 Información
Lo último: "Imaginando a Miguel" en Torremendo, organizado por la Concejalía de Cultura. (Actividades Culturales)
Inauguración de la Exposición y Documental "Falla Homenaje a Miguel Hernández 2m10" (Galería de Imágenes)
Actividades programadas para el mes de Octubre (Actividades de la Asociación)
Exposición de Roberto Ferrández. Obra pictórica 1998-2011(Actividades Culturales)
Inauguración de la exposición de Eva Ruiz, "El amor que no cesa", en el Ateneo de Madrid (Galería de Imágenes)
La Fundación Miguel Hernández colabora en un libro sobre traducción, editado por la Universidad de Moldavia
LA FUNDACIÓN MIGUEL HERNÁNDEZ COEDITA CON LA UNIVERSIDAD DE TEXAS UN LIBRO SOBRE EL POETA ORIOLANO (Actividades Culturales)
La pintora oriolana Eva ruiz expone en el Ateneo de Madrid (Actividades Culturales)
LAS DOS MUERTES DE MIGUEL HERNÁNDEZ IV ( Última entrega)
"EL NICHO 1009"
LAS DOS MUERTES DE MIGUEL HERNÁNDEZ III (¿POR DONDE SE SACÓ EL CADÁVER DE MIGUEL?)
Convocados los Premios Literarios de la Fundación Cultural Miguel Hernández 2012
Las dos muertes de Miguel Hernández, Introducción, I y II (Artículos)
La Escuela de Adultos de Orihuela participa en ‘100 países x MH’ La pintora Eva Ruiz expone en el Ateneo de Madrid, el próximo día 1 de Septiembre (Noticias)
Exposición de Fabiola Andreu, el próximo día 13 en San Juan de Dios (Actividades Culturales)
La Asociación renueva su Junta Directiva. (Noticias)
Una obra de Ramón Palmeral ilustra la portada de la revista murciana ÁGORA del mes de julio. (Noticias)
Fotos de la Asamblea Anual de la Asociación (Galería de Imágenes)
Fotos del estreno del documental ""Las tres heridas de Miguel", en Madrid, el pasado día 28. (Galería de Imágenes)
Para ser bien visto. Poema de J. Sancho (Poesía)
Despunta un nuevo día. Poema de J. Sancho (Poesía) Fallo del Jurado del III Certamen de POE+ X MH. (Pincha en Actividades de la asociación) Poemas del III certamen de poesía X SMS (Pincha en Poesía)
Poemas de MH traducidos al Valenciano por el profesor Lluís Tárraga. (Pincha en rincón poético, poesía de MH. Biografía de Miguel Hernández en valenciano. Traductor, Lluís Tárraga.(Mundo educativo)
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Poesía de Miguel Hernández
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Poesías de Miguel Hernández en inglés.
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Traducidas por Michael Sadhe
02: Toro
Perito en lunas, 1933
Bull
Moon Expert
All for glory, all for glory, you bullfighters!
It is a quarter to the hour of my moon.
Foolish mimics of the lizard,
burnish your backs with colours.
I am an arrow, ready to fire myself
at the picadors, with the bow of my horns.
All for glory, if I do not first anchor you
- on a bay of sand - with my golden moustaches!
03: Palmera
Perito en lunas, 1933
Palm tree
Moon Expert
Come on, column; give yourself a crown
like a jet of water. Begin with spurs.
Put a corkscrew on the moon. Make
the highest of cinnamon-coloured camels.
Shaping yourself like a cloister, graze on a slender wind,
an oasis of beauty in full sail
with necklets of gold around your neck:
from your foundation the serpent rises up, and sings.
04: Un carnívoro cuchillo
El rayo que no cesa, 1936
A flesh-eating knife
Unceasing lightning
A flesh-eating knife
with sweet, murderous wing
keeps flying and shining
around my life.
Tense, metallic beam of light
dazzling as it falls,
it pecks at my side
and in it makes a sad nest.
My brow, flowery balcony
of my early years,
is black, and my heart,
my heart has grey hairs.
Such is the evil virtue
of the beam which surrounds me,
that I go to my youth
like the moon to the village.
I gather with my eyelashes
salt from the soul and salt from the eye
and cobweb flowers
from my sadnesses I gather.
Where can I go that will not be
to seek my own perdition?
Your destiny is of the beach
and my vocation, of the sea.
To rest from this labour
of hurricane, love or hell
is not possible, and the pain,
whether I like it or not, will make me eternal.
But in the end I will conquer you,
bird and beam of the centuries,
my heart, for no-one
can make me doubt death.
So carry on, knife, carry on
flying, wounding. One day
time will turn yellow
on my photograph.
05: No cesará este rayo que me habita
El rayo que no cesa, 1936
Will it never cease, this lightning
Unceasing lightning
Will it never cease, this lightning that populates
my heart with exasperated wild animals
and angry blacksmith’s forges
where the freshest metal withers?
Will this stubborn stalactite never cease
training its head of hard hair
like swords and stiff flames
towards my roaring, shouting heart?
This lightning will neither cease nor wear out:
in me myself it had its origin
and on me myself it vents its furies.
This obstinate stone springs from within me
and upon me, insistently,
it rains down its destructive rays.
06: Umbriìo por la pena, casi bruno
El rayo que no cesa, 1936
Shadowy with pain, almost black
Unceasing lightning
Shadowy with pain, almost black,
because pain blackens when it bursts,
where I am not you will not find
the most pained man of all.
Upon pain I sleep alone and on my own,
pain is my peace and pain my battle,
a dog which neither leaves me nor ever shuts up,
always faithful to his master, always a pest.
