Viento del pueblo. Poesia en la guerra.

Descripción:

4to, pp. 154, [4], with a full-page photogravure portrait of Hernández and numerous photogravure illustrations in the text, probably by Tina Modotti; slightly toned, corners bumped, but a good copy, in the original printed wrappers, edges worn and chipped with loss, spine defective; bookplate of Stephen and Natasha Spender.First edition of a scarce collection of Civil War poems by the 'soldier-poet' Miguel Hernández, our copy from the library of Stephen Spender, who met Hernández in Madrid in the summer of 1937 and would champion and translate his work.Miguel Hernández (1910 1942) had been appointed 'commissar of culture' within the propaganda unit of the Republican army in 1936 on the basis of two poems published in El mono azul. One of them, 'Viento del pueblo', gave its name to the collection he was then planning, of twenty-five rousing, populist poems composed between September 1936 and July 1937. The photographs that accompanied them in print are probably by Tina Modotti, with whom Hernández was then in touch. In July 1937 Hernández was involved with the Second International Congress of Antifascist Writers, a conference held in Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia, and attended by, among others, Pablo Neruda, André Malraux, Octavio Paz, and Stephen Spender. Spender became a particular supporter, praising Hernández in a speech delivered there as 'an "international comrade", one who merits fame for being "a soldier of civilization and the moving and profound poet of this war"' (Rogers, Modernism and the New Spain (2012), p.176). Spender would later include his own translation of 'Recoged esta voz' (pp. 61 8 here) in his Spanish Civil War anthology Poems for Spain (1939). After the conclusion of the Civil War, Hernández attempted to flee to Portugal, but was arrested on the border and returned to Spain for imprisonment. His death sentence was commuted to thirty years in prison by Franco, fearful that Hernández would become another martyr like Lorca; but terrible conditions led to his death from tuberculosis in 1942. We find two copies in the UK (BL, CUL). Language: Spanish & Catalan. N° de ref. del artículo F1787.2

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