A-Alberti-1

BHS, LXXIII (1996)

81

Rafael Alberti’s De un momentoa otro: The Matter of

Poetry, Politics and War

ROBERT G. HAVARD

University of Wales, Aberystwyth

La politique au milieu des intérêts d’imagination,c’est un coup de pistolet au milieu d’un concert.1

Yo me defino como un poeta de mi tiempo, de untiempo terrible.2

The quality of Alberti’s 1930s poetry is a matter of some debate. Many criticstake the view that after the peak of Sobre los ángeles in 1929 the poet wentinto sharp decline when he adopted the role of political agitator and that,essentially, in this period, he sacrificed his art for the sake of voicing tritecommunist propaganda.3 The purpose of this article is to put the oppositeview and to highlight the virtues of De un momento a otro which, I shallargue, is not only a major volume in its own right but one that developsorganically from the poet’s earlier work.

Leaving aside for a moment the issue of whether or not poetry is theproper genre for political commitment, we begin by noting the obvious: thatthe dismissive attitude towards Alberti’s 1930s poetry was fostered in partby factors outside the poetry, notably Franco’s long dictatorship which

1 Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1964), 380.2 Rafael Alberti; see José Luis Tejada, ‘Una entrevista con Rafael Alberti’, Gades.

Revista del Colegio Universitario de Filosofía y Letras de Cádiz, XII (1984), 19.3 Pieter Wesseling comments on negative critical responses to Alberti’s political poetry

in Revolution and Tradition: The Poetry of Rafael Alberti (Valencia/Chapel Hill: Albatros,1981), 47. In addition to the outright opposition of critics such as Ricardo Gullón and C. B.Morris, a dismissive attitude is implicit in Solita Salinas de Marichal, El mundo poético deRafael Alberti (Madrid: Gredos, 1975), which goes no further than Sobre los ángeles; inGeoffrey Connell, a committed albertista who looks no further than Sermones y moradas; andagain in Salvador Jiménez Fajardo who comments on just one Civil-War poem in MultipleSpaces: The Poetry of Rafael Alberti (London: Tamesis, 1984), 143-44. Besides Wesseling,recent admirers who comment in depth on Alberti’s political poetry include Judith Nantell,Rafael Alberti’s Poetry of the Thirties: The Poet’s Public Voice (Athens, Georgia: Univ. ofGeorgia, 1986) and Antonio Jiménez Millán, La poesía de Rafael Alberti (1930-39) (Cadiz:Diputación Provincial de Cádiz, 1984).

82 BHS, LXXIII (1996) ROBERT G. HAVARD

precluded favourable criticism in Spain, and the waning esteem ofcommunism which prompted many a change of heart, most famously inAuden who omitted as fine a poem as ‘Spain, 1937’ from his collected works.Not to be underestimated are the political prejudices of bourgeois critics onwhom a prickly Alberti was quick to turn the tables:

Bueno, yo creo que sobre mí ha habido mucho partidismo, y lo siguehabiendo, enorme. Yo creo que si yo no hubiera sido lo que soy y lo quepuedo pensar civilmente y políticamente, como quiera, pues yo hubieratenido seguramente ... libros críticos a patadas, como se hacen sobreGuillén y sobre Aleixandre. Yo siempre encuentro algún hijo de putacrítico que me tira a matar, sea como sea, y esas cosas proceden defondos oscuros, no son cosas claras, y esas cosas sí que soncomprometidas.4

An Auden-like renunciation was not possible for Alberti, while Guillén’sresponse of turning his head away towards the positive things in life hadnever been a legitimate option:

Yo creo que soy un hijo de mi tiempo, que yo quisiera, lo he dicho muchasveces, ser un poeta de la paz, un poeta de lo bello, de la bahía, del agua,de las cosas eternas que siempre dan a la poesía cosas nuevas. Pero esque yo no puedo prescindir de que he llevado una vida angustiosa, de queel destino mío me ha lanzado a cosas que quizás otros poetas no lashayan sufrido como yo, ¿verdad? Y que yo siento profundamente lo quepasa en mi época: las muertes, las guerras, las sombras tan llenas demuertos ...5

Alberti scarcely need apologize for being the first major Spanish poet ofhis generation to treat politics in his poetry. What is surprising is that sofew of his contemporaries grasped that nettle. Having put himself in thefront line, both as poet and soldier who fought against fascism, he is entitledto resent sniping criticism. Yet, poetically, there is much to fault in his firstextensive political work, El poeta en la calle: ‘Un fantasma recorre Europa’simply—or slavishly—quotes the Communist Manifesto; crude sloganismappears in ‘S.O.S’, childish satire in ‘El Gil Gil’, transparent irony in‘Romance de los campesinos de Zorita’,

Se les prometen las tierrasy en tierra van a dejarles.Promesa pagada en sangre. (341)6

4 Tejada, art. cit., 19.5 Ibid., 20.6 Numbers in parenthesis indicate the page of reference in Rafael Alberti, Poesías

completas (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1961).

RAFAEL ALBERTI’S DE UN MOMENTO A OTRO 83

and, arguably, little more than exploitative sentimentality in:

Los niños de Extremaduravan descalzos.¿Quién los robó los zapatos? (339)

Indeed, excepting the powerful ‘La lucha por la tierra’, this volume tends toillustrate the pitfalls of political poetry, notably in its lack of any real senseof the poet himself. Wesseling makes the point that Alberti wrote differenttypes of political poems.7 Some were purely propagandist, virtualwallposters designed to further the cause, which applies to much of thematerial he published as editor of the communist literary magazine,Octubre.8 Others were more considered, especially as Alberti grew into hispolitical role, giving the lie to the notion that dogma meant doggerel. Toassess his achievement we might begin by accepting that for Alberti thewriting of poems on politics and war was not so much a choice of theme asan inevitable consequence of his life and circumstance, in the Guillén-Ortegasense of circumstance. We should also resist letting his overtly propagandistwork prejudice our response to De un momento a otro (poesía e historia)[1934-1938], which is ultimately the work by which his reputation as a poetacomprometido stands or fails.

That De un momento a otro develops organically from Alberti’s earlierwork applies both in conceptual and subjunctive terms. By the late 1920sAlberti had ‘evolved a highly intellectual Surrealism’, as Bowra observed.9This essentially consists in going beyond psychic automatism—the Freudianabreaction of the unconscious—advocated by Breton in his first manifesto of1924 and evident in Sobre los ángeles from its second poem, ‘Desahucio’,with its paradigmatic theme of eviction, onwards.10 By the end of thisvolume Alberti has turned his paranoia to more constructive—as opposed tomerely therapeutic—purpose and in ‘Los ángeles muertos’ he addresses hisreaders on the subject of his new faith, a form of materio-mysticism.11 He

7 Op. cit., 48.8 See Octubre, escritores y artistas revolucionarios [reimpresión anastática de la edición

de Madrid, junio-julio 1933—abril 1934, 6 números] (Liechtenstein: Vaduz, 1977), with itsthorough introduction by Enrique Montero. Examples of Alberti’s propagandist poetry are‘Documentos: Los desastres de la guerra, Goya 1808’, in which his anticlerical poem, ‘Laiglesia marcha sobre la cuerda floja’ is set alongside Goya’s illustration of a priest walking thetightrope, ‘Que se rompe la cuerda’, 34; the equally anticlerical ‘Farsa de los Reyes Magos(fragmento), El Espantapájaros’, 157-59, and ‘Himno de las bibliotecas proletarias’, 68.

