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

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  for my son Tony

  named for Spain’s nightingale

  don Antonio

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Note to Reader

  Foreword

  Antonio Machado: A Reminiscence

  Introduction

  Note on the Poems

  SOLITUDES, GALLERIES AND OTHER POEMS (1899–1907)

  SOLITUDES

  The Voyager (Spanish)

  “I have walked many roads” (Spanish)

  “The plaza and the burning orange trees” (Spanish)

  On the Burial of a Friend (Spanish)

  Childhood Memory (Spanish)

  “It was a bright afternoon” (Spanish)

  “The languid lemon tree” (Spanish)

  Shores of the Duero (Spanish)

  “A labyrinth of narrow streets” (Spanish)

  “I go dreaming along roads” (Spanish)

  Cante hondo (Spanish)

  “The street in shadow” (Spanish)

  “You slip away” (Spanish)

  Horizon (Spanish)

  ON THE ROAD

  “The clock was striking twelve” (Spanish)

  “Over the bitter land” (Spanish)

  “The sun is a globe of fire” (Spanish)

  “O figures in the courtyard” (Spanish)

  “A few canvases of memory” (Spanish)

  “Moss is growing in the shadowy plaza” (Spanish)

  “The fire coals of a violet twilight” (Spanish)

  “My love? Tell me, do you remember” (Spanish)

  “One day we sat down by the road” (Spanish)

  “A young face one day appears” (Spanish)

  SONGS

  “The corroded and greenish hull” (Spanish)

  “The dream below the sun” (Spanish)

  JOKES, FANTASIES, NOTES: THE GREAT INVENTIONS

  The Waterwheel (Spanish)

  The Gallows (Spanish)

  Flies (Spanish)

  Elegy for a Madrigal (Spanish)

  Garden (Spanish)

  Bad Dreams (Spanish)

  Tedium (Spanish)

  “The clock was clanging one” (Spanish)

  Advice (Spanish)

  Gloss (Spanish)

  “Last night while I was sleeping” (Spanish)

  “Has my heart gone to sleep?” (Spanish)

  GALLERIES

  “The torn cloud, the rainbow” (Spanish)

  “And he was the demon of my dream” (Spanish)

  “From the doorsill of a dream” (Spanish)

  “Those children in a row” (Spanish)

  “Stained by earlier days” (Spanish)

  “The house I loved” (Spanish)

  “Before the pale canvas of the afternoon” (Spanish)

  “Tranquil afternoon, almost” (Spanish)

  “Like Anakreon” (Spanish)

  “O luminous afternoon!” (Spanish)

  “It is an ashen and shabby evening” (Spanish)

  “Will the spellbound world die with you” (Spanish)

  “Naked is the earth” (Spanish)

  Field (Spanish)

  To an Old and Distinguished Gentleman (Spanish)

  “Yesterday my sorrows” (Spanish)

  “Perhaps the hand in dreaming” (Spanish)

  “You will know yourself” (Spanish)

  “Below the laurel tree” (Spanish)

  MISCELLANEOUS

  “Over coarse stone in the middle of the square” (Spanish)

  Winter Sun (Spanish)

  FIELDS OF CASTILLA (1907–1917)

  Portrait (Spanish)

  On the Banks of the Duero (Spanish)

  In Spanish Lands (Spanish)

  “The poorhouse” (Spanish)

  “Guadarrama, is it you, old friend?” (Spanish)

  “The thousand waters of April” (Spanish)

  A Madman (Spanish)

  Autumn Dawning (Spanish)

  The Train (Spanish)

  Summer Night (Spanish)

  Fields of Soria (Spanish)

  The Land of Alvargonzález (Spanish)

  To a Dry Elm (Spanish)

  Roads (Spanish)

  “Lord, now what I loved most you tore from me” (Spanish)

  “Hope says” (Spanish)

  “There in the highlands” (Spanish)

  “I dreamt you were guiding me” (Spanish)

  “One summer night” (Spanish)

  “As snow was melting” (Spanish)

