“There are documentary treasures that transcend their format and acquire incalculable value. This is the case of Miguel Hernández’s manuscript that, written on toilet paper and from prison, contains his last stories intended for his son.” It is José Carlos Rovira who speaks, curator of the exhibition that can be seen in the National Library of Spain, professor emeritus at the University of Alicante and professor of Latin American Literature.
The exhibition opened on Thursday in Madrid, with the title “Miguel Hernández: the poet who made toys. “Absences and last stories for his son.” The institutional event included the interventions of the curator, the director of the National Library, Ana Santos Aramburo, and the person in charge of the exhibition design, Ángel Rocamora. After the official opening ceremony yesterday, the exhibition opened to the public yesterday, Friday, October 6, and can be visited until January 7, 2024.
José Carlos Rovira described the exhibition as “a dream-tribute to the poet of Orihuela” that reflects the “emotional climate”, the sensations and moods of Miguel Hernández in his last years through the correspondence with his wife, Josefina Manresa, and the stories and toys he created from prison for his son. For his part, Ana Santos stated that “it is an evocative exhibition that is worth reflecting on, since it reflects Miguel Hernández’s idea of ??freedom and his desire to recover his life in his last years.”
Regarding the manuscript dedicated to her son, Rovira added that “this rudimentary booklet serves as a witness to the last months of the poet’s life, and also serves as a window to the future through the child. This is a dream-exhibition, in which the symbology fills the pieces in the showcases with life.
The exhibition has an exceptional exhibition design, by Rocamora Estudio, and revolves around that booklet with the stories The Dark Colt, A Home in the Tree, The Bunny and The Mancha Cat, thirteen sheets of toilet paper with four metaphors of freedom, a narrative allegory whose characters, especially from the animal world, live situations from which they long to free themselves.
To these stories are added two more in the exhibition, as detailed by José Carlos Rovira, belonging to Eusebio Oca, who was Miguel Hernández’s nursing partner in prison, “stories that he prepared in January 1942 for Miguel’s son Hernandez.”
Along with this material, the manuscript of two poems is exhibited (The man does not rest: who rests is his suit and I am still in the shadow, full of light: does the day exist?) that are part of the latest production by Miguel Hernández, The Songbook and ballads of absences, an unfinished work written at the end of the war and also from prison, and one of the most transcendent books of the poetic tradition of the 20th century, of which several different and main editions are exhibited.
In the midst of torment and uncertainty, of death sentences for “adherence to the rebellion”, of his sentence being commuted to “maximum prison”, of several transfers through penitentiary centers, the poet found a way to escape by making wooden toys for his son, and he tells it this way in his letters to his wife, epistolary material also present in the exhibition.
The curator details that “between play and poetic transcendence, Hernández is carrying out an exercise in saving the child, who in the rest of the poem is tomorrow, -my being that returns-, the universe that guides with hope. The child, one year and four months old, will be a main recipient of the father’s activity, and of the possibility of the future.”
Drawings, texts, objects loaded with meaning – like the milkmaid that the Hernández-Manresa couple used to communicate secretly – the exhibition immerses us in a family story that is the history of a country and is a story about war. Part of the exhibited material has been donated to the BNE by the family of Eusebio Oca and Ricardo Fuente.