Thistles and pains I bear as a crown
thistles and pains sow their leopards
and leave me with no bone unscathed.
My being cannot cope with the pain
surrounded by pains and thistles:
what pain one goes through in order to die!
07: Por tu pie, la blancura más bailable
El rayo que no cesa, 1936
From your foot, so dancingly white
Unceasing lightning
From your foot, so dancingly white,
where your beauty comes to a ten-part stop,
a dove rises to your waist,
and an endless lily descends to earth.
With your foot you put the wonder
of mother-of-pearl into ridiculous shade,
and where your foot goes, there goes whiteness,
a dog sown with jasmine shoe.
Towards your foot, like foam and beach,
sand and sea, I move forward and back
and try to enter its sheep’s pen from underneath.
I enter and allow my soul to leave me
through the amorous voice of the grapes:
tread on my heart for it is ripe.
08: Fuera menos penado si no fuera
El rayo que no cesa, 1936
I would feel less pain
Unceasing lightning
I would feel less pain if I did not feel
your complexion to be a lily to my sight, a lily
your skin to be a thistle to my touch, a thistle,
your voice to be bitter fruit to my ear, bitter fruit.
Your voice is bitter fruit to my ear, bitter fruit,
and I burn in your voice and around you I burn,
and I take to burn the time I take to offer you
juniper oil, my voice to yours, juniper oil.
Your hand is thorny bramble if I touch it, thorny bramble,
your body a wave if I reach it, a wave,
near once, but a thousand times not near.
My pain is a heron, a sad and slender heron,
lonely as a sigh and an ah!, lonely,
stubborn in its error and in its misfortune stubborn.
09: Tengo estos huesos hechos a las penas
El rayo que no cesa, 1936
These bones of mine are made for pains
Unceasing lightning
These bones of mine are made for pains
and for doubts this brow:
pain comes and goes, doubt goes and comes
like the sea to the sands of the beach.
Like the sea to the sands of the beach,
I go about in this shipwreck of comings and goings
through a dark night of round, poor,
sad and dark-haired frying pans.
No-one can save me from this shipwreck,
only your love, the floating plank for which I search,
only your voice, the direction for which I strive.
To avoid, therefore, the evil portent
that not even in you will I find a safe haven,
I go from pain to pain, smiling.
10: Te me mueres de casta y de sencilla
El rayo que no cesa, 1936
You are dying on me, so chaste and simple
Unceasing lightning
You are dying on me, so chaste and simple:
I am convicted, my love, I have confessed
that, intrepid thief of a kiss,
I drank from the nectar of your cheek.
I drank from the nectar of your cheek,
and since that glory, that crime,
your cheek, weighed down with scruples,
is sunken, bare-leafed and yellowing.
The ghost of that delinquent kiss
is following your cheekbone around,
ever more obvious, blacker and bigger.
And you cannot sleep, jealously
keeping watch over my mouth, with such care!
to make sure it doesn’t get naughty and disobey.
11: Silencio de metal triste y sonoro
El rayo que no cesa, 1936
Metallic silence, sad and sonorous
Unceasing lightning
Metallic silence, sad and sonorous,
swords and stirrings of love gathering
in the destructive bones at the tip
of the volcanic region of the bull.
He smelt a dampness of feminine gold
and it made his blood sparkle,
and he let out a roar amongst the flowers
like a vast hurricane of weeping.
Driven by the pain of a thousand lovers
he is covering the tender clover
with hot, loving blows of his horns.
Under his skin the furies take refuge
and there where his horns have their birth
they turn into thoughts of death.
12: Me llamo barro aunque Miguel me llame
El rayo que no cesa, 1936
Mud is my name although I am called Miguel
Unceasing lightning
Mud is my name although I am called Miguel.
Mud is my profession and my destiny,
staining with its tongue all it licks.
I am a sad tool of the road.
I am a tongue, sweetly infamous,
spread out at the feet of the one I idolise.
Like a nocturnal ox, of water and fallow land,
who longs to be the object of idolatry,
I confront your shoes and their surroundings,
and made from carpets and of kisses made
I kiss your heel as it wounds me, and sow it with flowers.
I place relics of my species
at your biting heel, at your step,
and I am always ahead of your step
so that your unfeeling foot can spurn
all the love I raise up towards it.
Wetter than the face of my weeping,
when the glassy sheep bleats from the ice,
when winter closes your window
I come down to your feet like a wide-winged hawk,
with wing stained and heart of earth.
I come down to your feet like a melted branch
of honey, humble, trampled on and alone,
a spurned heart fallen
in the form of seaweed and in the shape of a wave.
As mud in vain I turn myself into a butterfly,
as mud in vain I pour forth my arms,
as mud in vain I bite your heels,
giving you with wounded, flapping wings
toads like convulsing hearts.
As soon as you tread on me, as you place
the image of your footprint upon me,
the bipartite armour which bounds my mouth
in pure, living flesh,
breaks up and disintegrates,
and in pieces it begs you to keep pressing down on it
your mad, free hare’s foot.
Its silent skin bunches up,
the sobs shake their branches
of cerebral wool beneath your step.
And you go by, and it is left
burning its winter candle before the west wind,
a martyr, a jewel, and pasture for the wheel.
It is tired of submitting to the daggers
of rolling cart-wheels and hooves,
and you should fear that the mud will give birth to animals
of corrosive skin and vengeful nails.
Fear that when the moment comes the mud will grow,
fear that it will grow and rise up and cover tenderly,
tenderly and jealously,
your reed-like ankle, my torment,
fear that it will flood your lily-like leg
and grow higher and ascend to your brow.
Fear that it will rise up, blown by the hurricane
from the soft territory of winter
and explode and thunder and deluge,
hard yet tender, upon your blood.
