Published July 2024. Paperback, 132pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848619500 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
Las cosas del campo
is one of three books of Spanish prose poems that are often cited as the most accomplished in this form in the last century. The other two being Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Platero y yo
and Luis Cernuda’s Ocnos
. Las cosas del campo
is about the people and the landscape of Andalusia in the middle of the last century, still recognisable despite so many changes in the past seventy years. More specifically, it is about the landscape around the family home of the poet near the country town of Antequera in the province of Malaga; about the house, the Casería del Conde
, and the people who lived and worked there. It has come to represent a whole epoch of rural Andalusia and is full of magical descriptions of the land and its people, their character and ways of life.
José Antonio Muñoz Rojas (1909–2009) lived to be almost a hundred. His first book was published in 1929 and his last in 1997, Objetos perdidos
, about the trials of old age, for which he was awarded Spain’s national poetry prize. The reasons for this late recognition are related to the history of Spain in the last century. Muñoz Rojas came from Antequera in the south. His family were landowners. At the outset of the Civil War, his brother was killed, and he found himself in hiding and in fear of his life in Malaga. The story of his rescue by two Cambridge dons (he had been in Cambridge for the academic year 1935–36, researching connections between English metaphysical poets and Spanish poets of the Golden Age) is told in his autobiography. His position in respect of the conflict was complicated but his sympathies were with the nationalists. In the post-war years, he worked for Banco Urquijo in Madrid and helped fellow writers of whatever persuasion. Muñoz Rojas was an anglophile. He translated T. S. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins and other English poets. Amongst his most highly regarded works are two books published in the 1950s, Cantos a Rosa
(1954), intricately woven love poems; and the prose poems of Las cosas del campo
(1951).
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