“Después de todo, todo ha sido nada,
a pesar de que un día lo fue todo.
Después de nada, o después de todo
supe que todo no era más que nada.”
a pesar de que un día lo fue todo.
Después de nada, o después de todo
supe que todo no era más que nada.”
“After all, everything has been nothing
even though one day it was all.
After nothing, or after all
I knew everything wasn’t more than nothing”.
Vida is the last poem of his book Cuaderno de Nueva York (1998) and the beautiful pain of someone who is arriving to his last days facing up to the only truth of our existence: all and nothing are two faces of the same coin. We cannot avoid the time passage so live take us to crash brutally against our own lies, that is, to pretend we are something else than simple life expressions. Life flows on within us without us, as George Harrison once sang.
José Hierro was born in Madrid in 1922 but his family soon moved to Cantabria when he was just two years old. There he studied for a technical degree which was interrupted by the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939. His first poems were published in the republican side against fascism for which he was jailed when the war was over and General Franco achieved the power. He was accused of being involved in an organisation for helping the political prisoners, one of them his own father.
After some years in prison, his poetry achieved an extraordinary maturity, something really unusual in a poet so young. He published Tierra sin nosotros and Alegría (1947). “Llegué por el dolor a la alegría. Supe por el dolor que el alma existe. Por el dolor, allá en mi reino triste, un misterioso sol amanecía”. The war years took him to work underground and finally to the prison, but all those experiences marked his spirit in an even more lively way. His poems are always full of intensity in a minimalist and clear style for which he received the Adonáis Prize in 1947.
After that recognition, he published more books and was honoured with more important prizes. Some years living in Valencia collaborating as a pictorial critic in radio programs and magazines, he finally moved to Madrid. He returned to his poetical work with Con las piedras, con el viento (1950) and Quinta del 42 (1953), and his poems had a deeper social critic but not in the realistic style that dominated the Spanish literature at that time which had a grey tone avoiding any conflict with the obscure violence of the Franco’s dictatorship. So, that realism was always an obliged subtle portrait. But Hierro walked different ways and drew his own traces with the same strength he showed through his face, hard but full of tenderness.
And that walk finished where it began, in Madrid in December 2002, and the ones who found a warm coat in his Cuaderno de Nueva York (1998) became orphans because in life all is nothing more than an echo born inside ourselves.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Poems by José Hierro
Photo by Alberto Schommer courtesy of Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao