At 32 years old, American poet James Neugass spent several months in Spain during the civil war as an ambulance driver in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. His memoirs, unpublished for nearly 50 years after his death, contain dizzying accounts of battlefield rescues conducted as shells whistled past and machine guns rattled as well as melancholy, elegiac recollections of hours spent on alert, waiting for battle. Taken as a whole, these memories are not only a subtle, intensely lyrical evocation of the Spanish Civil War but also a movingly honest account of man’s experience of war.
Cuando tenía 32 años, el poeta americano James Neugass pasó algunos meses en España durante la guerra civil al volante de una ambulancia de la Brigada Abraham Lincoln. Sus memorias, inéditas por casi 50 años después de su muerte, combinan vertiginosos relatos sobre el rescate de heridos mientras silbaban los obuses y tableteaban las ametralladoras con recreaciones melancólicas y elegíacas de las horas en alerta, esperando el combate. En su totalidad, estos recuerdos son tanto una sutil, intensamente lírica evocación sobre la contienda civil española como un conmovedor testimonio sobre la experiencia del hombre en la guerra.
Overview
At 32 years old, American poet James Neugass spent several months in Spain during the civil war as an ambulance driver in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. His memoirs, unpublished for nearly 50 years after his death, contain dizzying accounts of battlefield rescues conducted as shells whistled past and machine guns rattled as well as melancholy, elegiac recollections of hours spent on alert, waiting for battle. Taken as a whole, these memories are not only a subtle, intensely lyrical evocation of the Spanish Civil ...