He was seen walking only with Her,
and unafraid of her scythe.
– The sun now on tower after tower, hammers
on anvils – anvil on anvil, of the forges.
Federico was speaking
flattering Death. She listened.
‘Yesterday in my verse, friend,
the clap of your dry palms sounded,
you gave ice to my song, your silver
scythe’s edge to my tragedy,
I’ll sing to you of your wasted flesh,
your empty eyes,
your hair the wind stirs,
the red lips where you were kissed…
Now as ever, gypsy, my death,
how good to be alone with you,
in this breeze of Granada, my Granada!
— Antonio Machado, The Crime Was in Granada.
This month I’m attempting “Chronicles of Short Books”, where I take small books by big writers and attempt to.. supplement them. I’m not quite sure how this works yet; broadly, I aim to stay faithful to the authors’ perspectives, but necessarily not to their knowledge. My cards have been stormy lately, there is much war and death in them, and I recommend buckling down for gloomy posts. But I’m guessing you lot don’t particularly fancy methodological disquisitions, so let’s move right on.
Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, the small book that changed my life forever, will begin the series in the next post. It was because of Looking Back on the Spanish War thatI went onto read Robert Fisk’s Great War for Civilisation, the biggest big-book of my young and sorry life. Between them, Orwell and Fisk taught me that the world around me demanded considerably more attention than I accorded it, and my tryst with non-fiction evolved into a full-blown affair.
This post records the poets and volunteers the Spanish war immortalised, for this was a war of illusions, and they were the ones who pierced it best.
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