Look up the meaning of the word “enormous” and some synonyms.

The Academy Dictionary is very terse. It defines the term simply as “very large”. Wordreference is more generous with synonyms: colossal, monumental, enormous, huge, immense, colossal, grandiose, gigantic, gigantic, titanic.

That phrase was said by an Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, more than a hundred years ago. It is not for us to put ourselves in the head of a writer, and even less so of a personality as complex and contradictory as Ramón J. Sender’s, but the fact that he began to publish Crónica del alba, his fictionalised autobiography (“apocryphal memoirs”, as others call it) in 1942… What had happened in the last years of his life, did he still live in the same country, did he still have the same family as only six years earlier, in 1936?

As a consequence of the Civil War, Sender lost his wife, led an eventful family life, became disenchanted with ideologies that had seduced him, lost his roots when he was forced to go into exile…

In a way, Crónica del alba is a kind of therapy: by novelising his childhood, adolescence and early youth (concentrated especially in the first four novels of the Crónica del alba series, Hipógrifo violento, La Quinta Julieta and El mancebo y los héroes), he tries to recover that homeland he has lost: unable to return to Spain, to Aragón… he recognises himself, he finds himself again through those early years of life. When speaking of this writer, Antón Castro speaks of “rural childhood as a lost paradise”. In other later books he delves into more stormy times, the war, etc., and he does so in a more unhinged way, with very complex metaphors, but the first books reflect a certain innocence, albeit with a great deal of irony and hidden meaning.

Read this paragraph from Chronicle of the Dawn:

When I turned ten, I thought I had entered the age of responsibility. I moved away a bit from the street fights, the group fights. I had my own in the village. Eight or ten boys who fought under me. The fiercest opposing group was led by Colaso and its most terrible member was Carrasco, who lived in the house next to mine. It had been three months, however, since I had seen either of them. This change was due to my initiation into student life and to the fact that my family was making my private life more and more difficult every day. I had to study, and it was no longer a question of primary school, but of serious teachers who lived in the capital and to whom I had to present myself in order to establish my ability in such arduous subjects as geometry, history and Latin.

 

What does it suggest to you? It seems to explain the passage from one stage to another. Does it sound familiar?

In this first book of the Crónica del alba series (the one with the same title), Sender also projects his difficult relationship with his father, a stern, upright man who wanted him to study law and despised his attraction to poetry. Much later, the writer would recall: “My father thought it was a disgrace for a son to write poetry, but my mother, behind his back, asked me to read him my clumsy verses or my novels or comedies. I wrote all that. My mother would listen to me and say: ‘I have never heard anything more beautiful’.

In this novel, the author puts us on the trail of a restless, impulsive boy with the makings of a leader and a touch of rebelliousness. Some critics have even described this book as a sort of “An Aragonese Tom Sawyer”.

Have you heard of Tom Sawyer, does this book ring a bell? In any case, look for information about it: who is the author? where and when does the action take place? what is the main character like, what qualities does he have? Look for a synopsis of the plot or, why not, you could read it.

If you add to this the reading of the first Chronicle of Dawn… or at least its synopsis, you will surely be able to establish some similarities: childhood crushes, rivalries, adventure, mischief, cave exploration, treasures… imagination, in short.

In fact, Crónica del alba was adapted for the cinema. It was shortly after the writer’s death. It was the film Valentina, directed by Antonio Betancor in 1983, and starring Anthony Quinn, Jorge Sanz and Paloma Gómez. Televisión Española was involved in its production, which is why it has been broadcast several times on the public channel.

 

It is part of a TVE programme, “Versión Española”, broadcast in December 2012.

In addition to this related suggestion, there could be a group viewing of the film in the classroom.

Valentina was continued in 1984, with the film 1919, which interprets the plot of El mancebo y los héroes (fourth novel in the series). It is set in a turbulent period (workers’ uprisings, repression…) in Saragossa in 1919.

 

Although names and dates are changed, some of the things told in 1919 are related to real historical events: the uprising in the Carmen barracks in Saragossa (January 1920). Look for information about this event: what happened, who motivated it, in what context did it take place?

Prior to the two films we have discussed, there had been some adaptations of Sender’s works into dramatic pieces for television and episodes of series. And they were followed by the premieres of

Réquiem por un campesino español (1985), directed by Francesc Betriu.
El rey y la reina (1985) by José Antonio Páramo.
Las gallinas de Cervantes (1987), by Alfredo Castellón.

