Four Poems from Langston Hughes's Spanish Civil War Verse

[ PMLA little-known documents

Four Poems from Langston Hughes’s Spanish Civil War Verse Introduction introduction by anne donlon LANGSTON HUGHES TRAVELED TO SPAIN IN 1937, DURING THAT COUN- and evelyn scaramella TRY’S CIVIL WAR. HE SAW THE REPUBLIC’S FIGHT AGAINST FRANCO AS AN

international fight against fascism, racism, and colonialism and for the rights of workers and minorities. Throughout the 1930s, Hughes organized for justice, at home and abroad, often engaging with communist and other left political organizations, like the Communist Party USA’s John Reed Club, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, and the International Workers’ Or- ANNE DONLON, project manager for digi- der (Rampersad, Life 236, 286, 355; Scott). When the war in Spain began, in tal initiatives at the Modern Language 1936, workers and intellectuals who were engaged on the left came from Association, holds a doctorate in En glish from the Graduate Center, City University around the world to fight against Franco’s forces; these volunteers, the In- of New York. She edited Langston Hughes, ternational Brigades, included approximately 2,800 Americans known as Nancy Cunard, and Louise Thompson: Po- the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, of which about ninety were African American etry, Politics, and Friendship in the Spanish (Carroll vii; “African Americans”). Hughes went to Spain to interview black Civil War (Center for the Humanities, CUNY, antifascist volunteers in the International Brigades and write about their 2012), and her essay on Thyra Ed wards’s experiences for the Baltimore Afro- American, Volunteer for Liberty, and other Spanish Civil War scrapbook appears in To publications. Much of Hughes’s writing from Spain sought to explain to peo- Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women ple at home why men and women, and African diasporic people especially, and Internationalism (U of Illinois P, 2019). had risked their lives to fight in Spain. Hughes profiled African Americans EVELYN SCARAMELLA , associate professor fighting for the first time alongside white comrades in the International of Spanish at Manhattan College, is the Brigades, including Ralph Thornton, Thaddeus Battle, and Milton Herndon editor, with Regina Galasso, of Avenues of (“Pittsburgh Soldier Hero,” “Howard Man,” “Milt Herndon”). In addition to Translation: The City in Iberian and Latin American Writing (Bucknell UP, 2019). writing articles, he wrote poetry, gave radio speeches, and translated poems Her scholarly writing has appeared in and plays from Spanish into English. Much of Hughes’s work from the Span- The Massachusetts Review, Translation ish Civil War has been collected in anthologies.¹ However, so prolific was Review, and Revista canadiense de estu- Hughes, and so fastidious was he in saving drafts and ensuring they reach dios hispánicos, among other journals. his collection at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Li- She is working on a book manuscript, brary, that many unpublished works exist in archives. The four poems here “Translating the Spanish Civil War: The represent different poetic registers and levels of polish, and they illuminate Avant-Garde, Antifascism, and Literary the dynamic range of Hughes’s literary production during his time in Spain. History,” that explores the solidarity and collaboration between hispanophone Like many wartime poems, these four were written with urgency and and anglophone avant-garde writers and political purpose, and under difficult conditions. In some cases, Hughes translators during the Spanish Civil War. scribbled drafts of them in notebooks on the war front—the page on which

FIG. 1 documents little-known

Cover and pages of a notebook contain- ing an early draft of “Girl” that Hughes wrote while reporting from the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. Repro- duced courtesy of the Yale Collection of American Litera- ture, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

he wrote “Girl (She looks like a gypsy)” is now frayed and torn in half (ﬁg. 1)—and he typed one of them, an untitled poem that concludes “MADRID CELEBRATES RUSSIA’S TWENTY YEARS,” on a piece of scrap paper. These drafts, which have been pre- served among the Beinecke’s Langston Hughes Papers, contribute to a growing corpus of Hughes’s Spanish Civil War writing. The literary response to the Spanish Civil War was so deeply international that we cannot read Hughes’s poems from the war in isolation; rather, we must read them as part of a dense web of collaboration with Spanish, Latin American, and Ca- ribbean poets who were writing in defense of the Spanish Republic (Nelson 190). In July 1937, the Second International Writers’ Congress in Defense of Culture took place in several Spanish cities— Valencia, 4 July; Madrid, 5–8 July; and Barcelona, 11 July—and in Paris, 16–17 July (Soler). Writers such as Chile’s Pablo Neruda, Mexico’s Octavio Paz, and Peru’s César Vallejo ﬂocked to Spain to take part in the congress, which Neruda helped to 564 Four Poems from Langston Hughes’s Spanish Civil War Verse [ PMLA

organize. Hughes delivered his speech “Too Much A famous line from a flamenco song—“Soy de of Race” to the conference in Paris before travel- la raza calé” (“I am of the gypsy race”)—is one of ing to Spain with Cuba’s Nicolás Guillén, who also several voices woven together in “Untitled (Madrid spoke at the Paris congress. Celebrates Russia’s Twenty Years).” The poem’s next When he arrived in Madrid, Hughes worked and final line marks a radical shift, to a headline with Rafael Alberti, Manuel Altolaguirre, and other reporting the October 1937 commemoration of members of the Spanish literary avant- garde at the Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution. While earlier in the Alliance of Anti- Fascist Intellectuals to translate poem Hughes implies that poetry follows a linear Federico García Lorca’s celebrated collection of po- path when he describes it as something he could Romancero gitano Gypsy Ballads little-known documents ems (1928; ). The act “ride . . . down the muddy road,” the collage- like of translating Lorca was meant to honor his life and form of the poem suggests that readers must legacy after he had been assassinated by national- take a less straightforward route to integrate its ist troops at the start of the civil war (Scaramella disparate voices. The poem prompts its reader to 179). Hughes’s translation work, as well as his own “[make] a story” out of its distinct lines, connecting poetry, grew out of conversation and collaboration poetry, performance, and communist revolution in with the hispanophone writers he met, or whose the fight against fascism in Spain. work he read, in Spain.² Hughes’s Spanish Civil War “Boy” presents a mother at home in Iowa poetry therefore shows traces of intertextuality examining a map, trying to understand the death with the cancioneros written in defense of the Re- of her son at the Fuentes de Ebro front, which public at the same time: Guillén’s España: Poema Hughes visited in October 1937 to report on the en cuatro angustias y una esperanza (1937; Spain: A death of Milton Herndon, a black volunteer and Poem in Four Anguishes and One Hope), Neruda’s Es- brother of the persecuted labor organizer Angelo paña en el corazón (1937; Spain in Our Hearts), Paz’s Herndon (Rampersad 353; Hughes, “Milt Herndon” “Bajo tu clara sombra” y otros poemas sobre España 181). This poem recalls the imagery of a poem by (1937; “Under Your Clear Shadow” and Other Poems Guillén in which Mussolini examines a map while about Spain), and Vallejo’s España, aparta de mí este his soldiers suffer during the Italo-Ethiopian War.3 cáliz (Spain, Take This Cup from Me, written in 1937 The map in “Boy,” like the letter in the four epis- and published in 1939, after his death). tolary ballads Hughes wrote in Spain,4 becomes a Hughes explores gitano (“Roma,” or “Gypsy”) symbol of the effort to bridge geographic and ide- culture through the Spanish popular musical tra- ological distances. For Hughes, the International ditions of cante jondo and flamenco in the short, Brigades soldiers’ commitment to the antifascist impressionistic “Girl” (fig. 2). Hughes, like Lorca, cause created a new map of solidarity among dis- explored the connections between the Gypsy cante enfranchised groups. jondo and the African American blues tradition. “Note to the Democracies” condemns inac- “Girl” suggests the influence of Lorca’s ideas and tion and complacency—in particular, the refusal shows Hughes’s interest in linking the emotional of Western governments to provide military and FIG. 2 histories of diasporic communities. humanitarian aid to Republican Spain. The poem’s The typescript draft use of direct address, verses in capital letters, and of “Girl” by Lang- repeated questions and exclamations resonates ston Hughes. Repro- with other “call to action” poems by Hughes that duced courtesy of provoke the reader to act in times of political crisis. the Yale Collection These four Spanish Civil War poems enrich of American Litera- ture, the Beinecke our understanding of Hughes’s deep commitment Rare Book and to the Republican cause. Manuscript Library, Yale University. 134.3 ] Langston Huges 565

NOTES Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston documents little-known Hughes. Edited by Arnold Rampersad, Vintage Special thanks go to Craig Tenney of Harold Ober As- Books, 1994. sociates Incorporated and the Langston Hughes Estate ——— . Te Collected Works of Langston Hughes. U of Mis- for granting permission to publish these poems. We are souri P, 2001–03. 16 vols. also grateful to the archivists, curators, and staf mem- ———. “Howard Man Fighting as Spanish Loyalist.” Afro- bers of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library American, 5 Feb. 1938. Hughes, Collected Works, at Yale University. vol. 9, pp. 194–95. 1. Tese anthologies include Good Morning Revolu- ———. Langston Hughes Papers. James Weldon Johnson tion, edited by Faith Berry; Langston Hughes and the His- Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, panic World and Haiti, edited by Edward Mullen; African Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale Americans in the Spanish Civil War: “Tis Ain’t Ethiopia University. But It’ll Do,” edited by Danny Duncan Collum; The ———. “Letter from Spain.” Hughes, Collected Works, Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold vol. 1, pp. 252–53. Rampersad; and Te Collected Works of Langston Hughes. ———. “Love Letter from Spain.” Nelson, pp. 204–05. 2. El mono azul (Te Blue Monkey), the journal of the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, published a weekly ———. “Milt Herndon Died Trying to Rescue Wounded section of ballads, or romances, called “Romancero de la Pal.” Afro- American, 1 Jan. 1938. Hughes, Collected guerra civil” (“Ballads of the Spanish Civil War”), and Works, vol. 9, pp. 181–85. Hughes translated several poems from a 1936 anthology ——— . “ N o t e f r o m S p a i n . ” Langston Hughes, Nancy Cu- of the same name (Scaramella 181). nard, and Louise Thompson: Poetry, Politics, and 3. Hughes translated this poem, “Soldados en Abi- Friendship in the Spanish Civil War, edited by Anne sinia” (“Soldiers in Ethiopia”), after meeting Guillén Donlon, Center for the Humanities, Graduate Cen- on a trip to Cuba earlier in the decade. Te original was ter, City University of New York, 2012, pp. 41–43. published as part of Cantos para soldados y sones para Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document turistas (1937; Songs for Soldiers and Songs for Tourists). Initiative. 4. “Letter from Spain,” “Postcard from Spain,” “Love ———. “Pittsburgh Soldier Hero, but Too Bashful to Letter from Spain,” and “Note from Spain.” Talk.” Afro- American, 15 Jan. 1938. Hughes, Collected Works, vol. 9, pp. 187–89. ———. “Postcard from Spain.” Hughes, Collected Works, WORKS CITED vol. 1, pp. 253–54. Mullen, Edward J., editor. Langston Hughes in the His- “African Americans in the Spanish Civil War.” ALBA: panic World and Haiti. By Langston Hughes, Archon Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, www.alba- valb Books, 1977. .org/ resources/ lessons/ african- americans- in -the Nelson, Cary. Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Po- -spanish -civil- war. etry of the American Lef. Routledge, 2003. Berry, Faith, editor. Good Morning Revolution: Uncol- Rampersad, Arnold. I, Too, Sing America. 2nd ed., Ox- lected Writings of Social Protest. By Langston Hughes, ford UP, 2002. Vol. 1 of Te Life of Langston Hughes Citadel Press, 1992. (1902–41). Carroll, Peter N. Te Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Bri- Scaramella, Evelyn. “Translating the Spanish Civil gade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War. Stanford War: Langston Hughes’s Transnational Poetics.” Te UP, 1994. Massachusetts Review, vol. 55, no. 2, Summer 2014, Collum, Danny Duncan, editor. African Americans in the pp. 177–88. Spanish Civil War: “Tis Ain’t Ethiopia, but It’ll Do.” Scott, Jonathan. Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston G. K. Hall, 1992. Hughes. U of Missouri P, 2007. García Lorca, Federico. Gypsy Ballads. Translated by Soler, Manuel Aznar. “‘Si Mi Pluma Valiera Tu Pistola’ Langston Hughes, Beloit College, 1951. (‘If My Pen Were Worth Your Gun’): Second Interna- Guillén, Nicolás. “Soldiers in Ethiopia.” Translated by tional Writers Congress in Defense of Culture.” Uni- Langston Hughes. Hughes, Collected Works, vol. 16, versitat de València, www .valencia .edu/ ~cultura/e/ pp. 103–05. e x p p e s e t s e g o n c o n g r e s p l u m a p i s t o l a 0 7 i n g . h t m . 134.3 ] Langston Hughes 567

