Miguel Hernandez – författare

The Second Ku Klux Klan’s success in the 1920s remains one of the order’s most enduring mysteries. Emerging first as a brotherhood dedicated to paying tribute to the original Southern organization of the Reconstruction period, the Second Invisible Empire developed into a mass movement with millions of members that influenced politics and culture throughout the early 1920s. This study explores the nature of fraternities, especially the overlap between the Klan and Freemasonry. Drawing on many previously untouched archival resources, it presents a detailed and nuanced analysis of the development and later decline of the Klan and the complex nature of its relationship with the traditions of American fraternalism.

The Second Ku Klux Klan’s success in the 1920s remains one of the order’s most enduring mysteries. Emerging first as a brotherhood dedicated to paying tribute to the original Southern organization of the Reconstruction period, the Second Invisible Empire developed into a mass movement with millions of members that influenced politics and culture throughout the early 1920s. This study explores the nature of fraternities, especially the overlap between the Klan and Freemasonry. Drawing on many previously untouched archival resources, it presents a detailed and nuanced analysis of the development and later decline of the Klan and the complex nature of its relationship with the traditions of American fraternalism.

Deeply admired by poets far more familiar to us, from Lorca to William Carlos Williams, the poems of Miguel Hernandez (1910-42), written in the midst of the savage 20th century, beam with a gentleness of heart. Hernandez was a self-educated goatherd from the tiny Spanish town of Orihuela who tried hard to be accepted among his older contemporaries. Lorca wrote to the young poet in 1933, telling him to stop struggling to get along in a 'circle of literary pigs'. After fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, Hernandez was imprisoned in several of Franco's jails, where he continued to write until his death from untreated tuberculosis on 28 March 1942: he was only 31. Miguel Hernandez is now one of the most revered poets in the Spanish-speaking world. From his early formalism, paying homage to Gongora and Quevedo, to the final poems, which are passionate and bittersweet, Hernandez' work is a dazzling reminder that force can never defeat spirit, and that courage is its own reward. Pablo Neruda called him 'a great master of language - a wonderful poet'.

I Spanien i mitt hjärta har Thomas Almqvist valt ut elva spanska favoritpoeter, varav flera aldrig tidigare har översatts till svenska. Antonio Machado, Federico García Lorca, Miguel Hernández, Rafael Alberti, Emilio Prados, Gabriel Celaya, Vicente Aleixandre, León Felipe, Blas de Otero, José Agustín Goytisolo och Carlos Bousoño. Många av poeterna i urvalet hörde till Generation 27, kallad La Generación de la República, »Republikens Generation«. Tre av dessa elva dog som martyrer under eller strax efter spanska inbördeskriget 1936-1939 – Lorca, Hernández och Machado, medan de andra fängslades eller tvingades i landsflykt. Kriget och döden är ofta närvarande i dessa dikter, men här finner läsaren också dikter om kärlek, om längtan till havet och naturen, om kamp och uppror.