She had already turned 50 when Jane Durán (Havana, 80 years old) decided to investigate and capture in her verses the silence that her father maintained about the Spanish Civil War. The fascinating pianist and composer Gustavo Durán (Barcelona, 1906- Crete, 1969), a great friend of Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti and Luis Buñuel, very close to the circle of the Generation of ’27, enlisted in the Republican ranks in the summer of 1936 and, against the odds, revealed himself as a great military strategist during the conflict. When the war ended he had the rank of lieutenant colonel, and managed to escape on a ship from Gandia to England.
“My father never returned to Spain, and that is something that moves me every time I see, from the plane window, the landscape flown over before landing,” explained Jane Durán this October 20 at the Madrid Student Residence, where she gave the poetry workshop titled Ink invisible. From a dozen poems in his book Silences since the Spanish civil war —originally published in 2002 and translated into Spanish by Gloria García Lorca in the 2019 Renacimiento edition—, recalled his creative process and uncovered the ideas on which he crafted his verses.
“How could I approach something as complex and remote for me as that war? There are history books, photos, documentaries, materials from that period, but I had to step on the ground and feel it,” he explained. In successive trips he visited Aragón, Belchite, Teruel, the Maestrazgo, the Camarena mountain range, scenes of the battles in which his father fought. Layer by layer he encountered the sediments, both tangible and emotional, of that tragic story and gave them a new emotion with his poetic gaze. About a can of sardines that he found in a shelter in Aragon, preserved almost intact from the war, he writes: “The lid folded back, screwed up in a hurry / —like a cloak against the cold,/ or fear or resentment or any emotion that can / break when stretched— so thin and expansive.”
From the battlefields to the border, and beyond, Durán writes in his collection of poems: “After the fields of Argelès-sur-Mer, / Saint-Cyprien, in Bacarès, after the barbed wire / in what places did they choose to live / or not live, rooms / swept by the roads and journeys?” Poetry, he maintains, allows history to be elucidated in an intimate, intense and concentrated way. ”A soldier’s cape can evoke the fear and resentment of everything that happened,” he noted, before highlighting the suggestive power of touch in poetry. “In the Sierra de Camarena I found the vestiges. I saw that the war was very present, even in the way people lowered their voices when talking about that story.”
An interview that his father gave in 1945 in Argentina gave him some clues about his silence. “He said that upon arriving in London he began to rebuild his life and decided not to talk about the war until new days came.” The gifted composer and soldier started a new life in 1939, as the father of three daughters after marrying the American Bonté Crompton. Already in the United States he worked for the MoMA, where he met again with Buñuel, for the State Department in Cuba, and later for the UN in Chile and in Greece, where he died. The sinister shadow of Senator McCarthy and his witch hunt followed him into the long exile from which he did not return. “My father was a great linguist and mastered Greek. He didn’t teach us Spanish but when we learned it during the years we lived in Chile we already spoke with him in that language,” she recalled. He brought them closer to music and their passion for poetry. The author has now traveled to Spain with her sister, the ethnomusicologist Lucy Durán, on the occasion of the presentation of the catalog raisonné of Gustavo Durán’s music. This work, carried out by Samuel Diz, based on the documentary collection of the composer deposited in the Residence a few years ago, dismantles the idea that Durán abandoned music in 1934 when he left Paris and the painter Néstor Martín Fernández de la Torre, and never returned to it.
Weren’t there many facets of Gustavo Durán’s life that were surrounded by silence, including his work in exile? “Many things we discovered through others. He didn’t tell us the story of his mother, whom my grandfather admitted to a psychiatric hospital, after they lost the youngest of their children as a child. Was he really a spy? I don’t know, he worked at the American embassy in Cuba and then at the UN. But throughout his entire life he composed wonderful scores and researched popular music.”
Jane Durán was born in Cuba, but grew up between New York and Chile. The long journey on a cargo ship that he undertook with his mother and sisters from the Big Apple to Valparaíso is evoked in the title of his most recent collection of poems, still unpublished in Spanish, Graceline, the name of the shipping company that owns that vessel. The brutal history of the construction of the Panama Canal that they went through on the trip, the coup d’état and the Pinochet dictatorship that arrived in 1973 resonate in their verses. How to approach politics from poetry? “In a more intimate and emotional, deeper way, which allows us to evoke the anguish and horror, for example, of the soldiers who participated in the atrocities of Pinochet’s coup and had to live with it for the rest of their lives. Political poetry must transcend the facts and reach the feeling of humanity to show the destruction, the fear, the censorship.”