9 C. M. Bowra, Poetry and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1966), 125.10 Breton’s famous definition of 1924 reads: ‘SURRÉALISME, n. m. Automatisme

psychique pur par lequel on se propose d’exprimer, soit verbalement, soit par écrit, soit detoute autre manière, le fonctionnement réel de la pensée. Dictée de la pensée, en l’absence detoute contrôle exercé par la raison, en dehors de toute préoccupation esthétique ou morale’,Oeuvres complètes, I (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 328.

11 Materio-mysticism and related issues are considered in the chapter on Alberti in


argues, in provocatively delusional terms, that salvation is to be found injunk objects or base matter: ‘en el insomnio de las cañerías olvidadas, / enlos cauces interrumpidas por el silencio de las basuras ...’ (290-91). Thismessage of a liberating and paradoxically transcendental materialism ispreached with ironic evangelism in ‘Sermón de las cuatro verdades’ where,subverting Christianity’s ascensionism, Alberti takes us down to the cellar ofhis mind, an Espronceda-like descent which parallels the Jesuit emphasis onhell, and down to the level of simple organisms which provide a fittingcontext for accepting life’s finiteness: ‘Bien poco importa a la acidez de losmostos descompuestos que mi alegría se consuma a lo largo de las maderas’(299).

This marked object-orientation, which is the antithesis of religion’sotherworldliness, conforms to the metaphysical theme of Breton’s secondmanifesto of 1930 that the higher plane of surreality consists in the union ofobjective and subjective realities.12 The aggregate of two dimensionstranscends their value separately, hence the mystic tone:

— Mi alma es sólo un cuerpo que fallece por fundirse y rozarse con losobjetos vivos y difuntos. (297)

The unitive way corresponds to the concept of ‘the surrealist object’, moreoften found in the visual arts.13 It is the guiding principle throughoutSermones y moradas, for instance in ‘Elegías’, where the images typicallytransfer to objects,

1. —La pena de los jarros sin agua caídos en el destierro de los objetosdifuntos.

—or they purposefully confuse matter, primitive life and the human realm:

4. —La venda rota de una herida, arrastrada por las hormigas de lastres de la tarde. (312)

Robert G. Havard, From Romanticism to Surrealism, Seven Spanish Poets (Cardiff: Univ. ofWales, 1988), 242-79. See also my essay, ‘Christ, the Paranoiac, the Surrealist, theCommunist, and Rafael Alberti’, in Changing Times in Hispanic Culture, ed. Derek Harris(Univ. of Aberdeen, forthcoming 1996).

12 The idea of the union of opposites was mooted in the first manifesto: ‘Je crois à larésolution future de ces deux états, en apparence si contradictoires, que sont le rêve et laréalité, en une sorte de réalité absolue, de surréalité’ (op. cit., 319). This became an all-embracing metaphysic in the second manifesto which concluded on the thematic note, ‘ellesdoivent se confondre’, where elles refers to the perceived opposites ‘certaines choses [qui] sont’and others ‘[qui] ne sont pas’ (ibid., 828). See also the introduction, ‘Tout porte à croire ...’(ibid., 781) and the discussion of the ‘système hégélien’ (793).

13 For discussion of this topic see, for instance, Anna Balakian’s chapter on theSurrealist Object in Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute (London: Allen & Unwin, 1972) andH. N. Finkelstein, Surrealism and the Crisis of the Object, University Studies in the Fine Arts,Avant-garde, 3 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1979).


This compositeness is clear in two striking images, the rubbish-dump andthe scarecrow, both of which Alberti borrowed from the painter MarujaMallo, his one-time lover.14 The basurero, a cemetery-like wasteland, offersan inventory of the human past in its random clutter of junk. Thescarecrow, an effigy constructed out of discarded man-made objects, issimilarly an icon of death, standing, in ‘Espantapájaros’, with its armsspread wide, Christ-like and burdened with the cares of the world.15 Areciprocal image is that of ‘blood’, found in ‘Sermón de la sangre’ and ‘Adiós ala sangre’, where the physical property so closely associated with theemotions and life itself is, in the end, no more than liquid matter:

mientras me humilla, me levanta, me inunda, me desquicia, me seca, meabandona, me hace correr de nuevo, y yo no sé llamarla de otro modo: Misangre. (304)

Very likely Alberti’s periods of ill health reinforced the notion that hewas the sum of his bodily parts, with all their vicissitudes. But theseimages, whose conceptual value lies in the interplay of objectivity andsubjectivity, point unmistakably towards materialism, or the primacy ofmatter, the notion underlying Marx’s analysis of history—historicalmaterialism—wherein materialism is deemed to be liberating sinceacceptance of the finiteness of the human condition is the first step by whichman frees himself from the error and subjugation of religion. Thesurrealists, having changed man’s way of looking at reality, wished tochange his view of society. For many, Communism’s revolutionary thesis,embracing materialism and atheism, showed the way.16 For Alberti, thesame issues took substantive form in the political events of the 1930s. In hisfirst political poem, Con los zapatos puestos tengo que morir (Elegía cívica)[1º de enero de 1930], the object-orientation and oracular tone continue as hedescribes the barricades on which he stood with students in protest againstPrimo de Rivera’s dictatorship:

14 For details on his liaison with Maruja Mallo see R. Alberti, La arboleda perdida

(libros III y IV de memorias) (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1987), 26-32. On the artist’s work seeMaruja Mallo, 59 grabados en negro y 9 láminas en color, 1928-1942 , introduction by RamónGómez de la Serna (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1942).

15 These images are considered more closely in Havard, art. cit., while John Crispinmakes an interesting comparison between Alberti’s scarecrow and Grünewald’s Gothiccrucifixions, ‘La generación de 1927 y las artes plásticas’, in Nuevas perspectivas sobre lageneración del 27 (ensayos literarios), ed. Hector Romero (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1983),37.

16 Other surrealists, it must be said, notably Salvador Dalí, rejected materialism. Forthem, the primacy of matter was abhorrent since it downgraded the creative faculty of theunconscious; neither could they accept communism, which they saw as a restriction ratherthan a liberation. The issues involved, together with Breton’s sustained but ultimatelyforlorn attempt to harmonize the movement, are discussed in Alan Rose, Surrealism andCommunism. The Early Years (New York: Peter Lang, 1991).


Será en ese momento cuando los caballos sin ojos se desgarren las tibiascontra los hierros en punta de una valla de sillas indignadas junto a losadoquines de cualquier calle recién absorta en la locura.