Fear an assault of offended foam
and fear a cataclysm of love.
Before it is consumed by drought
the mud has to get its own back on you.
13: No me conformo, no: me desespero
El rayo que no cesa, 1936
I do not accept, no: I despair
Unceasing lightning
I do not accept, no: I despair
as if I were a hurricane of lava
in the prison of a captive almond
or in the hanging cell of a goldfinch.
To kiss you was to kiss a wasp’s nest
which nails me to the torment and un-nails me
and digs a funeral pit and digs it
within my heart where I am dying.
I do not accept, no: too long have I spent
idolising the image of your kiss
and following along the trail of your aroma.
Buried alive through weeping,
a revolution within a bone,
a beam of light am I, trapped in a flask.
14: Como el toro he nacido para el luto
El rayo que no cesa, 1936
Like a bull I was born to grieve
Unceasing lightning
Like a bull I was born to grieve
and to suffer, like a bull I am marked
by an infernal iron on my side
and as a male by a fruit in my groin.
Like a bull my outsize heart
finds everything tiny,
and in love with the face of a kiss,
like a bull I challenge your love for it.
Like a bull I grow with punishment,
my tongue is bathed in heart’s blood
and around my neck I bear a noisy storm.
Like a bull I follow you and keep on following you,
and you leave my desire on a sword,
like a bull, tricked, like a bull.
15: Elegía a Ramón Sijé
El rayo que no cesa, 1936
Elegy to Ramon Sijé
Unceasing lightning
(In Orihuela, his town and mine, death has taken from me,
as if struck by lightning, Ramón Sijé, with whom I shared so much love.)
I want to be, crying, the peasant
that works the earth you occupy and fertilise,
companion of my soul, so soon.
My grief without instrument feeds
the rains, makes horns and organs sound,
and to the dispirited poppies
I will give your heart as food.
So much pain gathers in my side,
that it even pains me to breathe.
A hard slap, a frozen blow,
an invisible and murderous stroke of the axe,
a brutal shove has brought you down.
There is nothing longer than my wound,
I weep for all my misfortunes
and I feel more for your death than for my own life.
I walk on the stubble of the dead,
and with warmth from no-one and unconsolable,
I make my way from my heart to my daily business.
So soon death has risen up in flight,
so soon dawn has dawned,
so soon you are rolling on the ground.
I cannot forgive that lover, death,
I cannot forgive thoughtless life,
I cannot forgive the earth, nor the void.
In my hands I raise a storm
of strident stones, bolts of lightning and axes,
thirsting and hungering for catastrophes.
I want to scrape at the earth with my teeth,
I want to split the earth apart bit by bit
with dry, hot bites.
I want to mine into the earth until I find you
and kiss your noble skull
and take your shroud from you and bring you back.
You will come back to my garden and my fig tree:
among the high flowery trellises
your soul will flit like a bee in its hive
sewn with the wax of angels.
You will come back to the murmuring
of farm-workers at their beloveds’ windows.
You will cheer up the shadow over my eyebrows,
and from either side your beloved and the bees
will argue over your blood.
Your heart, now wrinkled velvet,
calls my greedy lovers’ voice
to a field of foaming almonds.
I want to be with you under the winged souls
of the roses of the cream-coloured almond tree,
for we have many things to talk of,
companion of my soul, my companion.
10 January 1936
16: Soneto final
El rayo que no cesa, 1936
Final sonnet
Unceasing lightning
For plucking the feathers from glacial archangels,
the snowfall, lilywhite and slender-toothed,
is condemned to the weeping of springs
and the despair of streams.
So it can diffuse its soul in metal,
so it can give iron its pearly brilliance,
fire is dragged by torrential blacksmiths
to the pain of intemperate anvils.
To the painful prick of the thorn,
to the fatal despondency of the rose
and to the corrosive action of death
I find myself thrown, and so much ruin
is for no other misfortune or reason
than for loving you and only for loving you.
17: Sino sangriento
1936
Bloody fate
From blood to blood I come
like the sea from wave to wave,
poppy-coloured is my soul,
luckless poppy is my destiny,
and I move from poppy to poppy
to be pierced on the horns of my fate.
There was a creature that came
from a field sown with nothingness,
and there was more than one that came,
under the sign of an angry star
and an evil, turbulent moon.
A bloodied foot painted by
an artist’s brush fell on my life,
there fell a jealous planet of saffron,
there fell an enraged red cloud,
there fell a badly wounded sea, there fell a sky.
I came with the pain of a knifing,
a knife was awaiting my arrival,
I was suckled on bitter milk,
the mad, murderous juice of a sword,
and for the first time I opened my eyes to the sun,
and what I saw first was a wound
and it was awful.
I have been followed by blood, that ravenous beast,
since I was brought into the world,
and even before I was uttered forth,
pushed out by my mother
into this covetous land,
which pulls me by my feet and my side,
ever more strongly, towards the grave.
I fight against blood, I argue
against all those scratching claws and all those veins,
and each body that I stumble upon and speak with
is another bubble of blood, another chain.
Although they are slight, the sharp tips of the oats
add to the marks on my breast:
it was stricken by a love for labouring the land,
and my fallow soul,
hopelessly, incurably wounded,
has furrowed deeply
into the plough’s yearnings for death.
All tools lie in wait for me:
the axe has left its
secret signs on me;
stones, desires and days
dug streams in my body
which are only swallowed up by sands
and melancholy.
The chains are ever greater,
the snakes are ever greater,
greater and more cruel their power,
greater their encircling rings,
greater their heart, greater mine.
