Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Spanish Edition)
Page 19
—No hay cimiento
ni en el alma ni en el viento—.
Bogadora,
marinera,
hacia la mar sin ribera.
Enrique Bergson: Los datos
inmediatos
de la conciencia.¿Esto es
otro embeleco francés?
Este Bergson es un tuno;
¿verdad, maestro Unamuno?
Bergson no da como aquel
Immanuel
el volatín inmortal;
este endiablado judío
ha hallado el libre albedrío
dentro de su mechinal.
No está mal;
cada sabio, su problema,
y cada loco, su tema.
Algo importa
que en la vida mala y corta
que llevamos
libres o siervos seamos:
mas, si vamos
a la mar,
lo mismo nos ha de dar.
¡Oh, estos pueblos! Reflexiones,
lecturas y acotaciones
pronto dan en lo que son:
bostezos de Salomón.
¿Todo es
soledad de soledades.
vanidad de vanidades,
que dijo el Eclesiastés?
Mi paraguas, mi sombrero,
mi gabán... El aguacero
amaina... Vamonos, pues.
Es de noche. Se platica
al fondo de una botica.
—Yo no sé
don José,
cómo son los liberales
tan perros, tan inmorales.
—¡Oh, tranquilícese usté!
Pasados los carnavales,
vendrán los conservadores,
buenos administradores
de su casa.
Todo llega y todo pasa.
Nada eterno:
ni gobierno
que perdure,
ni mal que cien años dure.
—Tras estos tiempos vendrán
otros tiempos y otros y otros,
y lo mismo que nosotros
otros se jorobarán.
Así es la vida, don Juan.
—Es verdad, así es la vida.
—La cebada está crecida.
—Con estas lluvias...
Y van
las habas que es un primor.
—Cierto; para marzo, en flor.
Pero la escarcha, los hielos...
—Y, además, los olivares
están pidiendo a los cielos
aguas a torrentes.
—A mares.
¡Las fatigas, los sudores
que pasan los labradores!
En otro tiempo...
Llovía
también cuando Dios quería.
—Hasta mañana, señores.
Tic-tic, tic-tic... Ya pasó
un día como otro día,
dice la monotonía
del reloj.
Sobre mi mesa Los datos de
la conciencia, inmediatos.
No está mal
este yo fundamental,
contingente y libre, a ratos,
creativo, original;
este yo que vive y siente
dentro la carne mortal
¡ay! por saltar impaciente
las bardas de su corral.
Baeza, 1913
Poem About a Day
Rural Meditations
So here we have a teacher
of modern tongues—yesterday
a master of troubadour song—
the nightingale’s apprentice
in a damp and cold village
run-down and somber,
Andalusian and Manchegan.
Winter. Near the fire.
Outside it’s raining a fine drizzle,
now twisting into mist,
now becoming slush.
An imaginary farmer,
I think of the fields. Lord,
how well you do! It’s raining, raining
your constant and tiny water
over the barley and beans,
your mute water
in vineyards and olive groves.
The sowers of wheat
will bless you with me,
those who live for picking
the olive from the tree,
those who hope
for the chance to eat,
those who this year
like last year
bet all their money
on the wheel,
treacherous wheel of the year.
It’s raining, raining; your mist
turns into slush,
and once again fine drizzle!
Raining, Lord, raining, raining!
In my room illumined
with winter light
—a gray afternoon siphoned
through rain and window glass—
I dream and meditate.
The clock
in the corner brightens
and its ticktock, forgotten
through repetition, is pounding.
Ticktock, ticktock. Now I’ve heard you.
Ticktock, ticktock. Always the same
monotonous and boring.
Ticktock, ticktock, the beating
of a metal heart.
In these villages can one hear
the beating of time? No.
In these villages you fight
endlessly with the clock
and with that monotony
measuring empty time.
But is your time mine?
Watch, is your time mine?
Ticktock, ticktock. On a day
(ticktock, ticktock) gone,
and what I most loved
death took away.
Far off a clamoring
of bells...
The rain drums harder
on the windowpanes.
An imaginary farmer
I return to fields. Lord,
how those who sow wheat
will bless your bounty!
Lord, isn’t your rain law
in the fields the ox plows,
and in the palaces of kings?
O good water, leave life
behind as you escape!
O you who flow drop by drop,
spring by spring and river by river,
like this season of tedium,
flowing to a remote sea
for all who seek birth,
who hope
for blossoming
in the spring sun,
be merciful
so tomorrow
you will be an early sprig,
a green meadow, rosy flesh,
and more: reason and madness
and the bitterness
of wanting and not being able
to believe, believe and believe!