Insistence on objects is no mere poetic trope of synecdoche; rather, it renderssociety’s hierarchical structure in starkly materialist terms:

Ira desde la aguja de los pararrayos hasta las uñas más rencorosas de laspatas traseras de cualquier piojo agonizante entre las púas de un peinehallado al atardecer en un basurero. (333)

Anger is vented on the bastions of the iniquitous society: the king, ‘loshombres más ilustres’, the clergy, ‘los curas sifilíticos’, and even God, ‘así seescupe a Dios en las nubes’. By ‘La lucha por la tierra’ God is seen moreclearly as an ‘aliado de los terratenientes’:

Y como cualquier propietario o explotador de hombres,exigía además que le llamásemos Señor.Esto nos enseñaron desde niño los curas. (352)

The religious theme has come full circle: from Sobre los ángeles, whereangels articulate the elements in a neurosis which is itself attributable inlarge part to a repressive Jesuit education; to Sermones y moradas, wherethe paranoiac poet messianically proclaims the surrealist message of atranscendent materialism; to the political poems of the 1930s, in which theChurch and its totem are seen unequivocally as oppressors of the people.The circle ends in De un momento a otro where Alberti depicts religion as anagent of political oppression by reference to his own childhood. Thus thesustained antagonism between religion and materialism provides aremarkable degree of coherence in Alberti’s trajectory from surrealist topoeta comprometido. The same coherence is apparent in subjective termsthroughout De un momento a otro which, in its four parts, takes us fromAlberti’s embryonic political awareness in El Puerto de Santa María to theculmination of the conflict in a Madrid racked by civil war.

The first part of De un momento a otro, ‘La familia (Poema dramático)’,deals with Alberti’s conditioning at the hands of ‘la familia burguesa y clasemedia españolas, de donde involuntariamente arranco y procedo’.17 In‘Colegio (S.J.)’ the school which had once induced fears of hell and feelings ofsexual guilt is seen by the clear-minded adult as an inculcator of class-consciousness. His family having fallen on hard times, Alberti was fated tobe an externo rather than one of the privileged boarders, ‘todos hijos contierras y ganados’ (371). He had to suffer the Jesuits’ asphyxiating charityand the stigma of an inferior uniform:

17 See Rafael Alberti, Poesía (1924-1937) (Madrid: Signo, 1938), 341, which is quoted inRafael Alberti, De un momento a otro (poesía e historia), ed. J. M. Balcells (Barcelona:Promociones y Publicaciones Universitarias, 1993), 103.


Eramos los externos,los colegiales de familias burguesas ya en declive.La caridad cristiana nos daba sin dinero su cultura,la piedad nos abría los libros y las puertas de las clases.Ya éramos de esas gentes que algún día se las entierra de balde.No sabíamos bien por qué un galón de oro no le daba la vueltaa nuestra gorrani por qué causa luego no descendía directo por nuestros pantalones.

(369-70)

The externos were never praised by their teachers, ‘Así tú no tenías buenavoz ... ni yo una débil rendija de talento’, but were instructed in the virtuesof gratitude and submissiveness: ‘quien obedezca al que firmó la rosa, / aAquel que nos concede el desayuno, / ... ese verá que le abren paso lasestrellas’. Alberti, with his underprivileged peers, rebelled:

tanta ira,tanto odio contenidos sin llanto,nos llevaban al mar que nunca se preocupa de las raíces cuadradas,... a las dunas calientes,donde nos orinábamos en fila mirando hacia el colegio. (370)

This gesture of defiance marks the poet’s initiation in class solidarity, a newconcept of allegiance which contrasts with the traditional one to family. Hisown kin, in fact, are seen as the enemy in ‘Hermana’, ‘Balada de los doshermanos’ and ‘Índice de la familia burguesa’,18 for they uphold suchreactionary values as piety, property ownership and military-basednationhood, while in ‘Siervos’, by contrast, Alberti holds out an olive branchto the extended family of abused servants, ‘yo os envío un saludo, / y os llamocamaradas’ (375). Thus the first section traces the roots of Alberti’segalitarian thinking and, in keeping with the prophetic vein of the volume’stitle, suggests that the collapse of paternalistic structures is at hand.

The second section is remarkable for its analysis of the explosive themeof revolution in the tight form of the sonnet, five of the six poems beingsonnets, and for its evocation of seditious rage in the shocking image of arabid dog. In the first of a pair of sonnets entitled ‘El perro rabioso’ themadness, fury and sub-human atavism recall earlier poems, but the ferocityis unprecedented:

Muero porque las pulgas me inoculenla sangre de los perros más rabiosos,me vuelvan los colmillos venenososy el hombre que hay en mí lo estrangulen.

18 ‘Índice de la familia burguesa’ is not included in Rafael Alberti, Poesías completas,

but it appears in De un momento a otro (poesía e historia), 119-20.


Que ni el odio ni la furia disimulencuanto de hirientes, graves, peligrososson mis serios arranques rencorosos,sin pulsos que los frenen y regulen. (380)

This candidly unsympathetic depiction of revolutionary zeal, far from beingpropagandist, suggests the dehumanized mentality of those who commitunspeakable atrocities. At the same time, the violence is consonant with thepolicy of Contra-Attaque, the ‘Union de lutte des intellectuelsrévolucionnaires’ founded by Breton in 1935, the year in which the poem waswritten. Concerned at the tendency of the masses to resign themselves tofascist servitude, Contra-Attaque advocated ‘fanatisme’: ‘Sans aucuneréserve, la Révolution doit être tout entière agressive, ne peut être que toutentière agressive’.19 Alberti, caught up in the feverish momentum, classeshimself as one who longs only to be rid of his last traces of humanity—theultimate subversion of San Juan’s ‘Muero porque no muero’—and totallyabsorbed in a mindless canine urge to bite:

Época es de morder a dentelladas,de hincar hundiendo enteras las encías,contagiando mi rabia hasta en la muerte.

Revolcándose, mira inoculadasaullar las horas de los malos días,por morderlas, ¡oh Tiempo!, y por morderte. (380)

That the political theme could be reduced to a blind rage to infect anddestroy suggests pessimism on the poet’s part, which deepens by analogywith Quevedo who is clearly echoed in the tercets. The sonnet’s classicalaura is enhanced by archaic syntax in the last tercet with its vocativeexclamation and indeterminate verb subject, and by deft stylistic touches,notably the repeated ‘r’ and especially ‘rr’ phonemes (‘perros’, ‘rabiosos’,‘arranques rencorosos’, ‘regulen’, ‘rabia’, ‘revolcándose’) which evoke thegrowling dog motif. In short, Alberti exploits the formal virtues of thesonnet as a counterpoint to the poem’s anarchism, enhancing the thematictension between the old and the new, tradition and revolution. The othersonnets similarly gain from his accomplished technique: the second on thedog motif sets the destruction of bourgeois values between the image pairand mandibular parenthesis of ‘Mordido en el talón ... un pie mordido’ (380-81), while the fifth sonnet concludes on a neat conceptista paradox,‘¡Revolución!, para matar la guerra’ (381), compressing the idea that theclass war can only be ended by breaking down present structures.

19 See Contre-attaque in André Breton, Position politique du surréalisme (Paris:Pauvert, 1962), 176. For a discussion of this and related issues see the chapter on ‘SurrealistPolitics’ in Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, trans. from the French by R. Howard(London: Plaintin, 1987).


