The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) brought immense suffering to all Spaniards, but primarily to the Republicans who fought to defend Spain from Franco’s military-led fascists who eventually prevailed with support from Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and other outside groups. The suffering included not just the loss of loved ones in battle, but ongoing post-war hunger, homelessness, joblessness, uncertainty about the future, steady oppression, and both psychological and physical torture. In all, more than 500,000 Spaniards died in the war, about 200,000 of them Republicans killed in retribution after Franco took power. Franco would go on to rule over Spain until November 1975.
Front and center in the suffering were the Spanish poets who sided with Republicans. Frederico Garcia Lorca was assassinated at the start of the war and his body never found. Miguel Hernández died in prison under brutal conditions. During the war, future Nobel Prize-winning poet Vicente Aleixandre worked as a contributor to El Mono Azul, a Republican cultural magazine. Although he managed stayed in Spain after the war, the Franco regime banned his books from 1936 to 1944. Many other Spanish poets of the era were forced into exile.
While Franco aimed to control and suppress the arts during his time, some important works of art and literature came out of the war. Perhaps the most famous piece is Pablo Picasso’s Guernica — an eleven-feet-by-twenty-five-feet, monochromatic painting depicting the slaughter of civilians in the bombing of Guernica, which killed anywhere from 300 to 1,600 civilians (the numbers vary per report) and destroyed three-quarters of the city’s buildings. The painting was displayed at the Paris World’s Fair in 1937 then spent years traveling around the world. In the realm of literature, we have Ernest Hemmingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and his short story “The Old Man at the Bridge,” along with George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Hemingway served as a correspondent for the North America Newspaper Alliance during the war. Orwell signed up with the POUM, the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, to join in the fighting, He’d eventually get shot in the throat in front-line combat. Later, ee would write, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism as I understand it.”
Sinclair Lewis’s No Pasarán! (1937) took on the corruption of international capitalism based on events in the Spanish Civil War. Archibald MacLeish’s Air Raid (1942) was written in response to the horrific bombing of Guernica, .
Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote España en el Corazón / Spain in the Heart about life during the war years. The book was famously printed on improvised paper made from cloth and medical bandages near the battlefront.
In the U.S. and elsewhere, writers were determined to draw more attention to the war and support for the Republican cause. For an American audience, John Peale Bishop and Edna St. Vincent Millay produced And Spain Sings (1937), a collection of poems written by Spanish poets. Among the thousands of foreigners who signed up for the International Brigades to fight along Republicans were some other writers and poets. Years later, American poet Philip Levine wrote The Names of the Lost (1974), eulogizing many of those who died in the Spanish Civil War in defense of democracy.
I mention all this now because I’m currently reading Julian Zabalbeascoa’s 2024 novel, What We Tried to Bury Grows Here. I met Julian Zabalbeascoa at a reading in New Hampshire recently and was surprised to learn that his new novel is about the Spanish Civil War — a topic we don’t hear much about these days, at least in the U.S. There was time when this war caught the attention of the world, as noted above. And there was time when I was deeply taken by the Spanish poets of the mid-20th century, including many of those who wrote about and during the war. Their full-throttle approach to poetry seemed so different from contemporary American poetry of the time — more openhearted and somatic, with such metaphorically rich, earthy language. This is poetry in which you can feel the tears. It interested me, too, how deeply integrated Spanish poets were into the life of the nation — to the point that many fought in the war and were venerated for their unflinching poetic responses to the war and its aftermath.
Zabalbeascoa’s novel, like Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, aims to highlight the human experience in war time over the war’s political and ideological underpinnings, though the politics can’t help but seep through. Zabalbeascoa tells the story through numerous perspectives — a chorus of voices, really. The effect is one that underscores the varied and complicated responses the war elicited from the inside — with some characters trying to stay below the fascist radar and others embracing the imagined glory of fighting for democracy and The Second Spanish Republic. Ultimately, what makes the novel so moving is that no one remains unaffected. All the characters carry a level of doubt and uncertainty along with the pain and suffering. Some find their way through it all. Others don’t.
This is what war does. These are its scars.
I’m grateful for Zabalbeascoa’s novel. It’s not just that I think it’s a good novel, it also brought back for me my sense of the literature of that era. And, of course, it’s hard not to see/feel some parallels to our own times. Here in the U.S. (and elsewhere), the ongoing tensions between right- and left-wing political groups persist in creating tensions that are not easily solved and that impact daily life. In the U.S., the totalitarian leanings of Donald Trump and his cabal have succeeded in damaging our world-leading democracy and sewing internal conflict that, at the end of the day only seems benefits the powerful. This turn of events reminds me of what Orwell said of The Spanish Civil War:
“The broad truth about the war is simple enough. The Spanish bourgeoisie saw a chance of crushing the labor movement, and took it, aided by the Nazi’s and by forces of reaction all over the world.”
I don’t expect the U.S. to devolve into actual civil war, but it’s more than painful to witness the unraveling of our core democratic principles and laws, knowing that negative impact on the lives of so many here and abroad, and the damage it is doing to human society and the world’s natural environments. It’s also painful to see other Americans, who should know better, embrace the racism and hatred running through right-wing politics today. For those of us who believe in a true democracy — a more just, verdant, and peaceful world — there will a lot of cleaning up and rebuilding to do in the coming years.
Being a writer, I’ve also been thinking about the poetic and literary responses to the growing injustices — then and now. I was particularly taken by the work of Spanish Poet Miguel Hernández back in my college days. Zabalbeascoa’s novel offered a good excuse for me to revisit Hernández’s life and work — and consider his poetry in light of larger sphere of what poet Carolyn Forché called “the poetry of witness.”