Quiet in their holes of earth this time, Hughes also composed a number of his own po- documents little-known Silent all day. ems about Gypsies and their culture, such as “A Farewell,” “Ballad of the Gypsy,” “Bad Luck Card,” “Girl,” “Gypsy Do you want Spain Man,” “Gypsy Melodies,” “Fortune Teller Blues,” and “Song Silenced? of Spain.” A draf of his unpublished book “First Book of Gypsies” includes a chapter called “Gypsies of Spain” and is Do you want Spain found in the Beinecke’s Langston Hughes Papers. To die? 2. Angle brackets have been placed around words that Hughes crossed out. SEE where the robber- butchers 3. In his 1947 essay “My Adventures as a Social Poet,” Sharpen their knives Hughes again invokes mud as part of his identity as a poet. For the kill! Defning the type of poetry he writes, Hughes explains What is your will— that “having been born poor—and also colored—in Mis- Ambulances souri, I was stuck in the mud from the beginning” (150). 4. Hughes incorrectly transcribes calé as jale in his STILL? notes, a mistake he repeats elsewhere in his writing. Calé Condensed milk for babies? is synonymous with raza gitana, “Gypsy race.” Caló re- fers to the language spoken by gitanos in Spain. Bread? 5. When the anniversary of the Russian Revolution Have you nothing was celebrated in Madrid, it was covered by the press, in- To add? cluding the International Brigades publication Volunteer for Liberty. Its 15 November 1937 issue ran the headline ARE YOU DEAD? “Madrid Celebrates Double Anniversary,” referring to the twenty- year anniversary of the Russian Revolution and the one- year anniversary of the defense of Madrid. 6. “Boy” illustrates Hughes’s fascination with chart- ing the heroism and sacrifces of American soldiers and EDITORS’ NOTES medics who traveled far from home to fght against fascism. Americans served in several diferent battalions “Girl (She looks like a gypsy)” and “Untitled (Madrid Cele- in the Spanish Civil War, and the American volunteers brates Russia’s Twenty Years)” are the titles assigned to these in the International Brigades tend to be referred to col- poems by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. lectively as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, named afer 1. Gypsies and famenco became pervasive themes in one of those battalions, the Abraham Lincoln Battalion Hughes’s poetry and prose through his obsession with (Carroll vii). American volunteers also served with the Federico García Lorca. Lorca and Hughes each saw a kin- George Washington Battalion, formed in the spring of ship between blues and cante jondo. In one of the articles 1937, and other battalions, including the predominantly Hughes wrote from Spain for the Baltimore Afro-American , Canadian Mackenzie- Papineau Battalion, known as the he wrote, “Flamenco is to Spain, I suppose, what the blues “Mac- Paps” (126). are to America. . . . The flamencos are like blues in that 7. National Youth Administration, one of Franklin they are sad songs, with a kind of triumphant sadness, a Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies. vital earthiness about them from which life itself springs” 8. Fuentes de Ebro, a town near Zaragoza, the capital (“Around the Clock” 200). In addition to Lorca’s Ro- of the Aragon region, was the site of fghting during the mancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads), Hughes translated Span- Republican Army’s Zaragoza Ofensive in October 1937, ish Civil War ballads of living Spanish poets like Rafael during which the Abraham Lincoln Battalion and the Alberti, José Moreno Villa, and Emilio Prados (Scaramella Mac- Paps sufered many casualties in their attempt to 179). Although Hughes fnished a draf of his translation take the town. of Romancero gitano in 1937, and published translations 9. Te poem reprimands the world powers like En- of individual poems from the collection in the United gland, France, and the United States that cited the nonin- States as early as 1938, he did not publish Gypsy Ballads tervention pact to justify their refusal to aid the Spanish until years later, in the Beloit Poetry Journal, in 1951. He Republic militarily while overlooking the aid Hitler and also completed his translation of Lorca’s play Bodas de san- Mussolini provided Franco. “Note to the Democracies” is gre (Blood Wedding) in 1938. Te translation of Bodas de perhaps most similar in style and tone to “Roar, China!,” sangre, which he titled “Fate at the Wedding” and “Tragic a poem that Hughes published during the Spanish Civil Wedding” in the manuscript versions, was adapted and War in Volunteer for Liberty. Sometimes he dramatizes published by Melia Bensussen in 1994 under the more com- such appeals in dialogic form, having one speaker make mon title, Blood Wedding (Martin- Ogunsola 4). During the case to another to take action on behalf of Spain 568 Four Poems from Langston Hughes’s Spanish Civil War Verse [ PMLA