The third section, ‘13 bandas y 48 estrellas (Poema del mar Caribe)1935’, is a sixteen-poem travelogue which traces Alberti’s visit to the UnitedStates, Central America and the Caribbean where he went to raise funds forthe relief of Asturian miners. The binding theme is U.S. oil- and dollar-based imperialism, as seen in the plunder of Cuba, ‘Los yankis vienenvolando, / urracas azucareras’ (389), acquisitive tourism in Mexico, ‘el gringoque compra en tu retrato / tu parada belleza ya en escombros’ (391),paramilitary rule in Panama and Costa Rica, ‘Yo iba a Costa Rica, / —¡¡Oh,su policía!!—’, racial oppression in Martinique, ‘negros como asnos deapariencia tranquila’ (397), and the ubiquitous counter-current of revolution,be it historical as in Venezuela, or actual as in El Salvador and Nicaraguawhere General Sandino had been executed one year before: ‘Los yanquisfirman la paz ... / pero matando a Sandino’ (392). This section impresses farmore than Alberti’s account of his visit to Eastern Europe in El poeta en lacalle, for the latter poems suffer from myopic idealism while those onAmerica offer a varied and analytical critique. They benefit too fromAlberti’s Hispanic empathy with the oppressed on the basis of the linguisticimperialism announced in the introductory quotation from Rubén Darío:‘¿Tantos millones de hombres hablaremos inglés?’ (384).

Economic imperialism is put in sharp focus in the opening poem, ‘NewYork (Wall Street en la niebla. Desde el “Bremen”)’, where image andargument interface to great effect. Continuing his surrealist role as poet-seer,Alberti bases the poem on the idea of perspicacity, his ability to see throughthe shrouded mists of New York to the capitalist structure beneath. Hisalertness—‘despierto’ as he approaches the city by ship in the early morning—unveils a pattern of motifs: the mist is a ‘vaho de petróleo’; the skyscrapers are‘inconmovibles cajas’; the men who rule others’ lives are ‘hombres macilentos’,their political bosses ‘gansters’, their acts ‘robos calculados’; the vaunted notionof Liberty is ‘prostituida, mercenaria, inútil’ as the famous statue ‘baja avender su sombra por los puertos’. Not only does the poet perceive the city’sevil—‘Y era yo entre la niebla quien oía, quien veía mucho más / y todo esto’—his vision encompasses its continental extension: ‘New York. Wall Street,Banca de sangre / ... araña de tentáculos que hilan / fríamente la muerte deotros pueblos’. Exploitation takes the form of ‘la extracción triste de metales... de cañas dulces ... de café y de tabaco’, and may even result in star wars,says the clairvoyant: ‘Tu diplomacia del horror quisiera / la intervenciónarmada hasta en los astros’ (386). Yet America’s ‘agónicas naciones’ throbwith a desire for vengeance that sooner or later, Alberti concludes withirresistible poetic logic, will see the hallowed Stars and Stripes burn ‘en unajusta, / libertadora llama de petróleo’.

Alberti’s anti-Americanism accords with his rejection of paternalistsuperstructures in favour of an egalitarian ideal. That his analysis is basedon Marxist-materialist principles is again clear in the next poem, ‘Guajiras


burlescas de los banqueros alegres y desesperados de Wall Street’, where sixdécimas portray the faceless bankers in terms of the commodities theycontrol: ‘Mi sangre es un yacimiento / de emisiones petroleras’, ‘Por rayos demi cabeza / yo muevo un cañaveral’. The latter speaker, a magnate wholikely made his pile in Cuba, is caricatured as a feudal overlord, having theridiculous motto ‘Tengo azúcar en la orina’ emblazoned on his shield. Onceagain we note the interplay between man and objective reality, but, asopposed to the materio-mysticism of Alberti’s metaphysical phase, theimplication here is of an omnivorous consumerism and eco-insensitivity.The magnate has no other consideration than profit, which derives fromexploitation of raw (or primary) materials. He fears communism, Alberticoncludes in the décima’s epigrammatic style, for it threatens to end hisdegenerate capitalist ways:

Materias primas me cantami cartera de caimán.Los empréstitos se vandragándome la garganta.Si el comunismo me espantacomo un insondable abismo,que se lleve el comunismotodo cuanto ahora poseo.Y en un yate de recreonaufrague el imperialismo. (137)20

Turning now to the Civil-War poems of the volume’s fourth section,‘Capital de la gloria (1936-1938)’, we find that materialism continues to be akey feature that bears directly on the poet’s themes and on his image-making technique. In the opening poem, ‘Madrid-otoño’, the capital issuffering aerial bombardment and the onslaught of Franco’s mercenaries inlate 1936. Yet Alberti’s treatment of this affecting topic is remarkable forhis almost exclusive focus on the material and fabric of the ravaged city. Hisstance is anti-sentimental, comparable in its way with Dylan Thomas’ poemon the Blitz, ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’, arestraint which achieves much impact in the long run. The poet is sensitiveto his role in these circumstances, as the first stanza indicates:

Ciudad de los más turbios siniestros provocados,... yo quisiera furiosa, pero impasiblementearrancarme de cuajo la voz, pero no puedo,para pisarte toda tan silenciosamente,que la sangre tiradamordiera, sin protesta, mi llanto y mi pisada. (401)

20 The PPU, Barcelona edition, gives ‘cantan’ in the first line, p. 137, but this is clearly

wrong, as the exigencies of rhyme indicate.


Alberti wishes to lose his poetic voice, perhaps feeling a sense of inadequacyin the face of momentous events, perhaps reluctant to intrude upon the griefof others. As a poet, he knows the dangers of a bombastic Quintana-likepanegyric. As a communist, he knows that mass suffering is not to beappropriated by an individual. Rather, he would be a mouthpiece, ‘haciendode mi voz pulmón de todo un pueblo’ (416), as the later poem ‘Aniversario’asserts.21 His vain hope is to merge with the city’s streets that beartestimony to the human agony in the form of spilt blood. Only animpersonal treatment will allow the collective body to listen unoffended, ‘sinprotesta’. Only by identification with those who suffer is the poet validated,as Wilfred Owen put it in his ‘Apologia pro Poemate Meo’: ‘except you share /With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell’.22

In the second stanza we follow Alberti to the suburbs, once the site ofrubbish-dumps, now the disfigured front-line of battle:

Por tus desnivelados terrenos y arrabales,ciudad, por tus lluviosas y ateridas afuerasvoy las hojas difuntas pisando entre trincheras,charcos y barrizales.Los árboles acodan, desprovistos, las ramaspor bardas y tapialesdonde con ojos fijos espían las tronerasun cielo temeroso de explosiones y llamas. (401)

His imagery is as assured as ever: the autumnal weather—‘hojas difuntas’—parallels the human mortalities; the stark branches with bent arms—in theanthropomorphic ‘acodan’—suggest the pose of snipers behind walls. All thewhile the personification of the city—which effectively integrates its objectsand its living organisms in one whole—keeps the notion of a collectiveidentity and heroic purpose in mind.

The thought occurs that precious objects will be lost in the devastation—‘corre un escalofrío al pensar tus museos’—including the treasures of thePrado which Alberti had been given special responsibility to protect.23 Buthumble objects attract most attention, notably in the bomb-sites whichprovide a powerful juxtaposition of war and everyday life:

Hay casas cuyos muros humildes, levantados

21 Nantell comments on this theme (op. cit., 4). Alberti later recalled in an interview:‘cuando vino la República, bueno, yo ya tenía un instinto de que la poesía puramenteparticular o excesivamente sujectiva ya estaba agotada’ (see Javier Alfaya, Alberti: un poetaen la calle [Madrid: Cuadernos para el Diálogo, No. 81, 1977), 52. Of related interest isAntonio Machado’s piece in Octubre dedicated to Alberti, ‘Sobre una lírica comunista, quepudiera venir de Rusia’ (op. cit., 148).

