Miguel de Unamuno

Two Moon Sonnets

translated from the Spanish by

Michael Smith

Miguel de Unamuno came to the writing of poetry late in life. Born in 1864, his first Poesías did not appear until 1907. Despite this late start, Unamuno crafted his poems with utter care: what he wished to say through the medium of poetry, he could not say in any other way. His poetry is harsh, intense, in keeping with all of Unamuno's works in which the lively sweep of his personality embraces collective experience without yielding anything of its own identity.

In Spain, Miguel de Unamuno was called 'a universal Basque'; and indeed he passionately loved the Basque language and culture, which he expounded with great competence. Unamuno, however, was no mere local genius. Rather, his thirst for knowledge and his mastery of European modernity transformed him into an international figure, and his intellectual sway was acknowledged throughout the whole Spanish-speaking world. While the native Basque is omnipresent in his writings, Unamuno is generally associated with Salamanca where he began to teach Greek at the university in 1891, and where later, in 1901, he became the university's rector. He died in 1936.

In a collection that appeared in 1920, containing accounts of his travels, there is the story of a journey made by Unamuno to Peña de Francia, south of Salamanca. The story highlights a memory which originated in the setting of a lake called del Cristo de la Laguna because of its proximity to a sanctuary. This memory, Unamuno writes, 'was impressed on me forever; of an evening, after sunset, passing over a ridge of earth, I suddenly saw the oaks as though mirrored in the sky which seemed spread out at their feet.' It was this experience that provided the occasion for the first of these two sonnets. The other sonnet has as its setting a small island of the Canaries to which Unamuno was confined in 1924 by the Dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera.