The Life of the Fields: Las cosas del campo

This book is about the people and the landscape of Andalusia at a specific time, in the middle of the last century, still recognisable, still to be found, despite the fact that Andalusia has seen so many changes in these past seventy years. The book was inspired by the landscape around the family home of the Spanish poet Jose Antonio Munoz Rojas (1909-2009) near the country town of Antequera in the province of Málaga. It is about the country house and farm, the Caseria del Conde, and the people who lived and worked there. But it has come to be seen as representing a whole epoch of rural Andalusia and is full of magical descriptions of the land and its people, their character and ways of life. The interest and regard the English have always shown for Andalusia is justification enough for bringing this most attractive book into our language.

Munoz Rojas (1909-2009) is one of the finest but least known poets of his generation. He was an Anglophile with a very considerable knowledge of English literature. He translated Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Hopkins, Eliot and others. In 1936 he was in Cambridge beginning a thesis on the relationship between the English 'metaphysical' poets and those of the Spain's 'golden age'. These studies were interrupted by the Spanish Civil War which began that summer. His Cambridge connections and the part they played in his near-death experiences in the first months of the war are recounted in his memoir 'La Gran Musarana', published in 1994. As well as 'Las cosas del campo', two books of poetry by Munoz Rojas are especially celebrated, 'Cantos a Rosa', 1954, love songs of lyrical and intricate form; and 'Objetos perdidos', 1997, a book of discreet humour about the trials of old age and religious devotion for which he received Spain's National Poetry Prize. In the post-war years Muñoz Rojas worked for the Banco Urquijo in Madrid. In those difficult years he helped many poets whether or not they were in favour with the Franco regime.