22 Wilfred Owen, The Complete Poems and Fragments. Vol. I: The Poems, ed. JonStallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth/Oxford U. P., 1983), 124.

23 See La arboleda perdida, ed. cit., 78.


a la escena del aire, representan la escenadel mantel y los lechos todavía ordenados,el drama silencioso de los trajes vacíos,sin nadie, en la alacenaque los biseles fríosde la menguada luna de los pobres roperosrecogen y barajan con los sacos terreros. (401-02)

The bombed house stands like a stage set, open on one side and roofless,awaiting the actors’ entrance. There is something surreal, Wesseling noted,in this mixture of horror and normality, in the empty suits that recall ‘Elhombre deshabitado’ of Sobre los ángeles.24 Conceptually, the surrealelement resides in the fact that the bomb-site, like the basurero andespantapájaros, suggests the interplay of man and material objects, with thehuman absence more poignant here since it results from violence. The poet’skeen eye is seen in the image of the wardrobe’s bevel-edged mirror, wheretwo angles of reflection shuffle together lines of clothes and sandbags, bothof which stack like cards. Thus chance or randomness, in an unexpectedjuxtaposition, continues to be thematic, as it was in the collage of thebasurero; but the additional social comment—in the class indices of ‘muroshumildes’ and ‘pobres roperos’—suggests malevolence and unwarrantedpersecution.

The poem’s first part reaches a climax via the sustained personificationof the city. Though ravaged on all sides, ‘la frente de tu frente se alzatiroteada, / tus costados de árboles y llanuras, heridos’, the city and itsindomitable spirit will not be buried under the ‘montes de escombros’. Onthe contrary, the poet senses that within the city there gestates ‘el germenmás hermoso de tu vida futura’ and, in oracular vein, asserts:

Bajo la dinamita de tus cielos, crujiente,se oye el nacer del nuevo hijo de la victoria. (402)

Given the spirited resistance of Madrid and the timely arrival of theInternational Brigaders in November 1936, Alberti cannot be denied hismoment of optimism which, poetically, balances the tragedies catalogued.25

24 Wesseling, op. cit., 66.25 Hugh Thomas writes: ‘The example of the International Brigades fired the populace

of the capital with the feeling that they were not alone’ (The Spanish Civil War[Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977 (3rd ed.)], 480). Similarly, Vincent Brome: ‘They arrived atthe crucial psychological moment in the defence of Madrid and stiffened the morale of thewhole population’ (The International Brigades, Spain 1936-1939 [London: Heinemann, 1965],272). In fact, with the Government having departed to Valencia, fear ruled Madrid on 7November, the eve of the Nationalist onslaught; but, as Paul Preston recounts: ‘Along withthe Communist Party’s Fifth Regiment ... the 1900 men of the Eleventh International Brigadehelped Miaja to lead the entire population of Madrid in a desperate and remarkable defence... Franco’s forces had suffered their first major reverse’ (Franco, A Biography [London:


Surprisingly, he continues the poem into a second part, his refusal to end ona triumphant note being a measure of his artistic as opposed to propagandistambitions. The short second part describes the appropriation of one ofMadrid’s aristocratic homes by a militant group—the Alianza deIntelectuales Antifascistas—26and their ejection of hoary objects, ‘libros’,‘sofás desvencijados’ and ‘retratos familiares’, which, piled up outside in thecold, make as pathetic a composition as the chattels of the poor in bomb-sites. The poet discerns a common feature in the portraits:

en donde los varones de la casa, vestidoslos más innecesarios jaeces militares,nos contemplan, partidos,sucios, pisoteados,con ese inexpresable gesto fijo y oscurodel que al nacer ya lleva contra su espalda el murode los ejecutados. (402)

The idea of noble forebears staring out from torn canvases with eyes of menfacing a firing squad—indeed, that they were born with such terror in theireyes—synthesizes history and the present crisis in a compelling image: thearistocracy, it is suggested, have always feared their days of privilege wouldend in a bloody proletarian uprising. The image restores a note of violence,or ‘furor’, the unedifying emotion which enables the poet to identify with themasses and which forms a harder basis for a conclusion than that offered inthe first part:

este cuadro, este libro, este furor que ahorame arranca lo que tienes para mí de elegíason pedazos de sangre de tu terrible aurora.Ciudad quiero ayudarte a dar a luz tu día. (402)

In effect, the birth motif is still present in the blood and suffering of thesefinal images. So too is the theme of Alberti’s role as poet, his poem havingcome out of him only after much agonizing. He can be proud of hisachievement. Though poised in its rhymed alexandrines, it is not an overlyformal poem, for the sporadic half-lines give a sense of spontaneity inkeeping with the uncertainty of war. The imagery is strong in detail,showing a poet who is responding to an actual situation as well as anideological crisis. Alberti avoids the pitfalls of propaganda and of bourgeoisliterariness, and comes close to achieving the impossible synthesis of losinghis voice in writing his poem.

An impersonal voice is most readily achieved in poems that highlight thecollective endeavour of war, of which there are several. A fine example is

Harper/Collins, 1993], 204-05).

26 See J. M. Balcells, op. cit., 167.


‘Los campesinos’ where peasant soldiers are described via the objects andimplements they know best, that is, in Marxist terms, with regard to thematerial conditions of their life: they are ‘duros, color de la corteza’ anddark, ‘Como los pedernales’; their cloaks smell of ‘corderos mojados’ and theyhave an unsavoury aura of ‘estiércoles y fangales’. Yet these plain men—‘Muchos no saben nada’—selflessly lay down their lives:

van los hombres del campo como inmensas simientesa sembrarse en los hondos surcos de las trincheras. (410)

The marvellously synthetic simile, surcos-trincheras, simientes-hombres,suggests an epic dimension to their sacrifice, expressing its naturalness and,through displacement, its unnaturalness, with the overriding implicationthat these braceros, victims of a feudal latifundist system, must have beengreatly abused to move voluntarily from field to trench. The image alsocontains the sense of a procreative purpose, soon explicit in the poem‘Vosotros no caísteis’:

Siembra de cuerpos jóvenes, tan innecesariamentedescuajados del triste terrón que los pariera,otra vez y tan pronto y tan naturalmente,semilla de los surcos que la guerra os abriera. (411)

The topic is undeniably emotional, but as Wilfred Owen put it, ‘These menare worth / Your tears’, and Alberti cannot fail to record what the Shropshirepoet called ‘The pity of war, the pity war distilled’.27 Closely related to ‘Loscampesinos’ is the poem ‘Los soldados se duermen’, where the men have ‘unaire de aldea, / de animales tiernísimos’, yet sleep watchfully like ‘perros deganados’ (415). They have laid down their guns to rest a while from theactivity of killing—‘también los fusiles descansan de su oficio’ (416)—but weare made to feel that their exhaustion should have come from the moreconstructive ‘pacíficas labores de los hombres’ (416) referred to in‘Aniversario’.28

Perhaps the most selfless sacrifice and highest collective endeavour isthat of the motley group honoured in ‘A las Brigadas Internacionales’ who,in far-flung corners, as Auden memorably put it, ‘heard and migrated likegulls or the seeds of a flower ... / They floated over oceans; / They walked thepasses: they came to present their lives’.29 Pablo Neruda witnessed their

27 Wilfred Owen, op. cit., 124, 148.28 ‘Los soldados se duermen’ lacks the force of ‘Los campesinos’. It is also less

impressive than Wilfred Owen’s ‘Soldier’s Dream’ which similarly deals with a respite in warbrought about by a pitying Jesus who ‘fouled the big-gun gears’. Alberti would have approvedof the irreverent conclusion: ‘But God was vexed, and gave all power to Michael; / And when Iwoke he’d seen to our repairs’ (op. cit., 182).

