We explain who Miguel Hernández was, what his main literary works were and what his tragic fate was like during the Spanish Civil War.
Miguel Hernández wrote an important poetic work in his only 31 years of life.
Who was Miguel Hernandez?
Miguel Hernandez was a Spanish poet and playwrightbelonging to the so-called Generation of ’27 and, in chronological terms, to the Generation of ’36. He is remembered for his poetic work, of great importance within the framework of 20th century Spanish literature, and for his death in prison after the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), in which he fought on the side of the Spanish Republic.
Hernández’s poetry combines traditional Spanish lyrical forms with a twentieth-century subjectivity.Some of his books were censored and destroyed by the Franco dictatorship that emerged from the civil war, while Hernández himself was initially sentenced to death and then to life imprisonment after the war ended.
Hernández, like Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), is considered a cultural icon of the Second Spanish Republic and of the resistance to fascism. Numerous lyrical pieces have been written in his memory by later artists. Many of them have been musical settings of his most famous poems.
Birth and early years of Miguel Hernández
Miguel Hernández was born in Orihuela, Spain, on October 30, 1910.He was the third of five children born to Miguel Hernández Sánchez and Concepción Gilabert, a couple dedicated to goat farming. Three of his sisters died at a very early age, when Miguel was a child.
His early education took place in religious institutions, especially Jesuit schools such as Santo Domingo de Orihuela, whose authorities offered him a scholarship to pursue his high school studies, which his father, an authoritarian and conservative peasant, rejected.
From then on, Miguel had to dedicate himself fully to shepherding. In his spare time caring for the flock, however, he tried out his first poems..
The rest of Miguel’s training was self-taught.Around 1925 he met and became friends with the cleric Luis Almarcha Hernández (1887-1974), who was then a canon of the Cathedral of Orihuela and a professor at the local seminary, and thanks to him he had access to the works of the major poets of the Hispanic tradition, such as Saint John of the Cross (1542-1591), and of great authors of the Golden Age and classics, such as Virgil (70-19 BC).
Miguel’s growing interest in literary matters led him to frequent the city library and then a group of young writers, who ended up forming a literary group.From then on, Miguel himself, his friend Carlos Fenoll and his brother Efrén, as well as the poet Manuel Molina Rodríguez (1917-1990) and the writer and lawyer José Marín Gutiérrez (1913-1935), who later became known by the pseudonym Ramón Sijé, met regularly. With the latter, Miguel established a long and close friendship.
Hernández’s relationship with Sijé deserves special mention, not only because they were friends and literary collaborators throughout their lives, but because Hernández dedicated his poem “Elegía” to him, when Sijé fell ill and died in just ten days in December 1935. This text was set to music by Joan Manuel Serrat (1943-) in 1972 and is one of the best-known of Hernández’s poetic works.
The literary beginnings of Miguel Hernández
Miguel Hernández published his first book of poems, Expert in glassin 1933.
In 1931, Miguel Hernández bought his first typewriter and wrote his first published texts on it.which came out in The Town of Orihuelaa local weekly. He also wrote his first and only prize-winning text, a 138-line poem entitled Song to Valenciawhich earned him the award from the Artistic Society of the Orfeón Ilicitano, when he was barely 20 years old.
At the end of 1931, Hernández undertook his first trip to Madrid, with the plan of making his way into the national literary scene. There he met members of the Generation of ’27 and acquired the necessary experience to compose his first book of poems.In Madrid, however, he lived poorly and sought employment without success, so he returned to Orihuela in May of the following year.
Hernández published his first book of poems, Expert in glassearly 1933 and was invited by the University of Cartagena and the Ateneo de Alicante to participate in some literary readings. From there he went back to Madrid, where he obtained a job as a collaborator in the Pedagogical Missions of the Second Spanish Republic, a national plan for cultural and educational promotion on a large scale.
Shortly afterward he worked as an editor for the encyclopedia Bulls. Technical and historical treatisethe most extensive bullfighting treatise in history, thanks to the sponsorship of the writer José María de Cossío (1892-1977). With him, Hernández also established an important friendship, and Cossío was one of the greatest admirers and defenders of his work even after the poet’s death..
Hernández collaborated assiduously in the Magazine of the West Founded by José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), and In 1933 he began a love affair with the Spanish surrealist painter Maruja Mallo (1902-1995)to whom he dedicated a good part of his next collection of poems, The lightning that never stops (1936).
Both left-wing activists, they influenced each other and planned several of Hernández’s plays, such as The bravest bullfighter (1934) or The children of the stone (1935), in which they referred to the Casas Viejas Massacre and the October Revolution of 1934.
