Jane Duran's 'Spanish Peasant Boy' featured as part of Radio 3's Poetry Season
Posted on: Monday, June 15, 2009As part of Radio 3's Poetry Season, presenters are sharing their poetry recommendations. Here Lucy Duran explains her choice.
I confess to having a special soft spot for my sister Jane's poems. 'Spanish Peasant Boy' comes from her 2002 book of poems called 'Silences from the Spanish Civil War'.
They're about our father, Gustavo Durán, a Spanish musician and composer. When he was only 29, with no military background, he enlisted in the Republican army to fight against Franco, and became its youngest general. At the end of the war he managed to escape to the UK, where he married my mother, and was never able to return to Spain.
This year is the 70th anniversary of the end of the Civil War and the 40th anniversary of my father's death, so it seems like a timely moment to share these thoughts on Radio 3's Poetry Season.
'Spanish peasant boy' for me is a comment on the bitterness of exile.
Like many other exiles from the Spanish Civil War, my father never talked to his children about his war experiences - hence the "silences" in the title of my sister's book.
So we grew up in an atmosphere of deep but unspoken nostalgia for Spain. This was especially powerful when he sat at the piano, playing his own compositions and arrangements of Spanish folksongs, like 'Mal de l'amor' (you can hear a version of it on Yasmin Levy's album Mano Suave). I think Jane's poems have a similar effect on me.
Spanish Peasant Boy
after a drawing by Benjamín Palencia
Perhaps you have sworn
to be still like this,
in your loud stone boots
your cropped hair
and sleeves too short
in a ploughed field,
the civil war
still far from your village.
You can hear it already
and pay attention.
It will come, one day,
right into the square
the sheep pass over
as my hand passes over
this paper, into the fastnesses
of doorways and sheepfolds.
Perhaps you will see my father
in the band of soldiers
with his hair cropped too,
the cypresses toiling
along the edge of your field
Perhaps you will leave everything
as he did
and cross borders,
go to France, America,
anywhere that will have you.
From Silences from the Spanish Civil War
To view Lucy Duran's introduction on the Radio 3 website click here
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