in 1972

In fiction

In 2002, the biographical miniseries Viento del pueblo. Miguel Hernández, directed by José Ramón Larraz and starring Liberto Rabal, in the role of Hernández, and Silvia Abascal, as Josefina Manresa.