In its bedroom, inhabited by emptiness,
save for the visits,
the pecking and the colour of a crow,
I keep a handful of letters, written passions,
a fistful of blood and a death.
Ay, blood, spreading like lightning,
ay roaring, climbing purple blotches,
a sentence resounding at all hours
under the the suffering anvil of my brow!
Blood gave birth to me and has made me its prisoner,
blood shrinks me and makes me a giant,
I am a building of blood and plaster
which crashes down of its own accord and raises itself up
on a scaffold of bones.
A bricklayer of blood, dead and red,
rains down on me, hangs his shirt up every day
around my eye,
and every night with my soul,
and even with my eyelids, I gather him in.
The blood grows, expands
the reach of its foliage on my breast,
which like an overgrown poplar gets out of control,
breaks up, and falls into many raging rivers.
I see myself suddenly
caught up in their angry currents,
and I swim desperately against them all
as against a fatal torrent of daggers.
I am dragged along by its wild flow,
it shatters me, sinks me, crashes me,
I flail about with my hands, trying to get away,
and my arms leave me and follow after it,
and my yearnings follow with my arms.
I will let myself be broken up and dragged along,
since that is how my life is ordered
by my blood and its tides,
by bodies and by my bloodied star.
I will be a single, lengthy wound,
until, at length, I become
a corpse of spray: wind and nothing.
18: Vientos del pueblo me llevan
Viento del pueblo, 1937
Winds of the people carry me along
Wind of the people
Winds of the people carry me along,
winds of the people pull me along,
they sprinkle my heart about
and bring air to my throat.
Oxen bow down their brows,
impotent and meek,
when punished:
lions raise theirs
and at the same time they inflict punishment
with their clamorous claws.
I am not from a people of oxen,
I am from a people who embody
ancient settlements of lions,
high passes of eagles and mountain ranges of bulls
bearing pride as their flag.
Oxen never prospered
on the barren plains of Spain.
Who said they would throw a yoke
round the neck of this race?
Who has ever yoked or hobbled
a hurricane,
or who has held lightning
prisoner in a cage?
Asturians of bravery,
Basques of reinforced stone,
Valencians of joy
and Castilians of soul,
worked like the earth
and with the grace of wings;
Andalusians of lightning
born amongst guitars
and forged on the
torrential anvils of tears;
Extremadurans of rye,
Galicians of rain and calm,
Catalans of firmness,
Aragonese of age-old caste,
Murcians of dynamite
planted like fruit trees,
Leonese, Navarrans, masters
of hunger, sweat and the axe,
kings of the mines,
lords of labour,
men who, amongst the roots,
like valiant roots yourselves,
go from life to death,
from nothing to nothing:
there are people who, like weeds,
want to put a yoke on you,
a yoke which you must leave
broken across their backs.
Twilight of the oxen
dawn is breaking.
Oxen die clothed
in humility and the smell of the stable:
eagles, lions
and bulls die clothed in pride,
and behind them, the sky
neither clouds over nor comes to an end.
The death-agony of oxen
has a small face,
that of the male animal
enlarges all of creation.
If I die, may I die
with my head held high.
Dead and twenty times dead,
my mouth against the wild grass,
I will have my teeth clenched
and my jaw resolute.
Singing I await death,
for there are nightingales that sing
above the guns
and in the midst of battles.
19: El niño yuntero
Viento del pueblo, 1937
Child of the plough
Wind of the people
Flesh of the yoke, he was born
more humbled than handsome,
with his neck plagued
by the neck-yoke.
He is born, like a tool,
destined to receive the blows
of a discontented land
and an unsatisfied plough.
Amongst pure, living cow dung,
he brings into life
a soul the colour of olives,
now old and silent.
He begins to live, and he begins
to die bit by bit
raising the crust
of his mother with the yoked oxen.
He begins to feel, and he feels
life is like a war,
and in his fatigue he knocks
against the bones of the earth.
He cannot count his age,
yet he knows that sweat
is a solemn crown
of salt for the labourer.
He works, and whilst he works,
serious and masculine,
he is anointed with rain and bedecked
with cemetery flesh.
Made strong by repeated blows,
and burnished by the sun,
with an ambition for death
he breaks the bread for which he has fought.
With each new day he is
more like a root, less like a human being,
listening to the voice of the grave
beneath his feet.
And like a root he sinks down
slowly into the earth
so that the earth can flood
his brow with peace and bread.
I am pained by this hungry child,
a skeleton in skin,
and his ashen life
turns over my soul of oak.
I see him plough the stubble,
and devour a scrap of food,
and declare with his eyes
why is he flesh of the yoke.
His plough strikes at my chest,
his life at my throat,
and it pains me to see the earth
so great, so bare beneath his feet.
Who will save this little child,
smaller than an oat grain?
Where is the hammer that will come forth
and smash this chain?
May it come from the hearts
of labouring men,
who before they are men are
and have been children of the plough.
20: Aceituneros
Viento del pueblo, 1937
Olive pickers
Wind of the people
Andalusians of Jaén,
proud olive pickers,
tell me from your soul: who,
who raised up the olive trees?
They were not raised up by nothing,
nor by money, nor by the master,
but by the silent earth,
by work and by sweat.
Together with pure water
and together with the planets,
these three gave beauty
to the twisted trunks.
Rise up, silver haired olive tree,
they said at the foot of the wind.
And the olive tree raised
a powerful hand as its foundation.
Andalusians of Jaén,
proud olive pickers,
tell me in your soul: who
suckled the olive trees?
Your blood, your life,
not that of the exploiter
who grew rich on the
generous wound of sweat.
Not that of the landowner
who buried you in poverty,
who trod on your brow,
who made you bow your head.
