The year of Miguel Hernández

By Xènia Nogué

2010 was the year of Miguel Hernández year as we celebrated the hundredth anniversary of his birth. To mark the occasion, on September 23rd Joan Manel Serrat launched a new CD with 13 songs, all of them based on the poems of Hernández. The CD is called “Hijo de la luz y de la sombra”, after one of his best poems.

Miguel Hernández was a poet born in 1910 in a little village called Orihuela. He studied in a Jesuit school. He published his first book of poetry at the age of 23 and by the time of his death he had written 500 pages of poems. After his death he became more and more famous. When he was young, he admired the Spanish Baroque lyric poet Luis de Góngora. On March 9th 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, he married Josefina Manresa Marhuenda. They met when he was in Orihuela in 1933 and they had two children: Miguel Ramón and Manuel Miguel, although his first son died a year after his birth. Hernández was put in jail many times because he was an anti-fascist. While in prison he wrote a lot of poems, which were kept by the jailers. Before his death he wrote on the wall of the prison sickbay: "Goodbye, brothers, comrades, friends: let me take my leave of the sun and the fields". He died of tuberculosis in 1942.

The poet's works include: Perito en lunas (1934), El rayo que no cesa (1936), Vientos del pueblo me llevan (1937), El hombre acecha (1938-1939), Cancionero y Romancero de Ausencias (incomplete, 1938-1942).