  “Here in the fields of my homeland” (Spanish)

  To José María Palacio (Spanish)

  Another Trip (Spanish)

  Poem About a Day (Spanish)

  November 1913 (Spanish)

  Out of the Ephemeral Past (Spanish)

  Lament for His Virtues and Verses on the Death of Don Guido (Spanish)

  Proverbs and Songs (Spanish)

  Parables (Spanish)

  My Clown (Spanish)

  PRAISES

  To Don Francisco Giner de los Ríos (Spanish)

  A Young Spain (Spanish)

  My Poets (Spanish)

  NEW SONGS (1917-1930)

  Notes (Spanish)

  Toward the Lowlands (Spanish)

  Galleries (Spanish)

  Highland Songs (Spanish)

  Songs (Spanish)

  Songs of the Upper Duero (Spanish)

  Proverbs and Songs (Spanish)

  Parergon (Spanish)

  Glossing Ronsard and Other Rhymes (Spanish)

  Sonnets (Spanish)

  Old Songs (Spanish)

  FROM AN APOCRYPHAL SONGBOOK: ABEL MARTÍN

  My eyes in the mirror (Spanish)

  Primaveral (Spanish)

  Rose of Fire (Spanish)

  From Advices, Verses, Notes (Spanish)

  “In dreams he saw himself” (Spanish)

  “Let us be confident” (Spanish)

  To the Great Zero (Spanish)

  FROM AN APOCRYPHAL SONGBOOK: JUAN DE MAIRENA

  Abel Martín’s Last Lamentations (Spanish)

  Siesta (Spanish)

  In the Manner of Juan de Mairena (Spanish)

  Songs to Guiomar (Spanish)

  Other Songs to Guiomar (Spanish)

  MISCELLANEOUS POEMS

  Notes and Songs (Spanish)

  Sierra Note (Spanish)

  Notes, Parables, Proverbs and Songs (Spanish)

  Three Songs Sent to
Unamuno in 1913 (Spanish)

  Dawn Songs (Spanish)

  Autumn (Spanish)

  APOCRYPHAL SONGBOOK

  Twelve Poets Who Might Have Existed (Spanish)

  Goodbye (Spanish)

  Sonnet (Spanish)

  POEMS OF THE WAR (1936-1939)

  Spring (Spanish)

  The Poet Recalls the Lands of Soria (Spanish)

  Dawning in Valencia (Spanish)

  The Death of the Wounded Child (Spanish)

  “From sea to sea between us is the war” (Spanish)

  “Again our yesterday” (Spanish)

  Song (Spanish)

  The Crime Was in Granada (Spanish)

  Today’s Meditation (Spanish)

  “I will give you my song” (Spanish)

  Songs (Spanish)

  “These blue days” (Spanish)

  Note on the Book

  About the Author

  Chronology of Antonio Machado

  About the Translator

  Index of Spanish Titles

  Index of English Titles

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Special Thanks

  Foreword

  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.

  Segovia is one of the walled mountain towns of old Castilla. It is full of arches. A Roman aqueduct stalks across the city. There are Romanesque façades, squat towers, broad portals, all built of an umber and honeycolored stone. Every detail of the carved stonework stood out sharp in the flaming moonlight.

  We had been sitting in the stale old casino that smelt of anise and horsehair sofas and provincial ennui. We had sat watching a game of billiards and talking about Whitman and Emily Dickinson until suddenly we had to get out of doors. A couple of other men joined us for a stroll around the city by moonlight. It was unbelievably beautiful. I remember how pleased Machado was with the names of the streets and the churches. San Millan de las Brujas—Saint Millan of the Witches—delighted him particularly.

  Machado himself was living then in a shabby lodging on a street called Calle de los Desamparados—Street of Abandoned Children. He couldn’t have had an address more characteristic of him. A lonely widower, in his forties I suppose, he gave the impression of being helpless in life’s contests and struggles, a man without defenses. There was no trace of worldliness about him. Long ago he had accepted the pain and ignominy of being what he was, a poet, a man who had given up all hope of reward to live for the delicately imagined mood, the counterpoint of words, the accurately recording ear.

