THE ANARCHIST POIESIS OF THE BALLAD IN RAMON J. SENDER'S REQUIEM POR UN CAMPESINO ESPANOL

Requiem por un campesino espanol is a novel, set during the spanish civil War, in which a priest recalls the life of one of his parishioners, the altruistic paco, and the unpremeditated role he played in his manhunt and murder. the villagers, too, have commemorated this victim of falangist violence in the form of a ballad. it has been argued that the romance establishes the tone of the novel as a whole, balladizing it, and that its fixed roles of hero and Villain lay the blame squarely, yet impersonally, on the priest. the current article counters the second stage of this argument by focusing on the poiesis of the ballad -its collective authorship and ongoing incompleteness- in order to argue that the poem honours paco, but also refrains from trafficking in the moral binaries identified by havard. to this end, the article considers the genesis of traditional anonymous ballads in the spanish middle ages, Kropotkin's anarchist concepts of collaborativeness, as well as examples of cooperation and non-cooperation among characters in sender's novel. it also contrasts sender's ballad somewhat favourably with the abundance of real anonymous ballads produced during the spanish civil War.