Hernández, a self-educated shepherd boy from Easter Spain, joined the Republican resistance in 1936 to fight alongside others in defense of the Spain’s democratically elected government. He also worked as a writer and editor for Republican publications and wrote a steady stream of war-related poems. At the end of the war, Franco’s forces arrested Hernández as he tried to escape to Portugal. He would die in prison three years later of tuberculosis.
At one point, in a letter to his wife, Hernández described prison life this way:
“For the last several nights the rats have taken to wandering over my body while I sleep. The other night I woke up and had one at the side of my mouth. This morning I caught another one in the sleeve of my pullover, and every day I have to pick their dung out of my hair. Seeing my head full of rat shit, I say to myself: So this is what I’m worth now! Even the rats come and leave dung on the roof of our thoughts. That’s what is new in my life: rats. Now I have rats, lice, fleas, bedbugs, mange…. The corner I have for a home will soon be a positive zoological garden, or, maybe, a wild animal cage…”
Yet while prison life wore his body down, it never broke his spirit. Hernández never stopped writing poetry. For his commitment to his art, he would become one of the most influential Spanish poets. Timothy Balland, co-editor of Selected Poems: Miguel Hernández and Blas de Otero, described Hernández’s poems as “pinecones of poems” — compressed, resinous, fragrant. “Poems that haunt.” One poem that fits this description for me is “War,” composed in prison in 1942.
War
Old age in the towns.
The heart without an owner.
Love without any object.
Grass, dust, crow.
And the young ones?
In the coffins.
The tree alone and dry.
Woman like a stick
of widowhood across the bed.
Hatred there is no cure for.
And the young ones?
In the coffins.
Spanish poet Gabriel Celaya writes: “Miguel Hernández has transformed our poetry precisely because he was a poet who always spoke, as the Gospels say, ‘verily, verily.’”
There’s a heart-on-the-sleeve feel to his poems — war or no war. The non-war poems are wide-open emotive pieces that come as much from the body and soul as the mind. In an early pre-war poem, Hernández writes:
Today the only thing I have is the desire
to rip out my heart by the roots
and stick it underneath a shoe.
…
A love affair has left me with my arms hanging down
and I can’t lift them anymore.
Don’t you see how disillusioned my mouth is?
How unsatisfied my arms are?
It’s not surprising then that, when asked about what matters to him in writing poetry, he said. “I hate poetic games that are merely cerebral. I want manifestations of the blood and not those of reason, which ruins everything in its attitude of thinking ice.”
Hernández is not alone in this thinking about the importance of poetry in his day. And he’s not alone in his desire to lead less with the brain and more with the body and spirit. Many of the Spanish poets I’ve read are unabashed with their emotive, metaphoric lines. The love. The loss. The wishing. The hunger. The joy. The spiritual longing. The reaching through death and time and place to the spirits of friends and loved ones. In his poem “Sitting on Top of Corpses,” Hernández writes:
I want my voice to climb mountains,
descend to earth, and give out thunder.
“Poetry,” he wrote, “is not a matter of rhyme: it’s a matter of courage.”
It is this courage I’ve been thinking about lately. What does it mean to be a courageous poet?” For Hernández it meant staying true to his ideals and vision and never backing down in his writing, even when imprisoned, even when he learned of the assassination of other poets, even facing death. The best of his poems are, indeed, unflinching works of resistance, reminding us that art is essential in connecting us when the world around us goes awry — when power, as it tends to do, crosses the line into domination and suppression.
There are many poets around the world, of course, who have written powerful works of resistance and witness. Carolyn Forché’s poems about El Salvador come to mind. In addition to her own work, the two anthologies Forché has edited — Against Forgetting, Poetry of Witness and Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001 — include hundreds of poems written in opposition to political and social violence.
In our current times, there are plenty of poets globally who are stepping up to address a wide-range of injustices — particularly involving race, environmental degradation, and political violence. Here in the U.S., Jorie Graham Graham’s new book, Killing Spree, is a case in point — though Graham’s poems are less about the battlefield world and more about the large existential pain of knowing that we, collectively, under the reign of unquenchable capitalism, have reached an environmental, political, and social threshold from which we are unlikely to return. In one poem, she dares us:
Go ahead,
Try to posit /a future
As the New York Times review said of Graham’s new book, “There is no reassembling the wreckage.”
For those of us writing poetry today, I think it helps to remember the Spanish poets — Miguel Hernández and others — who did not flinch under the fascist onslaught. I almost added here “who wrote without fear,” but I have to imagine they felt fear at every turn, witnessing the atrocities of war, knowing they were marked for death or prison. We remember them today because they created moving works of art designed to help us not just think deeply about civilization and our own lives but feel the full emotional weight of being alive today. They ask us to contemplate how we carry ourselves, how we care for each other, how we respect the earth that gave us life and sustains us.
In his poem, “The Death of Miguel Hernández,” Vicente Aleixandre writes:
…They choked
that stream of light that used to bathe mankind.
That bursting, generous glory that might have
show us our destiny one day; that spoke
like flower, like sea, like feather or a star.
Yes hide, bury your heads. Sink them
in the ground now, dig a tomb for your own black thoughts,
and eat away your hands, your nails, the fingers
all of you used to smother the fragrant way he lived.
Aleixandre once said of Miguel Hernández that “he seemed to radiate a will for good.” But there was also something fierce in Hernández’s commitment to telling his truth in poems. Consider these lines from “Sitting on Top of the Corpses”:
I am here in order to live
as long as my soul is alive,
and I am here to die
when that time comes,
deep in the roots of the nation,
as I will be and always have been.
Life is a lot of hard gulps,
but death is only one.