In December 1935 Ramón Sijé passed away and his early death left Hernández very dejected. He composed his famous “Elegía” (Elegy) for him, which earned applause from Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958) in the newspaper SunLikewise, in 1936, after the publication of his second collection of poems, Hernández caught the attention of Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) and Vicente Aleixandre (1898-1984), and began a brief period of greater poetic identification with surrealism.
That same year the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) broke out and Hernández’s poetry became openly committed to his political activism.
Miguel Hernandez in the Spanish Civil War
Miguel Hernández fought in the Civil War on the side of the Spanish Republic.
When the Spanish Civil War began, following the coup of Francisco Franco (1892-1975), Hernández was in his hometown of Orihuela. That summer he enlisted in the Republican side and in the Spanish Communist Party, and was part of the Fifth Regiment of Popular Militias.where he served as military political commissar from 1937 onwards.
That same year, in the midst of the conflict, he briefly returned to his village to marry the young Josefina Manresa (1916-1987), daughter of a civil guard from Orihuela, who played a vital role in preserving his poetic work after his death. The couple married on March 9, 1937 and settled in Alicante, despite the fact that the poet was in a constant state of mobilization..
Between December 1937 and February 1938, Hernández participated in the Battle of Teruel and on the Republican front in Jaén. His commitment to the war, however, did not distance him from culture: that year he participated in the II International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culturealong with literary personalities from the Hispanic world, such as the Peruvian César Vallejo (1892-1938), the Mexican Octavio Paz (1914-1998), the Cubans Nicolás Guillén (1902-1989) and Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980), and the Spaniards Antonio Machado (1875-1939) and Luis Cernuda (1902-1963), among others.
At the end of 1937, he also published his collection of poems Wind of the people and made his first trip to the Soviet Union, where he continued writing. In December of that year his first son, Manuel Ramón, was born. He died a few months after birth, and Hernández dedicated the poem “Hijo de la luz y de la sombra” (Son of Light and Shadow) to him. This text later became part of his last collection of poems: Songbook and ballads of absenceswhich he began writing in 1938 and which was published, unfinished, posthumously.
In 1939, Hernández’s second son, Manuel Miguel, was born in the town of Cox, in Valencia, where his wife was taking refuge with relatives. The war was ending and victory for the Francoist side was imminent.
That year Hernández joined the Sixth Republican Division, in Madrid, and published the poetry collection The man stalkswhich was almost completely destroyed by Franco’s forces after their victory. Only two copies survived the book burningAfter the fall of the Second Spanish Republic, Hernández went into hiding.
Life in prison and death of Miguel Hernandez
After the victory of the Francoist side, Hernández was sentenced to death.
The war ended in April 1939 and Hernández briefly returned to Orihuela. He was a wanted man, so he escaped through Andalusia to Portugal, from where he planned to flee to the American continent.However, he was betrayed and arrested by the Portuguese police, and the regime of António de Oliveira Salazar (1889-1970), close to Franco’s regime, handed the poet over to his political enemies.
Hernández was arrested at a border post and then transferred to the Huelva prison, where he endured beatings by the Falangist troops before being transferred to the Torrijos street prison in Madrid. While there, the then Chilean diplomat Pablo Neruda and his childhood friend, José María de Cossío, interceded on his behalf. Thanks to their help he briefly obtained freedom, but in September 1939 he was betrayed again and detained in the prison on the Plaza del Conde de Toreno in Madrid. There began his last years of life.
In prison, Hernández composed several well-known poems, such as “Nanas de la cebolla” and others that made up his Songbook and ballads of absencesThere he also met the Spanish playwright Antonio Buero Vallejo (1916-2000), with whom he shared his years of detention and who painted a famous portrait of the poet.
In 1940, Hernández was tried by a Francoist court martial and sentenced to death. His sentence, after the intercession of various Spanish and foreign intellectuals, was commuted to a 30-year prison sentence. The poet then began his journey through various prisons in Palencia, Arganzuela, Toledo and finally Alicante, often in deplorable conditions that seriously affected his health.
During his stay in Alicante, in 1941, he contracted typhus and tuberculosis.. Thanks to the mediation of his friends, he managed to receive specialized medical care in the prison infirmary, but it was too late. Dying, in the prison infirmary, he agreed to marry Josefina Manresa in church, since their civil union was no longer valid under the Franco regime.
Finally, On March 28, 1942, the poet Miguel Hernández died at the age of thirty…