Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Spanish Edition)

by Antonio Machado

  After two stanzas of darkness and illumination, Machado’s third stanza of vision is not an instant of ineffable revelation—the poem with its words does exist—yet it is limited in these four lines to nouns, to things, except for “green,” which as a quality inherent in the meadow is more substantive than adjectival in function. Then in the poem’s last lines, the memory of the vision is lost, and he wakes a second time to the world without vision or memory:

  And all in my memory was lost

  like a soap bubble in the wind.

  With one word—”hair” in “the water in your hair!”—the poet equates his vision with love. When Machado begins to write sonnets, poems to Guiomar, and his aphoristic mountain songs, we find a fluent and intensely clear vision of love and nature. In the sonnet “Por qué, decísme, hacia los altos llanos” (“You ask me, why my heart flies from the coast”), he tells us that it is not coastal Andalucía and its fertile lands, but the austere north and the starkly clean landscape of Soria where his heart lives. There he found one person—whom he translates into a landscape in order to represent his love:

  My heart is living, yes, where it was born,

  but not to life—to love, the Duero near,

  the whitewashed wall and cypress in the sky.

  Machado was writing poems of immaculately bright images of nature. His sonnets are dream games; the lens of time distorts and creates everything, with the emphasis on the thing, in soundless, endless Spanish afternoons where time halts. All this we see, and in Machado, we always see. From the sequence “Los sueños dialogados” (“Dreams in Dialogue”), the sonnet “Como en el alto llano tu figura” (“How suddenly her face on the plateau”) has the dreamed land, the love, the suspension of time:

  How suddenly her face on the plateau

  appears to me! And then my word evokes

  green meadows and the arid plains below,

  the flowering blackberries and ashen rocks.

  Obedient to my memory, the black oak

  bursts on the hill, the poplars then define

  the river, and the shepherd climbs the cloak

  of knolls while a town balcony shines: mine,

  ours. Can you see? Remote, toward Aragón,

  the sierra of Moncayo, white and rose.

  Look at the bonfire of that cloud, and far

  shining against the blue, my wife, a star.

  Santana hill, beyond the Duero, shows,

  turning violet in soundless afternoon.

  Segovia’s Street of Abandoned Children

  From Baeza in 1919, Machado went north to take a new teaching position in Segovia, whence he was able to go each weekend, in just a few hours by train, to Madrid; there he collaborated with his brother Manuel on several plays. In Madrid he had more intellectual companionship among his fellow teachers of literature and philosophy, and through his weekend trips had again joined the literary life. The best portrait of Don Antonio in his Segovia days appears in a remembrance by John Dos Passos. As a young man in his early twenties, Dos Passos spent some days and evenings talking with Machado in Segovia. This was 1919. Thirty-nine years later I wrote to him and to Machado’s old friend Juan Ramón Jiménez, who was then near death, asking whether they might write reminiscences of Machado for a publication. Juan Ramón sent an earlier work that he had written shortly after the end of the Spanish civil war (1936-39) in which the drama and dark calamity of the time as well as his affection for Machado throb in his poetic prose. Dos Passos wrote a new piece, and in his memoir time has sharpened memory and its images—as it should in treating Machado. Dos Passos recalls:

  Though I never knew Antonio Machado well my recollections of him are so sharp as to be almost painful. I remember him as a large sad fumbling man dressed like an oldfashioned schoolteacher. Stiff wing collar none too clean; spots on his clothes, and the shine of wear on the black broadcloth. He had a handsomely deep voice. Always when I think of him he is wearing the dusty derby he wore the evening we walked around Segovia in the moonlight.

  In Segovia in these later years Machado found a new love, Guiomar (Pilar de Valderrama), a poet, a married woman with three children, mostly separated from her diplomat husband at a time when there was no divorce in Spain. They met by chance in Segovia in 1928; she had come with her husband for some days of sojourning. Thereafter they met regularly and inconspicuously in Madrid, usually in an obscure restaurant, until civil war separated them. An element of erotic drama and wild dream, not found in earlier poems, enters Machado’s poems from this period, as in “Your Face Alone”:

  Only your face

  like white lightning

  in my dark night.

  *

  In the glossy sand

  near the sea,

  your rose and dark flesh,

  suddenly, Guiomar!

  *

  In the gray of the wall,

  prison and bedroom

  and in a future landscape

  with only your voice and the wind;

  *

  in the cold mother-of-pearl

  of your earring in my mouth,

  Guiomar, and in the shivering chill

  of a crazy daybreak...

  In the last sonnets of the war, he has the vision of Guiomar appearing on a finisterre. He admits, however, “It is a love that came to us in life too late: Our love’s a hopeless blossom on a bough / that now has felt the ax’s frozen blade” (“From Sea to Sea”).