(“Song of Spain”) or to join with other black workers in a ———. “Dear Mr. President.” Hughes, Collected Works, May Day demonstration (“Sister Johnson Marches”). Te vol. 2, p. 237. epistolary poems Hughes wrote from the perspective of ——— . “A F a r e w e l l . ” H u g h e s , Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 47. Johnny, a volunteer African American soldier in Spain, to ———. “Fortune Teller Blues.” Hughes, Collected Works, his family and friends in Alabama also make an appeal to vol. 1, p. 175. take action across geographic and ideological space (“Let- ———. “Girl.” Hughes, Collected Works, vol. 2, p. 122. ter from Spain,” “Love Letter,” “Note from Spain,” and ——— . “ G y p s y M a n . ” H u g h e s , Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 78. “Postcard”). Hughes wrote many poems in this period ———. “Gypsy Melodies.” Hughes, Collected Works, vol. 2, that declared themselves to be letters, memos, notes, and p. 118. broadcasts addressed to a particular audience, including ———. “Hughes Finds Moors Being Used as Pawns by “Open Letter to the South” (1932), “Letter to the Acad- Fascists in Spain.” Hughes, Collected Works, vol. 9, emy” (1933), “Broadcast to Ethiopia” (1936), “Dear Mr. little-known documents pp. 161–65. President” (1943), “Broadcast to the West Indies” (1943), and “Note to All Nazis Fascists and Klansmen” (1943). ———. Langston Hughes Papers. James Weldon Johnson Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, 10. Not only did Hughes urge democratic nations to Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale do more than send food and medical supplies to Spain, he University. also participated in organizing and fund- raising on behalf of the Spanish Republic. When he returned to the United ———. “Letter from Spain.” Hughes, Collected Works, vol. 1, States, in early 1938, he became involved with the Negro pp. 252–53. Committee to Aid Spain, part of the Medical Bureau and ———. “Letter to the Academy.” Hughes, Collected Works, North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, vol. 1, p. 231. which sent an ambulance full of supplies to Spain later that ———. “Love Letter from Spain.” Revolutionary Memory: year. Paul Robeson, Tyra Edwards, Salaria Kea, Louise Recovering the Poetry of the American Lef, by Cary Tompson, and Angelo Herndon were also active in raising Nelson, Routledge, 2003, pp. 204–05. funds and supplies for the ambulance, which was painted ———. “My Adventures as a Social Poet.” Good Morning with the words “From the Negro People of America to the Revolution: Uncollected Writings of Social Protest, ed- People of Republican Spain.” Hughes also recalled seeing ited by Faith Berry, Citadel Press, 1992, pp. 150–57. eforts to raise relief aid in the United States before he went ——— . “ N o t e f r o m S p a i n . ” Langston Hughes, Nancy Cu- to Spain in his article “Hughes Finds Moors Being Used nard, and Louise Thompson: Poetry, Politics, and as Pawns by Fascists in Spain” (originally published in the Friendship in the Spanish Civil War, edited by Anne Baltimore Afro-American on 30 October 1937). He noticed Donlon, Center for the Humanities, Graduate Cen- the appeals to aid “[t]he new democratic Spain . . . plac- ter, City University of New York, 2012, pp. 41–43. arded in the main streets of cities like Denver and Salt Lake Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document City when [he] lectured there. AID REPUBLICAN SPAIN! I n i t i a t i v e . MILK FOR THE BABIES OF SPANISH DEMOCRACY!” (164). ———. “Note to All Nazis Fascists and Klansmen.” Hughes, Collected Works, vol. 2, p. 79. ———. “Open Letter to the South.” Hughes, Collected WORKS CITED Works, vol. 1, p. 147. ———. “Postcard from Spain.” Hughes, Collected Works, Carroll, Peter N. Te Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Bri- vol. 1, pp. 253–54. gade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War. Stanford ——— . “ R o a r , C h i n a ! ” H u g h e s , Collected Works, vol. 1, UP, 1994. p. 249. Hughes, Langston. “Around the Clock in Madrid: Daily ———. “Sister Johnson Marches.” Hughes, Collected Works, Life in a Besieged City.” Hughes, Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 146. vol. 9, pp. 199–203. ——— . “ S o n g o f S p a i n . ” H u g h e s , Collected Works, vol. 1, ——— . “ B a d L u c k C a r d . ” H u g h e s , Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 141. p. 98. Martin- Ogunsola, Dellita. Introduction. The Transla- ———. “Ballad of the Gypsy.” Hughes, Collected Works, tions: Federico García Lorca, Nicolás Guillén, and vol. 2, p. 59. Jacques Roumain, by Langston Hughes, edited by ———. “Broadcast to Ethiopia.” Hughes, Collected Works, Martin-Ogunsola, U of Missouri P, 2003, pp. 1–15. vol. 1, p. 246. Vol. 16 of Te Collected Works of Langston Hughes. ———. “Broadcast to the West Indies.” Hughes, Collected Scaramella, Evelyn. “Translating the Spanish Civil Works, vol. 2, p. 238. War: Lang ston Hughes’s Transnational Poetics.” Te ——— . Te Collected Works of Langston Hughes. 16 vols., Massachusetts Review, vol. 55, no. 2, Summer 2014, U of Missouri P, 2001–03. pp. 177–88.