🦋 The white shirt
Warning: do not look in this post for a train of thought. Sorry! I've been trying to come up with one for a couple of days but it's not happening yet. So this is just a placeholder, a couple of things I've noticed recently that want tying together. Rosa (with whom I've been corresponding in English and in Spanish, thanks to Conversation Exchange for getting us together) sent me the lyrics to Ana Belén's "España, Camisa Blanca", a beautiful song that has really captured my imagination in the last few days.
I do not understand the metaphor yet -- Rosa explains that the song is about the end of Franco's regime in the late 70's, and that a white shirt is a symbol of hope. Looking around I see (from an article on El problema de España which I have not yet read) that the song's title comes from a poem by Blas de Otero Muñoz -- however I have not been able to find any of his poetry online, don't know the context. In the same article I notice a painting of Goya's, "The 3rd of May, 1808":
-- notice the white shirt which is the most striking detail of this painting. (The soldiers who are about to shoot the man in the white shirt are Napoleon's troops, suppressing civil unrest in Madrid during the occupation.) And now Dave is telling me that this painting features in Buñuel's movie Le fantôme de liberté -- onto my Netflix queue it goes... Hoping I will be able to suss out a thread connecting these items...
posted evening of Saturday, April 4th, 2009
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The force of the metaphor, I think, lies in the image of a white shirt ( the shape of Spain itself) clean, free of the traumatic historic past, full of confrontation and blood (the civil war). España:camisa blanca de mi esperanza= the poet´s hope for a different future, which sprouts from his love for his nation ( Any balanced individual will see in his own nation reasons for pride and reasons for shame= dulce o amarga, smelling of incense (so catholic Spain)). "A dove in search for more starred skies, where we can understand each other, without destroying one another, where to sit and talk... I´d want to lend a hand and I lend but words...". It is a beautiful poem, which only great poets can translate from harsh reality.
Greetings
posted afternoon of December 12th, 2014 by Miguel
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