Luna

The cultural magazine LUNA was produced by a group of Spanish Republicans who took refuge in the Chilean embassy in Madrid not long after the end of the Spanish Civil War. In all, they created 30 single-copy issues of the magazine between November 1939 and June 1940. In a richly illustrated typescript, the authors offered poetry, prose stories and reflections on literary culture. 

This number, the first of the series, opens with a sombre poem, ‘Luna nueva’, marking both the beginning of Franco’s dictatorship through references to a dark and ‘closed’ sky, and the founding of the magazine as a voice of resistance that amplifies the creative song of a new life. Through its allusions to the moon and the colour green, this poem recalls some of the more poems in Federico García Lorca’s famous Gypsy Ballads, and it is surely not by chance that the second entry in the issue is a short story by Santiago Ontañón imagining the poet Lorca inventing the name ‘Anfistora de Granada’ [Anfistora from Granada] to refer affectionately to the family maid who had sung him to sleep and helped him take his first steps as a child.

Other entries celebrate the resistance of the Spanish people, such as ‘España en el tormento’ [Spain in the storm], or ‘Cumbres heladas’ [Frozen heights], a story of love and loss. Signed by Julio Romeo, its title evokes Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and it is illustrated by beautifully delicate pen drawings. There is also a section on Antonio Machado, who along with Lorca was one of the great Spanish poets of the time, and a series of miscellaneous book reviews. 

The 30 issues of LUNA were preserved by the Chilean diplomat Germán Vergara Donoso. In 2000 they were discovered in the Archivo Central Andrés Bello at the University of Chile, which has now digitized them all and made them publicly available.