Trees which your effort
brought into the broad light of day,
provided the bread
eaten only by someone else.
How many centuries of olives,
with your feet and hands kept captive
from sun to sun and moon to moon,
weigh down on your bones!
Andalusians of Jaén,
proud olive pickers,
my soul asks: to whom,
to whom do these olive trees belong?
Jaén, rise up bravely
on your stony, moon-like land,
do not be a slave
along with all your olive groves.
Within the clarity
of the oil and its aromas,
they proclaim your liberty
the liberty of your hillsides.
21: Cancioìn del esposo soldado
Viento del pueblo, 1937
Song of the soldier husband
Wind of the people
I have peopled your belly with love and seed,
I have prolonged the echo of blood to which I respond
and I rest above the furrow as the plough rests:
I have reached the deepest point.
Dark-haired woman of high towers, high light and high eyes,
wife of my skin, great drink of my life,
your maddened breasts jump towards me
like an unborn hind.
You seem to me to be a delicate glass,
I fear that you will break at the slightest touch,
and I will reinforce your veins with my soldier’s skin
like a bursting cherry tree.
Mirror of my flesh, sustenance of my wings,
I give you life in the death they give me, and which I do not accept.
My love, my love, I love you beseiged by bullets,
sought out by lead.
Upon the ferocious coffins, lying in wait,
upon the dead themselves, without hope nor grave,
I love you, and I yearn to kiss you with my breast
deep in the dust, my love.
When by the fields of combat I think of you,
and your face does not cool nor soothe my brow,
you come towards me like a huge mouth
of hungry teeth.
Write to me in the battle, sense me in the trenches:
here with my gun I invoke and concentrate on your name,
and I defend your poor woman’s belly which waits for me,
and I defend your child.
Our child will be born with its fist clenched,
wrapped in a clamour of victory and guitars,
and I will leave at your door my soldier’s life
with its fangs and claws.
It is necessary to kill to keep on living.
One day I will come to the shade of your far-away hair,
and I will sleep on the starched, crackling sheet
sewn by your hand.
Your unrelenting legs go straight towards birth,
and your unrelenting mouth with its untamable lips,
and whilst I am in a solitude of explosions and breakthroughs
you tread a path of unrelenting kisses.
The peace that I am forging will be for our child.
And in the end, your heart and mine will shipwreck
in an ocean of inevitable bones, and all that remains will be
a woman and a man worn out with kisses.
22: Cancioìn primera
El hombre acecha, 1939
First song
Man lies in wait
The fields retreated
when they saw the man
angrily rush forward.
What a chasm opens up
between olive tree and man!
The animal that sings:
the animal that can
weep and put down roots,
has remembered his claws.
Claws which he clothed
in gentleness and flowers,
but which, in the end, he bares
in all their cruelty.
They crackle in my hands.
Get out of their way, child.
I am prepared to sink them,
prepared to cast them,
into your tender flesh.
I have reverted to the tiger.
Get out of the way, or I will destroy you.
Today love is death,
and man lies in wait for man.
23: El herido
El hombre acecha, 1939
The wounded man
Man lies in wait
For the wall of a field hospital
I
The wounded stretch across the fields of battle.
And from that stretched-out mass of fighters’ bodies
rise hot springs like a wheatfield, and they stretch up
in hoarse jets.
Blood always rains face up, towards the sky.
And the wounds ring out, just like horns,
when those wounds have the speed of flight,
the essence of waves.
Blood smells of the sea, it tastes of the sea and of a wine-cellar.
The cellar of the sea, of wild wine, explodes
there where the wounded man, throbbing, drowns,
and flowers, and finds himself.
I am wounded, look at me: I need more lives.
The life contained within me is too small for the great mission
of blood which I yearn to lose through my wounds.
Tell me who has not been wounded.
My life is a wound of joyful youth.
Have pity on he who is not wounded, who never feels
wounded by life, nor ever lays himself down to rest
happily wounded!
If we go with joy towards the hospitals,
they become orchards of half-open wounds,
of oleander flowering before the surgery
of blood-spattered doors.
II
For freedom I bleed, I fight, I keep on living.
For freedom, my eyes and my hands,
like a tree made flesh, generous and captive,
I give to the surgeons.
For freedom I feel more heart
than sand in my breast: my veins give foam,
and I go into the hospitals, and I go into the cotton sheets
as into lilies.
For freedom I tear myself away, with bullets,
from those who have toppled its statue into the mud.
And I tear myself away, with blows, from my feet, from my hands,
from my home, from everything.
For where empty eye-sockets dawn,
freedom will place two stones looking towards the future,
and will make new arms and new legs grow
in the felled flesh.
Relics of the body I lose with each wound
will sprout again with wings of sap that has no autumn.
For I am like the felled tree, I sprout again:
for I still have life.
24: Canción última
El hombre acecha, 1939
Last song
Man lies in wait
Painted, not empty:
my house is painted
in the colour of the great
sufferings and misfortunes.
It will return from the weeping
to which it was carried off
with its deserted table
with its dilapidated bed.
Kisses will flower
on the pillows.
And around the bodies
the sheet will twist
like a climbing plant of the night,
intense and perfumed.
Hatred will be muffled
behind the window.
The claw will be gentle.
Allow me this hope.
25: Vals de los enamorados y unidos hasta siempre
Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, 1942
Waltz of lovers, united for ever
Songs and ballads of absence
They never left
the garden of the embrace.
And, by the red rosebush
of kisses, they rolled.
Hurricanes tried
resentfully to separate them.
And sharp blades
and rigid bolts of lightning.
They raised up the earth
with their pale hands.
They measured precipices,
driven by the winds
between exhausted mouths.
