The Hands

Publication Instance Details #1719

Publication Overview

Translation	Is Multilingual	Explicit Irish Context?	Ekphrasis	Has Paratext?	Reference to News, Media or Technology
Yes	No	No	No	Yes	No

Details

Human Rights Issues	War State Violence Torture
War / Genocide Referenced	War: Spanish Civil War
Languages	English
Original Language	German
Original Poem	Die Hände
Original Author	Erich Arendt
Genre	Short Lyric
Medium	Print Collection
Paratext Text	- after the German of Erich Arendt
Notes	This poem is a loose translation of Erich Arendt's German sonnet 'Die Hände'. The original is one of a series of poems Arendt wrote during the Spanish Civil War (1937-1939), in which he fought for the Republican side alongside a Catalonian Marxist division. The sonnet depicts acts of extreme violence and the obliteration of human dignity suffered by a farmer, Sebastian, at the hands of four members of the explicitly mentioned Guardia Civil, the Spanish civil guard (most of whom fought alongside Franco's nationalist forces). Due to a vague act of defiance with his fist, Sebastian is taken to his chopping-block, where the guardsmen chop off his hands. As he is tumbling away from them in shock, the laughing guardsmen shoot him and afterwards stuff his mouth with loam to silence him. The final three lines of the sestet depict Sebastian's corpse lying still in the field, while his chopped-off hands can still be heard banging on the windows all across the village. In the original German poem, Sebastian's banging fists spread blood all over the village windows; Muldoon's translation does not carry that detail across, perhaps to avoid an otherwise explicit allusion to the Red Hand of Ulster, or the Red Hand Commando.