INTERNATIONAL BRIGADERS REMEMBERED IN POETRY BOOK

Features » People and Places

Staff Reporter / 2010-03-10 15:22:12

Hablando de Leyendas

Charlie Donnelly was born in 1914 at Dungannon in Ireland, and died aged 23 in the Battle of Jarama, during the Civil War. He was not a soldier and, once in Spain, lasted only about a month. He was, in fact, a poet, who had written a few verses at university. But literary fame came after his death. On the last day of the battle, he was defending the so called Suicide Hill. Surrounded by Franco’s Nationalist troops, crouching behind an olive tree, a Canadian comrade heard him say, over the rattle of a machine gun: “Even the olives are bleeding.” A long time afterward, he repeated this to the Irish writer Joseph O’Connor (brother of the singer Sinead O’Connor), who used it as the title for the poet’s biography. Minutes after this remark, Donnelly was shot dead. It was February 27, 1937. His comrades were unable to retrieve his body for burial until March 10.

Now, 72 years after his death, in the Mira park in the nearby municipality of Rivas-Vaciamadrid, a statue carved in Dungannon stone commemorates Donnelly, a writer, journalist and political activist.
Inaugurated on February 27, the monument is a tribute to the soldiers of the International Brigades: some 60,000 volunteers from 54 countries who came to Spain to fight for the Republic. Some 10,000 fell in the war, 3,000 of them in the Battle of Jarama. The same week in Rivas also saw the presentation of a book, Hablando de leyendas- Poemas para España, in which Jim Jump, Antonio Díez and David González have compiled a number of the English-language poems written about the war, by Donnelly and by other writers, both known and unknown.

The book has been translated from the original in English titled, “Poems from Spain: British and Irish International Brigaders on the Spanish Civil War,” which is available from Amazon priced £10.99.
These are verses written in letters and diaries, scribbled on the margins of books the soldiers read in the interminable waits before battles, or on the back of official forms. Some were composed to boost morale, and published in the brigade reviews, while others were sent off to relatives or kept as personal souvenirs. A third type are the pieces written after the Brigades returned home.
In English-speaking countries, the conflict is often referred to as the “poets’ war,” somewhat to the irritation of other combatants, at least 80 percent of whom were workers. Even so, it cannot be denied that the war marked the heyday of a certain sort of political commitment among intellectuals and artists.One clear example is John Cornford, a young writer whose work blends political reflections with verses about love and fear.

No veteran of the Brigades was present at the inauguration, although there was a delegation from Dungannon. Jack Edwards, one of the 40 or so Brigades veterans who are still alive, had planned to come, but poor health impeded. “It’s getting very difficult now,” said Ángel Rojo of the Association of Friends of the International Brigades. “Three of the remaining Brigades veterans from Cuba died this week.”

Tags: Brigaders, Poetry, Ireland