They went from one shipwreck to another,
ever deeper in
with their bodies, their arms.
Hunted down, sunk,
completely abandoned
by memories and moons,
by Novembers and Marches,
they were blown about
like lightwieght dust:
blown about,
but always embracing.
26: El sol, la rosa y el niño
Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, 1942
The sun, the rose and the child
Songs and ballads of absence
The sun, the rose and the child
were born flowers of one day.
The suns, flowers, children, of each day
are born anew.
Tomorrow I will not be:
the true me will be another.
And I will not be, except
in whoever wishes to remember.
Flower of a day is the greatest
at the foot of the smallest.
Flower of light, is lightning,
and flower of the moment, time.
Amongst flowers you went.
Amongst flowers I remain.
27a: Tierra. La despedida
Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, 1942
Earth. A farewell
Songs and ballads of absence
Earth. A farewell
is always a death agony.
Yesterday we said farewell.
Yesterday we were in death agony.
Earth in between.
Today we die.
27b: Por eso las estaciones
Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, 1942
That is why stations
Songs and ballads of absence
That is why stations
taste of death, and ports.
That is why when we leave
dead leaves fall from handkerchiefs.
Living corpses are we,
on the horizon, far away.
27c: Cada vez más presente
Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, 1942
Ever more present
Songs and ballads of absence
Ever more present.
As if a swift ray of light
were bringing you to my breast.
As if a slow ray,
slow.
Ever more absent.
As if a distant train
were passing along my body.
As if a black boat,
black.
28a: Llegó con tres heridas
Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, 1942
He arrived with three wounds
Songs and ballads of absence
He arrived with three wounds:
that of love,
that of death,
that of life.
With three wounds he comes:
that of life,
that of love,
that of death.
With three wounds, I:
that of life,
that of death,
that of love.
28b: Escribí en el arenal
Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, 1942
I wrote in the sand
Songs and ballads of absence
I wrote in the sand
the three names of life:
life, death, love.
A wave from the sea,
so many times lapping gently back and forth,
gusted in and rubbed us out.
29: Ausencia en todo veo
Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, 1942
Absence in everything, I see
Songs and ballads of absence
Absence in everything, I see:
your eyes reflect it.
Absence in everything, I hear:
your voice sounds just in time.
Absence in everything, I breathe:
your breath smells of grass.
Absence in everything, I touch:
your body becomes deserted.
Absence in everything, I taste:
your mouth sends me into exile.
Absence in everything, I feel:
absence, absence, absence.
30: A mi hijo
Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, 1942
To my son
Songs and ballads of absence
You have refused to close your eyes, my dead one,
open before the sky like two swallows:
their colour, June-crowned, is now dew
as it leaves certain regions of the morning.
Today, which is a day dark as under the earth;
rainy, as under the earth, deserted,
with the sunless damp of my future body,
I want to have buried you, as under the earth.
Since you died, the mornings, wrenched by fire
from your sun-like eyes, bring no hope:
October hurled itself against our windows,
you gave way to Autumn and it turned the seas to night.
You have been devoured by the sun, your only, deep, rival,
and the remote darkness which threw you, aflame, into the world;
it pushes you, light shining downwards, carrying you to the depths,
swallowing you up; and it is as if you had never been born.
Ten months in the light, circling the sky,
a sun that is dead, turned into night, buried, eclipsed.
Without seeing daylight your hair has withered;
with dawn at its side, your flesh has turned to evening.
The bird asks after you, body to the east,
new-born flesh needing dawn and joy;
child that knew only how to laugh, and for so long,
that only certain flowers die with your smile.
Absent, absent, absent like the swallow,
summer bird that avoids living at the foot of the ice:
swallow which opens its fine feathers, and, soon after,
is shipwrecked on the enemy scissors of flight.
Flower that was not able to harden its teeth,
nor attain the slightest sign of bravery.
Life like a leaf with new-born lips,
a leaf which slips away when it starts to make a sound.
The advice of the sea has been of no use to you . . .
I have just stuck a dagger into a tender sun,
buried a piece of bread in oblivion,
thrown upon eyes a fistful of nothing.
Green, red, dark brown: green, blue and golden;
the hidden colours of life, the fields of fruit,
the wreath of flowers, destined for your feet,
of sad dark blacks, stiff solemn whites.
My poor love, you are cornered: look, it is now day.
(Oh, eyes without sunset, forever in daybreak!)
But in your belly, but in your eyes, my love,
night keeps falling, in desolation.
31a: Tristes guerras
Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, 1942
Wretched wars
Songs and ballads of absence
Wretched wars
if not fought for love.
Wretched. Wretched.
Wretched weapons
if they are not words.
Wretched. Wretched.
Wretched men
if they do not die of love.
Wretched. Wretched.
31b: Menos tu vientre
Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, 1942
Except for your belly
Songs and ballads of absence
Except for your belly,
all is confused.
Except for your belly,
all is fleeting
future, barren,
murky past.
Except for your belly,
all is hidden.
Except for your belly,
all uncertain,
all at an end,
dust without world.
Except for your belly,
all is dark.
Except for your belly,
clear and deep.
32: Hijo de la luz y de la sombra
Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, 1942
Child of light and darkness
Songs and ballads of absence
1
(Child of darkness)
You are the night, my love: the night at the greatest
moment of its lunar, feminine power.
You are midnight: the concluding darkness
where sleep concludes, where love concludes.
Forged by the day, my burning heart
has a footstep as great as the sun, and takes it where you want,
with a solar impulse, with a supreme light,
highest point of mornings and evenings.
I will find your body when the night envelops us
in its greedy yearning for magnetism and power.
A feverish, starry feeling engulfs me,
sets my bones on fire with a shudder.
