Spanish · 1910–1942
Hernández herded goats outside Orihuela in Alicante and was taken out of school at fifteen to work, educating himself out of a borrowed library. He arrived in Madrid in 1931 with a shepherd's accent and a manuscript, went home unpublished, came back in 1934, and was taken up by Neruda and Aleixandre. He wrote a book of sonnets about a thwarted love that Lorca called the best in Spanish since the Golden Age. When the war came he joined the Communist Fifth Regiment, wrote for the front, married Josefina Manresa, and lost his first son. Arrested trying to cross into Portugal in 1939, he was sentenced to death, reprieved, and moved through six prisons; he died of untreated tuberculosis in Alicante in 1942, at thirty-one. His last poems were written to a wife who had nothing to eat but bread and onions.