Night is taking over.
the wire in the light bulb
is getting red,
then glows,
bursts into brilliance
slightly more than a match.
God knows where my glasses
are. Someplace among these tomes,
magazines and scribbles.
Who can find them? Here they are.
New books. I open one
by Unamuno.
Oh, the light
and delight
of this Spain now stirring,
born or coming alive!
This humble teacher
in a country school
has always kept your faith,
rector of Salamanca!
Your philosophy
which you call dilettante,
flighty, walking a tightrope,
grand don Miguel, is mine.
Water of a good spring,
always lively,
evasive:
poetry, a cordial thing.
Structural?
—There is no cement
in the soul or wind—.
Rower,
sailor,
&nb
sp; toward the shoreless sea.
Henri Bergson. Les données
immédiates de la conscience.28
Is this Bergson a truant?
Another French fraud,
maestro Unamuno?
Bergson doesn’t perform
an immortal handspring
like Immanuel.29
This devilish Jew30
has found free will
inside his columbarium.
Not bad.
Every sage has his problem,
every idiot his theme.
In this bad and short life
it matters
whether we are free or slaves,
but if we are heading
for the sea,
it’s all the same.
O these villages! Reflections,
readings and jottings
will all end up
as Solomon’s yawns.
Isn’t everything
solitude of solitudes,
vanity of vanities,
as Ecclesiastes said.
My umbrella, my hat,
my raincoat. The downpour
is letting up. So let’s go.
It is night. People
are chatting in the back of a shop.
“I don’t know,
don José,31
what makes the liberals
such immoral swine.”
“Oh, shut up!
When the carnival is over
the conservatives, who are good
administrators of their house,
will come in.
Everything comes and goes.
Nothing is eternal.
No government
is made of concrete,
no trouble lasts forever.”
“After these times come
other times and others and others
exactly like us
and others talking nonsense.
Such is life, don Juan.”
“It’s true, such is life.”
“The barley looks good.”
“With these rains...
And the beans
are splendid.”
“Right, by March they’ll be in bloom.
But frost, hail...”
“And besides, the olive patches
are begging the sky for a ton
of water.”
“A flood.
The work and sweat
a farmer goes through!
In the old days...
“It rained
also when God felt like it.”
“So long, gentlemen.”
Ticktock, ticktock. So another day
like any other has gone by,
telling me the monotony
of my watch.
On my table Les données
de la conscience. Immediate.32
It’s not bad
this fundamental
I, sometimes contingent, sometimes free,
creative, original.
This I who lives and feels
inside the mortal flesh,
oh! and yet needs to jump impatient
over the fence of his corral!
Baeza, 1913
28 The reference is to Essai sur les donnée immédiates de conscience (An Essay onthe Immediate Data of Consciousness), an 1889 book by Henri Bergson.
29 Immanuel Kant.
30 Henri Bergson (1859-1941), French philosopher, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1927. Antonio Machado attended a course with Bergson at the Collège de France in 1911. Machado’s philosophical foundation, concerning time, duration, being, come from Bergson, his preferred philosopher. Marcel Proust (Bergson’s cousin by marriage) made use of Bergsonian notions of time and duration in Remembrance of Things Past, as did Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and a generation of other writers. The poem ends as a paean to Bergson’s metaphysics. It is regrettable that Machado, too, fell into the linguistic and religious tradition of crass anti-Semitism, which is routine in writers such as Quevedo, Donne, Baudelaire, and in our times, in Pound, Yeats, and Eliot. Bergson, as a philosopher, found himself in essential sympathy with the Catholic mystics and would have converted had it not been for his loyalty to the plight of Jews in his later life. He asked to be buried in the Jewish cemetery, with Catholic rites. The Britannica cites his will: “He acknowledged in his will of 1937, ‘My reflections have led me closer and closer to Catholicism, in which I see the complete fulfillment of Judaism.’” Yet, although he declared his “moral adherence to Catholicism,” he never went beyond that. In explanation, he wrote: “I would have become a convert, had I not foreseen for years a formidable wave of anti-Semitism about to break upon the world. I wanted to remain among those who tomorrow were to be persecuted.” At other moments, Machado cites the medieval Spanish rabbi Sem Tob (Shem Tov), whose poems he especially admired and praises in his poems and who was a model for his own series of brief aphoristic wisdom poems.