In addition, other directors have found in Sender’s works fundamental pieces to undertake certain cinematographic works, such as Pilar Miró (El crimen de Cuenca, 1979) or Carlos Saura (El Dorado, 1988) based on the novels El lugar de un hombre and La aventura equinoccial by Lope de Aguirre.

These questions, and others, are dealt with in Ramón J. Sender y el cine, a book coordinated in 2001 by Alberto Sánchez and Lázaro Alexis as part of the Huesca Film Festival, in which Carmen Peña and Jesús Ferrer review the adaptations of Sender’s works to the seventh art.

 

Among the reasons why Sender has been such a well adapted author, Francisco Carrasquer points to his “lack of rhetoric, the linearity of the action, the extreme mobility of his style and the dramatic configuration of some of his narratives”. The relationship between the plot of these works and the first decades of the 20th century or the Civil War helps to rehabilitate the visual memory of a part of Spain’s history.

Participating in these narrative values, and with a very intense relationship with transcendental historical moments of the 20th century (specifically the Republic and the war), Réquiem por un campesino español (Requiem for a Spanish peasant) has been a very popular novel.

Among other things, it has inspired a play by the Aragonese company Teatro Che y Moche, which premiered it in 2021.

 

The Aragonese folk-rock group Ixo Rai! also entitled “Paco el del molino” (the protagonist of the Requiem…) one of the songs on their album Entalto (1999).

 

Sender was born almost with the century and lived intensely its contradictions, the moments of revolution and change, the conflict, the exile, the struggle of ideas, etcetera. A fundamental experience was his military service in Morocco between 1923 and 1925. Witness to scenes of injustice and corruption, he returned from there with his left-wing ideas strongly consolidated and with a baggage of experiences that he would transfer to Imán (1930), the novel with which he would make a name for himself on the literary scene.

Document yourself: What was going on in Morocco in those years? Why did Spain have its sway there? What other European countries were present in North Africa? Who usually went to war? What were the “quota soldiers”? Look up information about the Annual disaster, Abd-el-Krim and the Al Hoceima landing.

 

Exile is synonymous with exile (“losing one’s land”) and “expatriation” (“being left without a homeland”). In addition to Sender, other Aragonese writers had to leave Spain because of their commitment to the Republic defeated in 1939. Here are two of them, and another who left later but for similar reasons.

Fill in the gaps in the information about them:

1. 1. Benjamín Jarnés was born in …(a)… in the village of …(b)…. (in the district of Belchite): narrator, essayist and literary critic close to the Generation of 1927, his best known work is El profesor inútil (1926). He went into exile in …(c)…, from where he returned very ill and died in 1949.
   2. José Ramón Arana’s real name was …(a)…, born in Garrapinillos in 1905. He played a very prominent role in the Council of Aragon during the …(b)….. He emigrated to Mexico, where he edited the magazine Aragón. His most important work is the book of short stories …(c)…, the first edition of which dates from 1950. He returned from exile and died in 1973. He is buried in …(d)…, the village of his family.
   3. Ildefonso Manuel Gil, was born in …(a)…. (1912) and died in Saragossa in …(b)….. He was a poet, storyteller and translator. After the war, he was persecuted by the regime, but endured until he left for …(c)… in the 1960s. He returned in …(d)… and was very involved in Aragonese cultural life.

Solutions: 1: 1888 – Elbow – The Useless Professor – Mexico / 2: José Ruiz Borau – Civil War – The Priest of Almuniaced – Monegrillo / 3: Paniza – 2003 – United States – 1983

We recommend the book Aragón desgajado: los exilios republicanos de 1939, coordinated by Alberto Sabio, and published by the Instituto de Estudios Altoaragoneses and Doce Robles in 2020, compiling the contributions to a study conference held in Huesca.

The Instituto de Estudios Altoaragoneses devotes special attention to the great writer from Chalamera. Its Ramón J. Sender Study Centre offers information and research on the writer, has a complete library and a network of specialists, publishes critical editions of titles by this author and studies and monographs on his work, and organises congresses, symposia, conferences and other activities. On the ground floor of the Institute’s headquarters in Huesca there is a permanent exhibition of books, photos, oil paintings, letters, manuscripts and personal objects of the writer.

As José-Carlos Mainer says, Sender “was dispossessed of everything: territory, affections, language. He was left with nothing but the memory of childhood and the nostalgia of solitary heroes: his work is a complete gallery of them. Of saints, heroes and poets… but also of the persecuted, the guilty, the falsely innocent and the falsely evil, the suicidal…”. For Antón Castro, in essence, he was always trying to do the same thing: “to record his concern for man and his drives, for the intensity of primitive forces and the hidden web of dreams, destiny and memory”.