The breeze of the night disturbs your breasts,
and its shock disturbs the bodies and overturns them.
In a storm of maddened beds,
it eclipses the couples, turns them into a single block.
The night has lit up like a deaf bonfire
of mineral flames and dark challenges.
And all around the darkness beats like
the spreading souls of wells and wine.
Now the darkness is a closed nest, incandescent,
a visible blindness cloaking those who love;
now it provokes a blindly closed embrace,
now it gathers into its caves all that light spills out.
Darkness asks for, demands, beings who intertwine,
kisses that stud it with long stars of lightning,
emboldened, beaten mouths, tightly gripping,
murmurs that make music from their silent lethargies.
It asks that you and I lay down upon the blanket,
you and I upon the moon, you and I upon life.
It asks that you and I burn, smelting together in our throats
the trembling earth with all the firmament.
The child is in the darkness that gathers together stars,
love, bone-marrow, moon, clarity in shadows.
It bursts forth from its laziness and its holes,
and from its solitary and spiritless cities.
The child is in the darkness: from darkness he bubbles forth,
and at his origin the stars infuse a seed,
a milky juice, a warmly beating flow,
which will make his bones turn towards sleep and woman.
Darkness is moving its heavenly forces,
darkness is stretching out its star-studded shadows,
overturning couples and making them man and wife.
You are the night, my love. I am midday.
II
(Child of light)
You are the dawn, my love: you receive
the first of the light, as the hours of your brow open.
Determined to shine brightly, as it opens, it lights up
your body. Your insides forge the rising sun.
Centre of clear skies, the great hour awaits you
on the threshold of a fire burned by fire itself:
I await you, leaning like wheat at the threshing ground,
placing our house in the centre of the light.
Night detaches itself from dark pools,
and submerges itself in pools where it has put down roots.
And you open yourself up to luminous birth, between walls
which scratch against you like stony wombs.
The great hour of birth, the most resounding hour:
clocks burst when they hear your howl,
all the doors of the world, of the dawn, open,
and the sun is born in your belly, where it found its nest.
The child was first shadow and clothing sewn together
by your deep heart, from your deep hands.
With shadows and with clothes he anticipated his life,
With shadows and with clothes of human seed.
The shadows and the clothes that were uninhabited, deserted,
have been populated by a noisy child, a movement,
who opens the doors wide in our house
and with his shouting occupies its shining seat.
Oh life: what beautiful suffering, so close to death!
Shadows and clothes are brought by the child you name.
Shadows and clothes men carry through the world.
And always, they leave behind them shadows: clothes and shadows.
Child of the dawn are you, child of midday.
And your light will shine on all things,
whilst your mother and I go about our suffering,
asleep and awake, carrying love on our backs.
I speak and my heart comes out on my breath.
If I did not say how much I love, I would choke.
With lavender and resins I perfume your room.
You are the dawn, my love. I am midday.
III
(Child of light and darkness)
Woven, engraved, in the dawn, two honeycombs
cannot hold back the honey on the teats.
Your breasts in the dawn: maternal founts,
they fight and knock into each other with streams of white.
Your veins, my love, have overflowed like moons,
and flood the house, which oozes the taste of you.
And you seem to be sprouting from a village of beehives,
you, a whole hive of foamy milk.
Your blood seems to be all sweetness,
hard-working bees filtered through your pores.
Next to you, I hear a clamour of milk, of flood, of wedding
and you are filled by the sounds of flowing streams.
Plentiful woman, in your belly I bury myself.
Your plentiful belly will be my grave.
If my bones were burned in the flame of the forge,
your face would be seen engraved upon them.
We remain for ever fused in our child:
fused together as our voracious desires yearn:
in one branch of time, of blood, our two branches,
in one sheaf of caresses, of hair, our two sheaves.
The hearts of the dead, with a frozen fire that burns,
beat obstinately next to the living.
Our child comes to occupy the fields and the house
which you and I abandon, whilst we remain close by.
We will make of this child sustenance and regeneration,
and he will turn our flesh into fundamental matter:
where his soul is sensed by hands and breath
propellers will turn, agriculture will live.
He is a being made from our two beings;
he will ensure that this life is not brought down,
from our two mouths he will make a single sword
and two eternal arms from our four arms.
I do not love you for yourself alone: I love you for those from whom you come
and for those that will come from your belly tomorrow.
For I have been given the human race as my inheritance,
and the family of our child will be the human race.
Carrying love on our backs, asleep and awake,
we shall continue to kiss each other in the depths of our child.
When you and I kiss, our dead kiss too,
and so do the first inhabitants of the world.
33: Antes del odio
Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, 1942
Before hatred
Songs and ballads of absence
I am a kiss, shadow with shadow.
Kiss, pain with pain,
for having fallen in love,
heart without heart,
with the shadowless
breath, with all of creation.
Thirst with water in the distance,
but thirst all around.
Heart in a glass
from which I alone drink,
and no-one else drinks,
no-one knows its taste.
Hatred, life: so much hatred
only because of love!
I cannot caress you
with the hands given to me
by the fire of desire,
the yearning for ardour.
Many flying wings
now bring down on these hands
irons which surround my veins
and bite bitterly into them.
Because of love, life, brought down,
bird without remission.
Only because of love, hated.
Only because of love.
Love, your heavenly vault above
and I am always below, love,
with no other light than these yearnings,
with no other illumination.
See me here chained,
spat upon, without warmth,
at the foot of the most sudden,
most ferocious, darkness,
eating bread with a knife
like a good workman
and sometimes nothing but a knife,
only because of love.
Everything represented by
swallows, rising up,
clearness, width, air,
open space, sun,
wings flapping on the horizon,
buried in a corner.