29 W. H. Auden, ‘Spain, 1937’, in Collected Shorter Poems 1930-1944 (London: Faberand Faber, 1950), 191.


arrival in Madrid: ‘Camaradas, / ... os he visto ... / venir de lejos y lejos /venir de vuestros rincones, de vuestras patrias perdidas ... / a defender laciudad española en que la libertad acorralada / pudo caer y morir mordidapor las bestias’.30 For Alberti too the point is the volunteers’internationalism, that they came from many countries but without thenarrow sense of patria which Breton denounced for its ‘intérêts egoistes’.31

Venís desde muy lejos ... Mas esta lejanía,¿qué es para vuestra sangre, que canta sin fronteras?La necesaria muerte os nombra cada día,no importa en qué ciudades, campos o carreteras.

De este país, del otro, del grande, del pequeño,del que apenas si al mapa da un color desvaído,con las mismas raíces que tiene un mismo sueño,sencillamente anónimos y hablando habéis venido. (406)

This proletarian union, which Alberti poetically homages in culturedalexandrines, is the communist ideal in action, the antithesis of the self-seeking imperialism deplored earlier. The men are anonymous in theirselflessness—‘hombres abnegados y generosos’, as Antonio Machadodescribed them—32but their spirit can perhaps only be appreciated in theparticular. Typical are the sentiments expressed in the letters of TomPicton, an untutored Rhondda miner later executed in a Nationalist jail: ‘thepoor class of Spain are 500 years behind time, they been kept under likedogs but the people have risen now ... I am bloody proud that I am herewhatever the Hell happens and we are bloody sure that we are going to Win,we are not coming back until we drive these _____ Rats out of it ... If I stopesone and dont come back tell all Wales that I was Dead Game and bloodyproud to die for the cause’.33 Alberti insinuates the volunteers’ ignorance of

30 Pablo Neruda, ‘Llegada a Madrid de la Brigada Internacional’, Obras completas(Buenos Aires: Losada, 1962 [2nd ed.]), 261.

31 The first resolution of Contre-attaque declares its signatories to be ‘Violemmenthostiles à toute tendance, quelque forme qu’elle prenne, captant la Révolution au bénéfice desidées de nation ou de patrie ...’; while its thirteenth and penultimate clause avers: ‘quel’exaltation qui doit être mise au service de l’intérêt universel des hommes doit êtreinfiniment plus grave et plus brisante, d’une grandeur tout autre que celle des nationalistesasservis à la conservation sociale et aux intérêts égoïstes des patries’ (see André Breton,Position politique du surréalisme, ed. cit., 169, 176).

32 Antonio Machado, prologue to Homenaje de despedida a las Brigadas Internacionales(various authors) (Madrid: Editorial Hispamérica, 1978), 5.

33 Picton’s letters, along with those of many other Brigaders, may be read in the SouthWales Miners’ Library, Sketty Road, Swansea. Picton’s death is mentioned in Hywel Francis,Miners against Fascism: Wales and the Spanish Civil War (London: Lawrence and Wishart,1984), 240. Having served in the First World War and with limited success as a prize-fighter,Picton was an out-of-work collier, divorced and the wrong side of forty when the Spanish Warbroke out. He addressed his letters to George Thomas, a communist agent in Treherbert:


the country they have come to defend:

No conocéis siquiera el color de los murosque vuestro infranqueable compromiso amuralla.

But he also recognizes the tribute they have paid Spain:

La tierra que os entierra la defendéis, seguros,a tiros con la muerte vestida de batalla.

Quedad, que así lo quieren los árboles, los llanos,las mínimas partículas de la luz que reanimaun solo sentimiento que el mar sacude: ¡Hermanos!Madrid con vuestro nombre se agranda y se ilumina. (406)

The last line anticipates Machado’s valedictory comment, ‘el haber merecidovuestro auxilio, vuestra ayuda generosa y desinteresada, es uno de los másaltos timbres de gloria que puede ostentar’.34 Highly charged as the notionof a soldier finding rest in foreign soil is, it gains conceptual weight here inthe imagery’s unifying materialist force: the ground disputed in battle is theearth the soldier is buried in, which, in turn, is ‘LA TIERRA’, capitalized in‘La lucha por la tierra’, the very soil which the impoverished Spanishpeasant fights for.

The various overlapping groups represent the theme of collectiveidentity: the city, the peasants, the Brigaders—seen again in ‘Al GeneralKleber’, the leader of the International Brigade—and the communist units,which receive special attention. ‘¡Soy del Quinto Regimento!’ depicts apeasant’s pride in serving in the crack regiment for which La Pasionariarecruited;35 ‘A Hans Beimler, defensor de Madrid’ honours the leader of theGerman communists, and ‘Aniversario (a los soldados del Ejército Rojo)’brings a familiar motif to an uplifting conclusion:

Siempre os recuerdo, siempre, soldados entrañables,soldados como estos que ahora siento en mi patriabrotar de los terrones partidos de la tierracon la misma razón sencilla de los trigos. (416)

I would like to tell you what part we are but you know Comrade it will only be x off sothere, you are right George we have got the B_____ on the run now and will keep themgoing, know the old saying ‘No Pass Around’ ... We had a Hell of a Do George at a placecalled Brunete, I had a crack in the Neck but am OK ... We are at another Front now, theB_____ are bombing the townes around here like Hell now, its down all the Dam time, butstill George we are giving the rotten B_____ beans all the time ... the boy Foulkes is goinga little bit crackers but I have warned him if he dont act when in the tight and anyoneelse that it will be too bad for him, he should be sent from here as he jumps at every bangand theres a lot of banging on times I can tell you.34 Antonio Machado, op. cit., 6.35 Hugh Thomas, op. cit., 322.


Outstanding is ‘Quinto Cuerpo del Ejército (A Modesto su Jefe)’ which linksseveral concepts in a structured whole of four identical stanzas in rhymingalexandrines with a final half-line. The poet begins by evoking the livingconditions of the Corps’ combatants, intermixing what they experiencedbefore the war with their current plight to imply that the men have nothingto lose by suffering the privations of war:

Los pobres de alpargata, rotos, descamisados,esos que tantas veces tuvieron por abrigode sus huesos diez húmedos ladrillos desveladosy cuatro mudas, sórdidas paredes por amigo;esos, entre los cardos, las piedras, los calores,miradlos vencedores. (190)36

The second stanza refers to the men’s ‘conducta límpida y fe’, which did notdeter the Nationalists from branding them criminals, ‘fe’ doubtless beingshorthand for their practical convictions. The third eulogizes threecommunist leaders: Juan Modesto Guilloto, the Corps’ commander, who hadbeen a woodcutter, ‘Modesto, cuyo nombre en las aserradoras / suenagloriosamente con un son carpintero’; Enrique Líster, an ex-quarryman,located ‘entre los duros picos de un son cantero’, and Valentín González, elCampesino, ‘en las eras y entre las trilladoras’. Modesto and Líster were‘the two outstanding military successes of the war’, according to HughThomas, though the poet omits to say that they and el Campesino were alsobitter rivals.37 Each was as rugged as the background he came from, with elCampesino, ‘notorious for his beard, volubility and physical strength’.38

Their manly forebearance and commitment to the cause suggests that likeall common men they will triumph, as the rousing half-line concludes, bothover their enemies and their material circumstance, which in the end areone and the same:

Ellos, analfabetos, descalzos, cargadoresde vida amarga y sacos sólo grandes de penas;ellos, los más difíciles, nuevos libertadoresde Madrid y alicates de sus largas cadenas;ellos, entre las balas, los himnos y las flores,miradlos vencedores.