  Machado ‘s late love had all the intensity, fantasy, frustration, absence, and separation, of romantic love. If we are to believe Valderrama’s volume of memoirs, the love was always discreet and never consummated, and while she avoided any trysting place that would bring public notice, she also called off any meeting where they would be entirely alone, which circumstance could lead to scandal. She was conservative politically as well, as was Antonio’s brother Manuel, who would side with Franco in that fratricidal war. Antonio, committed as he was to liberal democracy and later to the Republic, never knew Manuel as anything but his closest friend in the world (indistinguishable from himself, he would say); and similarly, despite Valderrama’s politics and “public” prudishness, Antonio would not be deterred from his longing for her, even during the war when she had escaped, definitively, to the haven of Portugal.

  Machado’s love letters to Guiomar were published in 1950 by Concha Espina in a book with the flashy title of De Antonio Machado a su grande y secreto amor (From Antonio Machado to His Grand and Secret Love), and although the letters are authentic, published in facsimile, the Spanish press in the Franco era predictably condemned their dissemination as sensationalism. The only “sensational” revelation in the letters is that Machado definitely expresses his enthusiastically adolescent and wearily sad love for an absent woman. Nevertheless, Machado’s mature ambiguities in his love for Guiomar are contained in some of his richest late poems. The ambiguity is the obvious one. He needs Guiomar. He worships her. She is real and unreal. And her fantasy self, he recognizes perfectly well, is a result of his need, deriving from Guio mar’s unattainability and absence. He needs to dream in peace his genuine false dreams where historical truth, or any similar aberration, does not disturb the truth of the passion. And the poems, uneven like a journal, without the tenderness, nostalgia, and melancholy of those poems written after the death of his child bride, are immediate, fanciful, have a compelling flow and the youthful courtliness of a medieval troubadour. They are never sentimental; they are always tempered with his measures of irony and humor. They tell us that Guiomar really exists in the present time, and is also hopelessly, desperately far away. Resigned to this knowledge, Antonio is joyfully, futilely inventing her:

  Your poet

  thinks of you.

  The distance

  is lemon and violet,

  the fields are still green.

  You are with me, Guiomar.

  The mountains absorb us.

  From oak to oak

  the day is wearing out.
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br />   Once again, with the strategy of Chinese aesthetics, Machado uses the condition of parallel drama in nature to express his own passion. We see the two faces of Machado the lover, and they are in harmonious contradiction to each other. One spirited and fanciful face appears in his brief, epigrammatic lyrics of love as self-conscious illusion; the other, sensual face appears in fuller poems, where love is total eros, an earthly creation of a real woman with kissable lips and breasts, with whom he longs to share a real bed, in a single, burning night. In the first the lover speaks conceptually, wistfully, without passion. We see the Andalusian laughing proverbially at his self-deceptions. Machado distances himself from this philosopher by creating a third-person narrator to speak his futile generalizations:

  All love is fantasy,

  and he invents the year, the day,

  the hour and its melody;

  invents the lover too, and even

  the beloved, which is no reason

  against the love. Though she

  never existed nor can be.

  When Machado speaks, or as the title of the sequence of poems, “Canciones a Guiomar” (“Songs to Guiomar”) suggests, when he sings to his lover, then he is wholly poet and the woman, attainable or not, is wholly woman:

  Today I write you from my traveler’s cell

  at the hour of an imaginary rendezvous.

  A downpour breaks the rainbow in the wind

  and its planetary sadness on the mountain.

  Sun and bells in the old tower.

  O live and quiet afternoon,

  opposing its nothing flows to panta rhei;

  childlike sky your poet loved!

  Here is our adolescent day,

  your eyes bright, muscles dark,

  when by the fountain you felt Eros

  kissing your lips, squeezing your breasts!

  Everything in April light is a transparency.

  The now in yesterday, the now that still is now

  singing and narrating time

  through these ripe hours,

  burns into a single noon

  that is a choir of afternoons and dawns.

  Guiomar, I remember and crave you.

  In Segovia, after the publication in 1924 of the first edition of Nuevas canciones (New Songs), which are color-patches of memories of other places, largely in succinct, popular-song prosody, Machado assumes the task of two imaginary poet-philosophers: Abel Martin and Juan de Mairena. Independently of Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese inventor of poet-voices with their own names and biographies, Machado created a gallery of fourteen poets—including one named Antonio Machado—to comment on the world and on himself. He continued using these names, principally Abel Martin and Juan de Mairena, for his poetry and prose. Only after 1936, at the outbreak of civil war, did the poet publish poems that were not through the intermediary of his apocryphal poets, but he still used these heterónimas for his essays. During that decade, when his poems were only to be found mixed in with prose in the apocryphal songbooks of Martin and Mairena, many of the songs were sonnets.