Hope, sea, desert,
blood, rolling hills:
freedoms of my soul
clamouring for passion,
they parade along my body,
they do not stay there, no,
they just unfold,
only because of love.
For within the sad
garland of the chain,
of the constant taste
of prison guard, and firing squad,
and of the precipice lying in wait,
I stand tall, happy, free.
Tall, happy, free, free,
only through love.
No, there is no prison for man.
They cannot tie me down, no.
This world of chains
is small to me, and outside me.
Who can lock up a smile?
Who can wall in a voice?
In the distance you, completely alone,
lonelier than death, than me.
In the distance you, feeling
my prison in your arms:
in your arms where the heart
of our freedom beats.
I am free. Feel me free.
Only through love.
34: La boca
Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, 1942
The mouth
Songs and ballads of absence
Mouth which pulls my mouth along:
mouth which has pulled me:
mouth which comes from afar
to shine your light on me.
Dawn which gives my nights
a red and white splendour.
Mouth peopled with mouths:
bird full of birds.
Song which turns its wings
upwards and downwards.
Death reduced to kisses,
to thirsting for a slow death,
striking the bleeding cochineal
two tremendous blows of its wings.
The upper lip the sky
and the earth the other lip.
Kiss which rolls in the shadows:
kiss which keeps rolling
from the first cemetery
to the last stars.
Star of your mouth,
silent and closed,
until a touch from the heavens
makes its eyelids tremble.
Kiss which goes towards a future
of girls and boys,
who will abandon neither
streets nor fields.
How many buried mouths,
mouthless, we dig up!
I drink from your mouth for them,
from your mouth I drink to all those
who have fallen on the wine
of loving glasses.
Today they are memories, memories,
distant and bitter kisses.
I sink my life into your mouth,
I hear sounds of spaces,
and it seems as though infinity
has enveloped me.
I must kiss you again,
I must come back, I am sinking, falling,
whilst the centuries descend
towards the deep ravines
like a feverish snowstorm
of kisses and lovers.
Mouth which dug up
the brightest dawn
with your tongue. Three words,
three fires you have inherited:
life, death, love. There they are,
written on your lips.
35: Nanas de la cebolla
Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, 1942
Lullaby of the onion
Songs and ballads of absence
The onion is frost,
closed and poor:
frost of your days
and of my nights.
Hunger and onion:
black ice and
big, round frost.
In the cradle of hunger
my child lay.
With onion blood
he was suckled.
But your blood,
frosted with sugar,
onion and hunger.
A dark-haired woman,
in the shape of the moon,
spills out thread by thread
over the cradle.
Laugh, child,
drink the moon
when you need to.
Lark of my house,
keep laughing.
The smile in your eyes
is the light of the world.
Laugh so much
that when it hears you
space beats in my soul.
Your laughter makes me free,
gives me wings.
It relieves me of solitude,
tears away my prison.
Mouth that flies,
heart that on your lips
is a flash of lightning.
Your laughter is the most
victorious of swords.
Conqueror of flowers
and of larks.
Rival of the sun,
future of my bones
and of my love.
His flesh trembling,
quick moving his eyelids,
and the child redder
than ever.
So many goldfinches
rise, wings flapping,
from your body!
I awoke from childhood.
Never awake.
My mouth is sad.
Laugh always.
Always in your cradle,
defending laughter
feather by feather.
Creature of such high,
such lengthy, flight
that your flesh seems
like sifted sky.
If only I could
go back to the origin
of your journey!
At the eighth month you laugh
with five lilies.
With five tiny
ferocities.
With five teeth
like five adolescent
jasmins.
The frontier of kisses
they will be tomorrow,
when in your teeth
you sense a weapon.
You will sense a fire
running down from your teeth
thrusting towards your centre.
Fly child in the double
moon of the breast.
It is onion sad.
You are satisfied.
Do not give up.
May you not know what is happening
nor what comes to pass.
36: Casida del sediento
Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, 1942
Casida of the thirsty man
Songs and ballads of absence
Sand of the desert
am I, desert of thirst.
Your mouth is an oasis
where I cannot drink.
Mouth: oasis open
to all the sands of the desert.
A moist point in the midst
of a scorching world,
your body, yours,
can never belong to the two of us.
Body: a well closed
to one burned by thirst and the sun.
37: Eterna sombra
Cancionero y romancero de ausencias, 1942
Eternal darkness
Songs and ballads of absence
I who believed that the light was mine
now find myself thrown into darkness.
Ember of the sun, starry, fiery
joy of foam, of light, of desire.
Blood, light, rounded, mature:
swift yearning, with neither shape nor shadow.
Outside, light is buried in light.
I feel darkness alone shines on me.
Darkness alone. With no star. With no sky.
Beings. Bulks. Tangible bodies
within the flightless breeze,
within the tree of impossibilities.
Purple frowns, mourning passions.
Teeth thirsty to be red.
Darkness of absolute bitterness.
Bodies like blinded wells.
There is not enough space. Laughter has collapsed.
It is no longer possible to reach upwards.
The heart strains impatiently
to broaden the narrow blackness.
Flesh without direction which goes in waves
towards the sinister, vacant night.
Who is the ray of sunlight that can break in?
I search. I find no sign of day.
Only the glow of clenched fists,
the gleam of teeth lying in wait.
Teeth and fists from all sides.
Mountains close together, as if shaking hands.
Opaque is the struggle with no thirst for tomorrow.
Muffled heartbeats, so far away!
I am a prison with a window
over a great, roaring solitude.
I am an open window, listening,
trying to see life through the gloom.
But there is a ray of sunlight in the struggle
which always conquers darkness.
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