Poems that celebrate the collective endeavour of war thus facilitate thepoet’s submersion of his identity while they also fulfil the function ofinspiring soldiers who heard them recited at the front. To focus attention on

36 This poem is not included in Poesías completas, but is found in the PPU, Barcelona

edition, 190.37 Hugh Thomas, op. cit., 323, 794, 836.38 Ibid., 324.


the common purpose was crucial when the Republican effort was split byleftist factions and separatist animosity of the kind Alberti attempts todefuse in ‘Defensa de Madrid, defensa de Cataluña’. This romance was twopoems originally and, for all Alberti’s harmonizing intentions, its twoseparate parts remind us of that fatal lack of cohesion. In the first part thefortitude of the besieged Castilian capital is again evoked viapersonification, ‘Madrid, corazón de España’, which is complemented by anobjectification of humans:

Los hombres, como castillos;igual que almenas sus frentes,grandes murallas sus brazos,puertas que nadie penetre. (404)

The sub-text, however, is a challenge to Catalans to put aside age-oldprejudices and join the struggle. Despite lavish praise of Catalonia, thismessage is writ large in the poem’s second part where Alberti refers to theprovince’s renowned economic wealth:

La libertad catalana,¡sabedlo!, en Madrid se juega;fábricas, ciudades, campos,montes, toda la riquezade vuestro país ... (405)

Relations were, in fact, less than ideal in late 1936, as Thomas observes:‘contact barely existed between Barcelona and Madrid ...; there wereaccusations that Madrid was starving Catalonia ... Madrid complained ofCatalonia’s military inaction’.39 Stephen Spender, a delegate at the Writers’Conference in 1937, speaks of ‘the rather brutal separatist spirit inBarcelona’ and recalls an informal meeting he attended: ‘the poet RafaelAlberti accompanied me. As soon as we had arrived he launched into adiatribe against the Catalans, criticizing their failure to take sufficient partin the war and ending by asserting roundly that if they did no better theRepublic, “after the victory”, would know how to deal with them’.40 Thoughmore circumspect in his poetry, Alberti pointedly places his appeal toCatalans between two poems of selfless commitment, ‘¡Soy del QuintoRegimento!’ and ‘A las Brigadas Internacionales’, while his later poem‘Madrid por Cataluña’, written in April 1938 when Barcelona was under thehammer of Savoia bombers, unstintingly stresses Madrid’s solidarity withCatalonia.

A last feature to consider in De un momento a otro for its bearing on thematerialist viewpoint and on Alberti’s role as poet is his treatment of nature.

39 Hugh Thomas, op. cit., 429.40 Stephen Spender, World within World (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1951), 245.


This staple of poetry provides a lyrical backdrop to the horror of war as wellas many resources for commenting on the war’s progress. As we have seen,the seasons have different implications. Transition from winter to springtypically suggests progress: in ‘Aniversario’, of 14 February 1938, confidenceabounds that the ‘nieve inocentísima’ will melt away and new life burgeon;in ‘1º de Mayo en la España Leal de 1938’ a traditional rhythm conveys thejoyful spirit of May Day as workers proudly proclaim their contribution tothe ‘Primavera del triunfo de los trabajadores’ (420). Autumnal images, onthe other hand, suggest fatalities, while the collapse of a tree in the secondstanza of ‘18 de julio’ is a graphic emblem of Spain’s convulsion at theoutbreak of war, though this is later qualified: ‘Mucho ha caído ... Mas nadainútilmente se ha perdido’ (416).

Effective as these polarities are, Alberti is often at his best whenbreaking the equation. In the nonosyllabic—or appropriately truncated—sonnet, ‘Abril 1938’, the coming of spring and new hope seems ‘más queimposible’ at a time when the Republican cause is faring badly: theNationalists had reached the sea at Vinaroz in early April, isolatingBarcelona to the north and virtually ensuring themselves of victory.Repeating his incredulous question in the tercets, Alberti apostrophizesspring and poignantly negates its positive connotations:

¿Otra vez tú poniendo floressobre la tumba improvisada,sobre el terrón de la trinchera

y esa apariencia de coloresen esta patria ensangrentada?Otra vez tú, la Primavera? (417-18)

In one of Alberti’s finest poems on the war, ‘El otoño en el Ebro’, the seasonalimplication is still more complex. At first the war and the seasons’ rhythmseem out of step: ‘El otoño, otra vez. Sigue la guerra, fría, / insensible alperiódico descenso de las hojas’ (421). Then a parallel is developed betweenthe Republican soldier, defenceless under the Nationalist counter-offensive,and the bare trees:

Como el hombre del Ebro bajo la artillería,los despoblados troncos junto a las aguas rojas.

Resistencia del árbol, tan dura, tan humana,como la del soldado ...Miro las hojas, miro cuán provisionalmentese desnuda la tierra del bosque más queridoy de qué modo el hombre de esta España se siente,como los troncos, firme, ya desnudo o vestido. (421-22)

The last-ditch Republican offensive of the Ebro began on 24 July 1938, but


by 2 August it had been contained. From then until the autumn months inwhich Alberti’s poem is set the Republican soldiers, dug into the hillsidesaround Gandesa, suffered constant shelling from artillery and bombing fromaircraft that enjoyed uncontested domination of the sky. Here, on 22September, the International Brigade fought for the last time, and it isperhaps with this in mind that Alberti extols the fortitude of the archetypalSpaniard—‘el hombre del Ebro’, ‘el hombre de esta España’—who now stoodalone against the fascist powers. The situation was as bleak as the wearyrhythms of punctuated alexandrines suggests, while Alberti’s reference tothe seasons’ turning is fatalistic, his optimism is less convincing:

El otoño, otra vez. Luego, el invierno. Sea.Caiga el traje del árbol, el sol no nos recuerda.Pero como los troncos, el hombre en la pelea,seco, amarillo, frío, más por debajo, verde. (422)

Rather than hope for a reversal of fortune in the spring, ‘verde’ suggests theSpaniard’s inner spirit, indomitable even in defeat; indeed, he hastriumphed, if only over his own submissiveness, and things will never be thesame.