31 The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955).
32 “The immediate data of consciousness.” It is fitting that the poem ends with a reference again to Machado’s preferred philosopher Bergson, who in great part turned him to philosophy at an early age, and who was the most influential on his own thinking and work. Apart from his concern with time and duration, Bergson gave a special place to intuition, as in mathematics and the arts, which he called “élan vital” (“the creative impulse” or “living energy), and which he developed in Creative Evolution (1907). “The fundamental I” is developed in Bergson’s Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousnes, whose subtitle is “Time and Free Will.”
Noviembre 1913
Un año más. El sembrador va echando
la semilla en los surcos de la tierra.
Dos lentas yuntas aran,
mientras pasan la nubes cenicientas
ensombreciendo el campo,
las pardas sementeras,
los grises olivares. Por el fondo
del valle del río el agua turbia lleva.
Tiene Cazorla nieve,
y Mágina, tormenta,
su montera, Aznaitín. Hacia Granada,
montes con sol, montes de sol y piedra.
November 1913
Another year. The sower is casting
the seed into the furrowed earth.
Two slow teams of oxen plow
while ashen clouds pass overhead
darkening the plain,
the colorless seed-fields,
the gray olive groves. Through the bottom rift
in the valley the river pushes troubled water.
Cazorla33 is snowy
and Mágina below a storm,
Aznaitín capped by clouds. Toward Granada
mountains of sun, mountains of sun and stone.
33 The Cazorla range, near the Sierra de Quesada, lies near the source of the Guadalqivir River.
Del pasado efímero
Este hombre del casino provinciano
que vio a Carancha recibir un día,
tiene mustia la tez, el pelo cano,
ojos velados por melancolía;
bajo el bigote gris, labios de hastío,
y una triste expresión, que no es tristeza,
sino algo más y menos: el vacío
del mundo en la oquedad de su cabeza.
Aún luce de corinto terciopelo
chaqueta y pantalón abotinado,
y un cordobés color de caramelo,
pulido y torneado.
Tres veces heredó; tres ha perdido
al monte su caudal; dos ha enviudado.
Sólo se anima ante el azar prohibido,
sobre el verde tapete reclinado,
o al evocar la tarde de un torero,
la suerte de un tahúr, o si alguien cuenta
la hazaña de un gallardo bandolero,
o la proeza de un matón, sangrienta.
Bosteza de política banales
dicterios al gobierno reaccionario,
y augura que vendrán los liberales,
cual torna la cigüeña al campanario.
Un poco labrador, del cielo aguarda
y al cielo teme; alguna vez suspira,
pensando en su olivar, y al cielo mira
con ojo inquieto, si la lluvia tarda.
Lo demás, taciturno, hipocondriaco,
prisionero en la Arcadia del presente,
le aburre; sólo el humo del tabaco
simula algunas sombras en su frente.
Este hombre no es de ayer ni es de mañana,
sino de nunca; de la cepa hispana
no es el fruto maduro ni podrido,
es una fruta vana
de aquella España que pasó y no ha sido,
esa que hoy tiene la cabeza cana.
Out of the Ephemeral Past
This man out of some old provincial town,
who saw Carancha34 take the bull one day,
has eyes veiled by sadness, his spirit down,
his face withered and his hair iron gray.
Below his white mustache, lips in disgust,
a mournful look that isn’t mournfulness
but something vaguely bleak. The shallow crust
of the world mirrors his head’s hollowness.
He still walks sparkling in a Corinth red
velvet jacket and trousers with sharp boots,
a caramel Córdoba hat with thread
woven delicate and absolute.
Three times he had inheritances, and
three times he shot it all at cards. Two times
he was a widower, but found dreamland
only when wading the illegal slime
of gambling, mesmerized before a green
casino cloth, or recollecting days
of caping bulls or following the scene
of gallant bandits on the road, the craze
and skill of bloody murderers. He yawns
at the banalities of government,
and prophesies the liberals will be drawn
back in as the stork soon will be present
on its belfry. Something of a farmer,
he looks up at the sky, scared of the sky.
Worrying about his olive trees he sighs,
fearing rain may come late this summer.
The rest is boredom. He is taciturn,
a hypochondriac, a prisoner
of a phony Arcadia. Only smoke
of cigarettes circling his shadowed face
reveals his thought. He’s not of yesterday,
tomorrow but of never. Hispanic stock
not of ripe fruit or rotten but a vain
fruit of that Spain