Mark Statman | Edward J. Hill

The Erasure of José María Hinojosa

Mark Statman

For a number of years, I’ve been interested in the work of Spain’s famed Generation of ‘27. This group of artists that included Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Joan Miró, Salvador Dali, and Luis Buñuel represented a collective flowering of culture unlike any in Spain’s history. My recent work has focused on the poets: García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, Miguel Hernández, and Vicente Aleixandre. These were men whose lives were dramatically changed by the demise of the Second Spanish Republic and by the Spanish Civil War. García Lorca was murdered in 1936 by the Nationalists. Miguel Hernández, dying of tuberculosis, had his life imprisonment sentence “commuted” by the Fascists, until he died, still in jail, in 1942. Cernuda and Alberti went into exile. Aleixandre somehow managed to survive Franco’s attempts to destroy Spanish culture and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977, two years after Franco’s death.

It was with some surprise that I discovered another poet of that generation, one whose name, voice, and presence had seemingly been erased and yet whose work, where I initially found it (two Spanish language websites to be exact, containing some twenty poems total), is as powerful and evocative as his contemporaries:José María Hinojosa. In biographies of others, his name comes up in passing (he was with Buñuel and Dali in Paris, he associated with Garcia Lorca in Madrid). Who was he? What had happened that this gifted poet was so unknown? Not only is his work uncollected and unselected in English, but for many years his work was out of print in Spain (a recent edition of his Obras Completas, edited by Alfonso Sanchez, was published in 2004, but even this edition is difficult to find). There is a two-volume collection, Poesias Completas, published in 1974 by littoral, a Spanish literary magazine Hinojosa helped found in the twenties. littoral itself has no copies but, fortunately, a few university libraries in the United States do, and I borrowed a set. Receiving these was like discovering treasure, buried gold. There are poems here that dance off the page, that draw one in, seductive.

Still, my question remained:  Why had Hinojosa so completely disappeared? Why had he seemingly been erased?

That story is in his story. Hinojosa was born in 1904 in rural Campanilla to a wealthy farming and ranching family. Catholic and conservative, he was, like Lorca and Alberti, drawn to the mystery of the Spanish campo, to its myths and legends. Eventually, his family moved to Malaga, where he excelled at school. In 1923, he went to study in Madrid, where he became part of the city’s growing artistic life. His family’s politics and religion would prevent him from studying at the famously progressive Residencia de Estudiantes (religion was the one subject forbidden in the curriculum); still, as a young poet, he couldn’t help being drawn to it: here he would find García Lorca, Buñuel, Dali.

Hinojosa, like many of the Generation of ’27, was strongly affected by the artistic influences coming from Paris. Of particular importance was Breton’s surrealist manifesto (1924). Like Lorca and Alberti, Hinojosa’s style underwent a significant change: he became less a poet of the campo and, with Poesia de Perfil (1926), we see an emerging surrealist following Breton’s ideas on the unconscious and Hegelian idealism. In 1927, Breton issued his second manifesto, in which he argued that a true surrealist must also be a communist. This argument ran counter to the beliefs of many surrealists, in particular the conservative, religious Hinojosa. Still, he took Breton seriously and in 1927 visited Stalin’s Soviet Union. Hinojosa returned disturbed with the “accomplishments” of the revolution. He continued his work as a poet however, publishing several books, including La Rosa de los Vientos (1928), La Flor de California (1928), and La Sangre en Libertad (1931). This was his last book of poetry—disenchanted with the Republic’s liberalism and connections with the Soviet Union, he began, by 1932, to work against it. As an artist, he became persona non grata, in particular with those very contemporaries who believed so strongly in the importance of unifying the Republic. Eventually, in 1936, he was imprisoned. On August 22, Republic supporters attacked the prison, assassinating Hinojosa, along with his father and brother. This murder took place only three days after the murder of García Lorca. There is nothing to suggest anything more than coincidence; it does, however, show how during this unstable, hopeful, and ultimately destructive period, crimes were committed by Republicans and Nationalists alike.

It is interesting and strange for me to translate the poetry of José María Hinojosa. His right-wing conservatism stands in marked contrast with my own left, progressive biases. But he is not a political poet, and to lose his work, to lose the poet, is an injustice I think must be prevented. The poems translated here come from his breakthrough Poesia de Perfil. They reveal a poet of innovation and imagination, who paid close attention to language and image, who seems a cross between the visions of surrealism and a Pound-like modernism, a poet who examines the world to find, in the ordinary, the mysterious.

Three Poems by José María Hinojosa, translated by Mark Statman