Concha Méndez with her husband Manuel Altolaguirre
Concha Méndez. Josefina de la Torre. Rose Chacel. Carmen Conde. Ernestina de Champourcin. These are names one rarely hears mentioned in connection with the Generation of ’27. Yet these Spanish women were all writing in the ’20s and ’30s and beyond. Their poems have been very difficult for me to locate, even here in Spain. One of the problems with women poets is that as soon as they married, they were no longer seen for themselves, but only as the wife of ——.
Concha Méndez (1898-1986), who was friends with Lorca and was Luis Buñuel’s "secret" girlfriend before marrying a minor poet, has written quite movingly of the experience of having given birth to a stillborn child—a uniquely female experience. Here are three of her poems: the first, a simple song, the second one, a section from “Madrigal,” and the third, the 2nd section of her long poem about her devastating experience as a mother. Méndez did go on to have another child who survived.
With You
With you
on the plain,
with you in the sleeping dawn,
with you through the thicket
of some lost forest.
Where
would you have me go.
With you to the sea, to the wind,
to the highest mountain,
in the most solitary place;
or to the sterile sands
of the remotest desert.
Where would you have me go?
from
Inquietudes (1926)
Madrigal (excerpt)
Come to
me you who were wounded,
that in this bed of dreams
you will be able to lie down with me.
Come, it’s already midnight
and there is only a clock of forgetfulness
whose peals pour out
into my grieving breast.
I have been awaiting your return.
From an angle of my life
a voiceless voice has announced it to me.
. . . .
My anguish is made of fire.
A memory is going to kill me.
All the streets in shadow
throughout the city where I pass.
The flag of pain
in the windows and on the balconies.
Nor is there a voice that distracts me
and takes me out of myself.
Nor is there a voice between the voices
that pulls me out of this agony.
….
from Vida a Vida (1932)
Boy and Shadows (excerpt)
2
My blood
loosened itself to form your body.
My soul shared itself to form your soul.
And it was nine moons of total agony,
of days without rest and sleepless nights.
And it
was in the hour of seeing you that I lost you without seeing you.
What color were your eyes, your hair, your shadow?
My heart is a cradle that secretly watches over you
because it knows you existed and it carried you into life,
it will follow you swaying until my final hours.
from
Niño y Sombras (1936)
