Writing through the land
Like the Prague poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who shared with him his year of birth in 1875, Machado was a poet of solitude and landscape. He described in stark color planes (never in the saturated colors of the early Stevens) the landscapes of monastic Castilla and fertile Andalucía. Like the Chinese, he was a poet of fantastic and acute observation, of departure and absent love seen through objects and the places he knew. He saw them through a metaphysical lens of open-eyed dream. What he saw, by extension, was also the soul of Spain made personal and particular. More important, those outer landscapes of Spain’s soul were also the silent fiery lands of his solitude.
He communicated an image of his being with minimum means and minimum loss. Like Frost’s genius of a few monosyllabic sentences to say the land, Machado used few words, with extraordinary subtlety in their plain utterance. There is a huge gallery of possibility in the right placement of words in a line, and in each case he labored until no labor showed and the word was sonorously invisible. To his willing reader he bequeathed with unlimited generosity and modesty an intimate picture of an interior landscape. And Antonio el Bueno remains a lucent world. He inhabits a sky below the earth where the poet, filled with solitary sky, walks alone amid his remembered streets and far mountains.
1 The epithet “the good” (el bueno) was born of nastiness as a result of his poem “Portrait,” in which he speaks of himself as “good.” His brother Manuel, writing a parallel autobiographical poem—both poems being written in 1908, at the request of a contemporary Madrid newspaper—speaks ironically of himself as one who lounges in his garden, eating the fruit fallen from the Arabian trees. In times of suspect moralizing, Manuel was dubbed, by mischievous comparison, “Manuel the bad” (Manuel el malo), le poète maudit (the damned poet). His later active siding with the Franco revolt and regime confirmed the negative title to many minds, but Antonio’s cognomen stayed mythically with the schoolteacher poet throughout his life. Machado’s kindness, ethical courage, and dusty suit were legendary.
2 Barea, Arturo, Lorca: The Poet and His People, trans. Usa Barea, New York: Grove Press, 1951, p. 9.
3 Azorín, Clásicos y modernos, Madrid: Archivos, 1919, pp. 235–236.
4 Salinas, Pedro, “Spanish Literature,” Columbia Directory of Modern European Literature, ed. Horatio Smith, New York: Columbia University Press, 1947, p. 770.
5 Machado began as a young Spanish poet in part influenced by a movement misleadingly called modernismo, which, despite protests from some Spanish critics, has not only nothing to do with the European and American modernism of Eliot, Borges, Beckett, and Lorca but represents very much what modernism was thoroughly rejecting: fin de siècle aestheticism. Yet Machado takes the best of modernismo, that concise, gnomic lyricism he shares with Juan Ramón Jiménez, which is found in many lyrics in Solitudes, Galleries, and Other Poems (1899–1907), in his sonnets, and in his late brief lyrics. Indeed, elements of modernismo persist after the more declamatory aspect of the ’98 poet has entirely disappeared. The sonnets are their own world, and especially those of the civil war, which speak with astonishing beauty, love, and tragedy.
6 Translated by Willis Barnstone.
7 Machado, Antonio, Obras: Poesía y prosa, ed. Aurora de Albornoz and Guillermo de Torre, Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1964, p. 711.
8 Ibid., p. 317.
9 A close literary friend of Machado who helped him very much during his lastjourney.
10 Pradal-Rodríguez, Gabriel, Antonio Machado, New York: Hispanic Institute, 1951, p. 12.
11 This episode was related to me by the philosopher Professor Juan Roura-Parella in fall 1958 in Middletown, Connecticut, where we were both teaching at Wesleyan University. Roura-Parella examined this brief text in its written form for accuracy. The event took place at Cervià de Ter, near Figueras, in the patio of a hacienda.
12 This story is confirmed by the Spanish writer and close friend of Machado, Corpus Barga. In his memoir—which appeared in Los últimos días de Don Antonio Machado, La Estafeda Literaria, Madrid, May 7, 1966, num. 349—Corpus Barga himself, rather than Navarro Tomás, tells the French customsofficer that with him is the poet Antonio Machado. Recalling that Navarro Tomás read over his narration to me, which I typed up for him to see, I preferto think that even this minor detail did not stray. I interviewed Tomás Navarro Tomás twice: at Middlebury College in 1947, and at Columbia University in August 1956, where I wrote down his dictation. Having said this, Barga was theangel of these days for Machado in caring for him and helping him to survive. In another version, parts of which are denied by Corpus Barga, another closefriend, Pepe y J. Xirau, describes in detail that there was an infernal walk ofsome six hundred meters to the frontier. The poet was drenched with rain andsnow. Machado passed to the frontier, two Senegalese soldiers in red fezzes lifted the iron chain, and Machado fainted, needing to be held up for the remaining walk to the French compound.
13 Barga, Corpus, Crónicas literarias, Edición de Arturo Ramoneda Salas, Madrid: Ediciones Júcar, 1985, p. 155.
14 Pradal-Rodríguez, Antonio Machado, p. 15.
15 Barga, Corpus, Crónicas literarias, p. 40.
16 Machado, José, Ultimas soledades del poeta Antonio Machado {recuerdos de su hermano José), Madrid: Forma Ediciones, 1977, p. 159. In 1962, in Madrid, the Spanish poet José Bergamín told me this story: One evening during the civil war, Manuel Azaña, president of Spain, had a party in the parliament attended by the leading political figures. Bergamín and Machado were also there. Azaña spent most of the evening chatting with the two poets. When the poets left, on the way down the stairs, Don Antonio said to Bergamín, “Pobre de Azaña que tiene que ser presidente de la república, cuando mi sueño siempre era de ser portero del palacio”: Poor Azaña who has to be president of the republic, when my dream was always to be doorkeeper of the palace.
17 The third fragment on Machado’s page is a revision from an earlier published poem to Guiomar. See Jacques Issorel, Collioure 1939, Les dernier jours d’Antonio Machado (Perpignan 1982: p.96).
18 Machado, Antonio, Obras: Poesía y prosa, p. 16.
Note on the Poems
Many of the latter poems of Antonio Machado are interwoven among his prose writings, often attributed to his heterónimas, Abel Martin and Juan de Mairena. When he is anthologized, sometimes the prose context is included. Readers are most often confused by the delightful and whimsical settings, unable to locate the poem. In the normal Spanish editions of Complete Poems, the poems found among his prose works are omitted altogether and one must find them in the Juan de Mairena, Abel Martin, and The Complementaries volumes. Here, the poems alone, not their prose frame, are given, and their place in the prose writings is always cited; the poems of his personae are indicated in the subtitle. When a poem does not have a title, I have used the first line to identify the poem. In a few instances, the poet puts two poems together (as Baudelaire had the habit of doing), separated by a line of dots. In notable instances such as “Glossing Ronsard,” “Songs to Guio mar,” and “Sonnets,” Machado often placed sonnets under one title. These sonnets are sometimes related, but they are not a sequence and are to be taken as separate sonnets.
—WB.
Solitudes, Galleries and Other Poems
Soledades, gallerías y otras poemas (1899–1907)
Solitudes / Solidades
El viajero
Está en la sala familiar, sombría,
y entre nosotros, el querido hermano
que en el sueño infantil de un claro día
vimos partir hacia un país lejano.
Hoy tiene ya las sienes plateadas,
un gris mechón sobre la angosta frente;
y la fría inquietud de sus miradas
revela un alma casi toda ausente.
Deshójanse las copas otoñales
del parque mustio y viejo.
La tarde, tras los húmedos cristales,
se pinta, y en el fondo del espejo.
<
br /> El rostro del hermano se ilumina
suavemente. ¿Floridos desengaños
dorados por la tarde que declina?
¿Ansias de vida nueva en nuevos años?
¿Lamentará la juventud perdida?
Lejos quedó—la pobre loba—muerta.
¿La blanca juventud nunca vivida
teme, que la de cantar ante su puerta?
¿Sonríe el sol de oro
de la tierra de un sueño no encontrada;
y ve su nave hender el mar sonoro,
de viento y luz la blanca vela hinchada?
El la visto las hojas otoñales,
amarillas, rodar, las olorosas
ramas del eucalipto, los rosales
que enseñan otra vez sus blancas rosas...
Y este dolor que añora o desconfía
el temblor de una lágrima reprime,
y un resto de viril hipocresía
en el semblante pálido se imprime.
Serio retrato en la pared clarea
todavía. Nosotros divagamos.
En la tristeza del hogar golpea
el tictac del reloj. Todos callamos.
The Voyager
He is among us in the gloom
of the family den. The brother we loved.
One day of sun in childhood dream
we saw him leave for a far land.
His temples have gone silver,
gray hair over a pinched forehead.
The icy worry of his gaze
reveals a soul almost in limbo.
In the old melancholy park
leaves spin out of autumn treetops.
Behind the steaming windowpanes
afternoon is painted in the deep mirror.
Our brother’s face is softly
lighted. Are these gold disillusions
in the sinking afternoon?
A hunger for new life in new years?
Is he longing for his lost youth?
Far off the dead miserable wolf.
Is he terrified a white manhood
never lived will haunt his door.
Is he grinning at the sun of gold
from a country of unfound dream,
or seeing his ship cracking a thunder sea,
a white sail swollen with wind and light.
He has seen the autumn’s yellow leaves
rolling on the ground, aromatic
branches of the eucalyptus, rosebushes
again showing their white bloom.
And his wistful and suspicious grief
freezes a threatening tear.
The splash of virile hypocrisy
is printed on his wan countenance.
The grave portrait on the wall is still
flashing light. We are rambling.
In the gloom of the den pounds
the clock’s ticktock. None of us talks.
“He andado muchos caminos”
He andado muchos caminos,
he abierto muchas veredas;
he navegado en cien mares,
y atracado en cien riberas.
En todas partes he visto
caravanas de tristeza,
soberbios y melancólicos
borrachos de sombra negra,
y pedantones al paño
que miran, callan, y piensan
que saben, porque no beben
el vino de las tabernas.
Mala gente que camina
y va apestando la tierra...
Y en todas partes he visto
gentes que danzan o juegan,
cuando pueden, y laboran
sus cuatro palmos de tierra.
Nunca, si llegan a un sitio,
preguntan a dónde llegan.
Cuando caminan, cabalgan
a lomos de muía vieja,
y no conocen la prisa
ni aun en los días de fiesta.
Donde hay vino, beben vino;
donde no hay vino, agua fresca.
Son buenas gentes que viven,
laboran, pasan y sueñan,
y en un día como tantos,
descansan bajo la tierra.
“I have walked many roads”
I have walked many roads
and opened many paths,
sailed over a hundred seas
and tied up on a hundred shores.
In every place I’ve watched
caravans of sorrow,
black shadows of haughty
and melancholy drunks
and fat pedants in robes
who gaze, say nothing, and think
they know because they don’t drink
the cheap wine of the taverns.
Evil people walking along,
stinking up the earth...
And everywhere I’ve seen
people who dance and play,
when they can, and work
their few feet of land.
If they turn up somewhere,
they never ask where they are.
When they travel they ride
on the back of an old mule
and don’t know how to hurry
even on a day of fiesta.
Where there’s wine, they drink it,
where there’s none, cold water.
They are good folks who live,
labor, pass by and dream,
and on a day like all the others,
they relax below the earth.
La plaza y los naranjos
La plaza y los naranjos encendidos
con sus frutas redondas y risueñas.
Tumulto de pequeños colegiales
que, al salir en desorden de la escuela,
llenan el aire de la plaza en sombra
con la algazara de sus voces nuevas.
¡Alegría infantil en los rincones
de las ciudades muertas!...
¡Y algo nuestro de ayer, que todavía
vemos vagar por estas calles viejas!
“The plaza and the burning orange trees”
The plaza and the burning orange trees
with their fruit plump and smiling.
The tumult of small school kids
racing crazy out of the building
fills the winds of the shadowy plaza
with the thunder of their new voices.
Childhood happiness in the corners
of the dead cities!...
Something of our yesterday we still
see roaming through these old streets.
En el entierro de un amigo
Tierra le dieron una tarde horrible
del mes de julio, bajo el sol de fuego.
A un paso de la abierta sepultura,
habla rosas de podridos pétalos,
entre geranios de áspera fragancia
y roja flor. El cielo
puro y azul. Corría
un aire fuerte y seco.
De los gruesos cordeles suspendido,
pesadamente, descender hicieron
el ataúd al fondo de la fosa
los dos sepultureros...
Y al reposar sonó con recio golpe,
solemne, en el silencio.
Un golpe de ataúd en tierra es algo
perfectamente serio.
Sobre la negra caja se rompían
los pesados terrones polvorientos...
El aire se llevaba
de la honda fosa el blanquecino aliento.
—Y tú, sin sombra ya, duerme y reposa,
larga paz a tus huesos...
Definitivamente,
duerme un sueño tranquilo y verdadero.
On the Burial of a Friend
They gave him to the earth one horrible afternoon
in the month of July, under the sun of fire.
A step from the open grave
were roses with rotting petals
among geraniums of pungent fragrance
and red flower. The sky
clear and blue. A strong
and dry win
d was blowing.
Two gravediggers
lowered the coffin hanging heavily
from thick ropes
to the bottom of the pit...
And it came to rest with a harsh thud
solemnly in the silence.
The thud of a coffin hitting the earth
is something perfectly serious.
Over the black box were breaking
the heavy dusty clumps of earth.
The whitish breath
from the hole the wind carried away.
“And you who lost your shadow, sleep and rest.
Lasting peace to your bones...
Definitively,
sleep a true and tranquil dream.”
Recuerdo infantile
Una tarde parda y fría
de invierno. Los colegiales
estudian. Monotonía
de lluvia tras los cristales1.
Es la clase. En un cartel
se representa a Caín
fugitivo, y muerto Abel,
junto a una mancha carmín.
Con timbre sonoro y hueco
truena el maestro, un anciano
mal vestido, enjuto y seco,
que lleva un libro en al mano.
Y todo un coro infantil
Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Spanish Edition) Page 6
