Poetry
The Unceasing Lightning
El rayo que no cesa
Miguel Hernández · 1936
Synopsis
Some thirty poems, almost all sonnets, on a painful love: the beloved, idealised, is both the cause of the poet's suffering and the addressee of most of the pieces. The bull and the lightning bolt recur constantly as figures of this torment, and death accompanies love. The poet tests the form of the sonnet, taking up from one stanza to the next whole lines and words. Towards the end of the book, an elegy in tercets mourns a childhood friend, Ramón Sijé.
Context
Written in 1934 and 1935, the poems appeared in 1936 from Ediciones Héroe. After the Gongorism of his first book, the author adopts here a simpler language, close to the old songbooks and to Petrarch, in which traces of the earlier manner remain, inversions and humble objects. Commentators link the sonnets to several loves, among them Josefina Manresa, whom he later married, and the painter Maruja Mallo; the elegy to Ramón Sijé has become one of his most famous poems. In French, Monique-Marie Ihry produced a bilingual translation in 2024.
Who it is for
Tight sonnets, in a rhetoric still learned but more direct than those of the author's first book.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's most accomplished book; translated several times into French since 1989.
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