This last poem is more realistic about the Republic’s plight than the onethat precedes it, ‘Al nuevo coronel Juan Modesto Guilloto, lejano compañerode colegio en la Bahía de Cádiz’, a purely formal commemoration ofModesto’s promotion during the Ebro campaign. Alberti is grandiloquent,‘recibe mi alabanza, coronel, viejo amigo, / mientras el Ebro justo con sumojada mano / te asciende y de ola en ola ...’ (421), and Gongoresque in hisconclusion, ‘también te condecoren con estos versos míos / Madrid, que no teolvida; Cádiz, que ya te espera’, which seems to bear out Spender’sdescription of ‘the grandiose and rhetorical Rafael Alberti, a kind of BaroqueCommunist’.41 But while the poet is clearly not at his best here, it is likelythat his recollection of ‘aquella rota infancia juntamente vivida’, and theJesuit school he attended irregularly with Modesto, ‘¡Las perdidas leccionesentre los arenales!’, caused him to flaunt his erudition and Modesto’s statuswhich were both conspicuously lacking when they sat at ‘los gratuitospupitres colegiales’.

To return to the treatment of nature and to a poem many critics havepraised,42 ‘Monte de El Pardo’ captures a moment in the midst of battlewhen the sun suddenly appears, incongruous in winter and oblivious orinsensitive in its radiance to the human tragedy:

Tanto sol en la guerra, de pronto, tanta lumbredesparramada a carros por valles y colinas;

41 Stephen Spender, World within World, 241.42 For example, Bowra, Wesseling, Jiménez Fajardo and Nantell.


tan rabioso silencio, tan fiera mansedumbrebajando como un crimen del cielo a las encinas;

este desentenderse de la muerte que intenta,de acuerdo con el campo, tanta luz deslumbrada;la nieve que a lo lejos en éxtasis se ausenta,las horas que pasando no les preocupa nada; (408)

The sense of incongruity is heightened by oppositions: ‘rabioso silencio’, ‘fieramansedumbre’, ‘crimen ... cielo’, sol-nieve, sol-guerra, lumbre/luz-muerte,éxtasis-nada. This mixture of beauty and devastation, of normality andhorror, as disturbing in its way as the bombed house in ‘Madrid-otoño’,leaves the poet anguished and confused as the third and final quatrainprecisely recounts:

todo esto me remuerde, me socava, me quitaligereza a los ojos, me los nubla y me ponela conciencia cargada de llanto y dinamita.La soledad retumba y el sol se descompone. (408)

It is a moment when time stands still, when the poet, elemental man nowrather than a communist, is perplexed at the unresolved horror of a warstarkly divorced from its setting. For a moment his role in the conflict isuncertain, while his inner oppositions—‘la conciencia cargada de llanto ydinamita’—encompass emotional and ethical contradictions that areespecially acute in a civil war. As a final irony, he feels a pang of ‘soledad’amid battle, another elemental insight which recalls captions used by Goyain his gruesome illustrations, Los desastres de la guerra.

Doubt is also present in ‘Nocturno’, the last poem we shall consider,where the value of the poet’s role is questioned. Each of three structuredstanzas is followed by the emphatic line, ‘Balas. Balas.’, against whichuncompromising material the poet’s medium is useless: ‘las palabras nosirven: son palabras’. In the first stanza the poet is driven by ‘la rabia ... elodio ... y la venganza’, which, as in ‘El perro rabioso’, are irresistible bodilyurges located respectively in ‘la sangre ... los tuétanos ... y en las médulas’.The second stanza itemizes the literature of war, similarly feeble in thisbrutal context:

Manifiestos, artículos, comentarios, discursos,humaredas perdidas, neblinas estampadas,¡qué dolor de papeles que ha de barrer el viento,que tristeza de tinta que ha de borrar el agua! (420)

The parallelism in the last two lines—syntactical, phonological andsemantic—enhances the equation between ‘dolor de papeles’ and ‘tristeza detinta’, images which transfer sentience to objects in the manner of Sermones


y moradas. But feeling is of no consequence in the face of the persistent‘Balas. Balas.’, and in a magnificent concluding stanza Alberti expresses hisagony as a poet at being reduced by events to mute impotence:

Ahora sufro lo pobre, lo mezquino, lo triste,lo desgraciado y muerto que tiene una gargantacuando desde el abismo de su garganta quisieragritar lo que no puede por imposible, y calla.

Balas. Balas.Siento esta noche heridas de muerte las palabras. (420)

His wish, announced in ‘Madrid-otoño’, to lose his voice—‘yo quisiera ... /arrancarme de cuajo la voz ... / para pisarte toda tan silenciosamente’—isgranted, ironically, in this poem of late 1938 when the Republic’s plight isdesperate and a war-weary poet can muster no lines of encouragement forhis comrades or even praise their forlorn efforts. Defeat is numbing and, asMadrid enters its third year of siege, the enduring sound of ‘Balas. Balas.’silences proletarian optimism as well as Alberti’s muse, though not before hehas written one of his finest poems. With some poignancy the war’s tragicoutcome, unrecorded in the volume, becomes the last imminent eventsubsumed in the title, De un momento a otro.

The preceding comments suggest three criteria on which to base anassessment of this challenging if uneven work, namely: the volume’scohesiveness, its place in Alberti’s output, and the quality of its poems.Cohesiveness is not immediately obvious in a volume whose four parts coversuch disparate topics as ‘La familia’ and ‘13 bandas y 48 estrellas’. ButAlberti’s rejection of the oppressive religious regime he knew as a child in ElPuerto is one with his criticism of U.S. imperialism, and both inform hisanti-fascist stance that is roused to anger in the sonnets of the secondsection and then challenged and defeated in the Civil War crisis of the last,‘Capital de la gloria’, the volume’s centrepiece.

Even less obvious at first sight in the conceptual link with Alberti’searlier work. But we have seen how the pronounced object-orientation of thesacrilegious materio-mystic who wrote Sobre los ángeles and Sermones ymoradas continues and finds new purpose in the political activist of thethirties whose atheism is channelled into the Marxist critique of historicalmaterialism. Materialism is the decisive link, and Alberti is one of the fewto test the gamut of surrealist theory from Freudian automatism to thefevered pursuit of ‘the surrealist object’ to Marxist solidarity with theworker.

As to the quality of the poems, finally, it has to be said that in absoluteterms several fall short of the mark, for the poet is sometimes toocompromised by the need to encourage or denounce, as in the crude ‘Baladade los cuatro cerdos de la paz’ which expresses disgust at the Munich


agreement.43 However, poetry is the product of circumstance and Alberti’scircumstance in the war was that of Spain’s most highly regarded poet—‘therecognized successor to Lorca’, as Spender put it—44whose poems wereexpected to contribute to the Republican effort. Remarkably, he met theseexpectations while writing poems that largely bear out Spender’s furthercomment that Alberti ‘felt about the propagandist heroics of war much as Idid myself ’ ,45 which is to say, unimpressed. Indeed, the poems of ‘Capitalde la gloria’ offer a multifaceted commentary which reflects the fluctuationsand contradictions of a war witnessed in turn by a communist, a soldier, apoet and simply a man, with all the agony this entails. At least half a dozenare outstanding war poems, which is no mean proportion, and theyinvariably bear Alberti’s materialist stamp. In my view, De un momento aotro completes a cycle begun with Sobre los ángeles and Sermones ymoradas, and it ranks with these works as Alberti’s finest achievement.46

43 This poem is not included in Poesías completas, but is found in PPU, Barcelona, 202.44 Stephen Spender, The Thirties and After: Poetry, Politics, People (1933-75) (London:

Macmillan, 1978), 78.45 Spender, The Thirties and After, 78.46 A number of points and references in this article came to light through a process of

collaborative discussion with a postgraduate student, Craig Duggan, to whom I would like toexpress my sincere thanks.

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