  Antonio becoming sonnetized

  In the last years of his life, Machado turned to the sonnet form. There was a struggle going on in Machado between his aversion to certain tendencies in Spanish poetry, to superficial Spanish modernismo that he links with the sonnets of Pierre de Ronsard, Rubén Darío, and even his brother, the modernist Manuel Machado, and to his attraction to the sonnet form. He is so taken by the sonnet that he even imitates Dante and begins one sonnet with Dante’s Nel mezzo del cammin, the first line oí Inferno. The sonnet won out, for he was to use the form in diverse ways in all his later collections. Typical of his whimsical dogmatism, in his posthumous Los complementarios he denounces the form for modern times as a used-up trinket, conceding that his brother Manuel Machado wrote some good ones. The poet is so elusive (and confounding) that one cannot be sure whether it is Machado or a prefatory resonance of one of his later voices speaking; that is, Abel Martin or Juan de Mairena. Clearly, Machado feasts in this confounding of personae:

  The sonnet moves from the scholastic to the baroque. From Dante to Góngora, passing through Ronsard. It is not a modem composition, despite Heredia. The emotion of the sonnet has been lost. A skeleton remains, too solid and heavy for a contemporary literary form. One still finds some good sonnets among Portuguese poets. In Spain those of Manuel Machado are extremely beautiful. Rubén Darío never wrote one worthy of mention.7

  This mild diatribe dates from, perhaps, 1916, while he is still in Baeza. Soon he will write the sonnets in which he is “glossing Ronsard,” dreaming of Dante invoking hell, light, nightmare, and vision. In the subsequent sequences, Heracleitus is for Machado what he is for Borges: an obsession. We know that Machado and Borges, both sworn to Heraclitean relativism, will never persuade with absolutes. And when they inch toward a static absolute truth, we note their skeptical grins. Machado tell us absolutely that absolute truth is impossible. Or more plainly, truth is impossible:

  Let us be confident:

  there will be no truth

  in anything we think.

  We can guess what he really has in mind when he contrasts Pedro Calderón de la Barca with the flow of things and consciousness in Heracleitus, saying, “The whole charm of Calderón’s sonnet—if it has any—rests on its syllogistic correctness. The poetry here does not sing, it reasons, discourses about certain definitions. It is—as all or almost all our baroque literature—left-over scholasticism”8. So while Don Antonio condemns the baroque sonnet for its plodding, heavy ways, he also disproves his disapproval of the form by writing lyrical sonnets with the power of song. Yes, his sonnets sing. His model is not, however, popular Spanish song but Dante, and Shakespeare, whom he translated. In his later poems, he exchanges the alexandrine of medieval verse and didactic elegy—that dominate Fields of Castilla—for the shorter eleven-syllable sonnet line. The sonnet was Machado’s compromise between the alexandrine and the octosyllabic ballad. Endowing it with his epigrammatic simplicity, Machado made of the sonnet a complete vehicle for his final poetic expression, using it in sequences for his fields of Spain, his woman in open-eyed dream, and his fields of war.

  Antonio back in his Madrid cafés

  On the day the Second Spanish Republic was declared in 1931, Machado and his students in Segovia climbed to the roof of the city hall to raise the tricolor Republican flag. He transferred soon afterward to a newly opened school, El Instituto Calderón de la Barca in Madrid. There must have been some witty god laughing at Machado, to have appointed the poet a professor in a Madrid public high school named after Calderón de la Barca, the masterful Spanish playwright of La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream), of the wondrous, allegorical auto-sacramental, El gran teatro del mundo (The Great Theater of the World), and the aforementioned author of baroque sonnets that Machado considered the epitome of foolish excess.

  In the Madrid of 1931 to the war in 1936, Antonio became a more successful man of letters and continued collaborating with Manuel in their not overly significant but very popular plays. He lived with José, his younger brother, the painter, and his family. As for Guiomar, his muse or maybe muses, she too was in Madrid, the secret woman, real, invented, absent, and desired.

  Now at last truly back in Madrid and its literary life, Machado retained qualities of the loner, keeping to his own older tertulia (a café literary group), which had its own café, the Várela on calle Preciados, where he might chat with Ricardo Baroja or the actor Ricardo Calvo. Sometimes Miguel de Unamuno would stop by. His tertulia was separate from that of the younger poets associated with the popular Generation of 1927. But Machado was not aloof. Indeed, more than being simply friendly to these wonderful poets—to Jorge Guillen, Pedro Salinas, Vicente Aleixandre, Rafael Alberti, and Lorca—Machado was warm and supportive in every way. But in his poetry, he did not share their avant-garde premises and prosodies. He didn’t care for the baroque, or for the cold metals and obscure and semi-surreal imagery of the baroque
poet Luis de Góngora, whom the poets of the ’27 movement held in great favor. In this regard, four years before Machado ‘s return to Madrid, Federico García Lorca gave a seminal lecture in Granada on Góngora, in 1927, at a symposium to celebrate the tricentennial of Góngora’s death in 1627. That gathering of scholars and poets in Granada in 1927 was the symbolic genesis of the Generation of 1927.

  In the end, what was there between Antonio Machado and the younger poets? A porous boundary. Literary categories and influences are never as neat and simple as the academy might wish them to be. Indeed, there was abundant crossover of friendship and aesthetic within that extraordinary grouping of Spanish poets who were to dominate the poetry of Spain in the twentieth century. The instance of Machado and Lorca is telling and complex. In “A Summer Night” Antonio writes:

  I will fan you,

  with the white moon

  on a cove by the sea