Homage to Catalonia

This 1936 newspaper fragment was found under the floorboards in my neighbour's house two years ago, when she was having work done. She gave it to me, knowing of my interest in the subject. See yesterday's blip. It's been eaten by woodworm and is pretty fragile, but I thought I'd bring it to my social history group next week, as a found object from the 1930s. The amazing women in the photograph are 'the women of Madrid', but the caption is mostly missing.

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My degree was in Spanish, which is how I came to be pronunciation adviser to the Stroud Football poets, and later got a walk-on part as an old woman giving an eyewitness account of the bombing of Guernica. The young Pablo Picasso experienced an earthquake as a child in Mallorca, and according to Alice Miller, this would account for the wobbly perspective in his (possibly) most famous painting, Guernica.

One of the poems we've been looking at:

A Letter from Aragon


This is a quiet sector of a quiet front.

We buried Ruiz in a new pine coffin,
But the shroud was too small and his washed feet stuck out.
The stink of his corpse came through the clean pine boards
And some of the bearers wrapped handkerchiefs round their faces.
Death was not dignified.
We hacked a ragged grave in the unfriendly earth
And fired a ragged volley over the grave.

You could tell from our listlessness, no one much missed him.

This is a quiet sector of a quiet front.
There is no poison gas and no H. E.

But when they shelled the other end of the village
And the streets were choked with dust
Women came screaming out of the crumbling houses,
Clutched under one arm the naked rump of an infant.
I thought: how ugly fear is.

This is a quiet sector of a quiet front.
Our nerves are steady; we all sleep soundly.

In the clean hospital bed, my eyes were so heavy
Sleep easily blotted out one ugly picture,
A wounded militiaman moaning on a stretcher,
Now out of danger, but still crying for water,
Strong against death, but unprepared for such pain.

This on a quiet front.

But when I shook hands to leave, an Anarchist worker
Said: 'Tell the workers of England
This was a war not of our own making
We did not seek it.
But if ever the Fascists again rule Barcelona
It will be as a heap of ruins with us workers beneath it.'

John Cornford, d. 1936


copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.