  Machado el Bueno, his friends called him. Indeed he struck me as good in the best sense of the word, a man entirely of one piece. He followed his chosen calling with the simplicity and abnegation of a monk. Early he must have vowed himself to poverty.

  His Campos de Castilla particularly made a great impression on me. I was a gangling foureyed young hobbledehoy just out of college, making my first independent effort to master a foreign language. Somebody had given me an excellent piece of advice: when you are trying to learn a foreign language always read the poetry before you try to learn the prose. Of course poetry that’s worth its salt carries the essence of the language. So I carried Machado ‘s Campos de Castilla with a dictionary around in my pocket for months. Even today when I try to dredge up some Spanish, it is Machado’s Castilian that I remember. A language dry, spare and luminous. Its music is austere and plain. Eloquence is avoided at all cost. The homely carefully cadenced words are so stuffed with feeling that they throb. Sound and image are woven together to an extraordinary degree. Some stanzas seem almost more pictures than poems; rereading them I find myself renewing the excitement of my first touch of Spain.

  The Spain of Antonio Machado’s time was the Spain of what was known as “the generation of ’98.” Defeat in Cuba and the Philippines had fired a fresh crop of young men with a determination to renovate their country at any cost. Their hopes for education, for social justice, for freedom of speech and thought and action still glowed with the warm light of nineteenth century idealism. While their friends planned miracles in social progress, the poets discovered miracles in the tradition-laden villages, the bare landscapes, the harsh dignity of the peasants and drovers and muledrivers who people the Spanish countryside. The bare wheatlands of Castilla were Machado’s special domain.

  Most of the men I got to know and esteem during those early trips to Spain met their ends in the civil war. Their hopes died with them. In Paris, after the collapse of the republic, they told me that Antonio Machado, already ill and broken, had been hustled into an ambulance carrying refugees to the border. He died in exile a month later in the French village of Collioure.

  John Dos Passos

  Spence’s Point

  December 1957

  Antonio Machado: A Reminiscence

  Even as a child, Antonio Machado sought death, the dead and decay in every recess of his soul and body. He always held within himself as much of death as of life, halves fused together by ingenuous artistry. When I met him early in the morning, I had the impression that he had just arisen from the grave. He smelled from far away of metamorphosis. A pit of worms did not disturb him, he was so familiar with it. I think he felt more repelled by smooth flesh than by bony carrion, and butterflies in the open air seemed to him almost as enchantingly sensual as houseflies or flies of the tomb and train,

  inescapable gluttons.

  A poet of death, Antonio Machado spent hour after hour meditating upon, perceiving, and preparing for death; I have never known anyone else who so balanced these levels, equal in height or depth, as he did, and who by his living-dying overcame the gap between these existences, paradoxically opposed yet the only ones known to us; existences strongly united even though we others persist in separating, contrasting, and pitting them against each other. All our life is usually given over to fearing death and keeping it away from us, or rather, keeping ourselves away from it. Antonio Machado apprehended it in itself, yielded to it in large measure. Possibly, more than a man who was born, he was a man reborn. One proof of this, perhaps, is the mature philosophy of his youth. And possessing the secret of resurrection, he was reborn each day before those of us who saw him then, by natural poetic miracle, in order to look into his other life, that life of ours which he reserved in part also for himself. At times he passed the night in the city, in a lodginghouse or family boardinghouse. To sleep, after all, is to die, and at night we all lie down for our share of dying. He never cared to be recognized, and so he always walked enshrouded when he journeyed through the outskirts of towns, along passageways, alleys, lanes, and stairways; and at times, he may have been delayed by a stormy sea, the mirrors in a railroad station, or abandoned lighthouses, those standing tombs.

  Seen by us, in our half-false light, he was corpulent, a naturally earthy hulk, like a big stump just dug out of the ground; he dressed his oversized body in loose-fitting black, ocher, or brown clothes in keeping with his extravagant manner of living death; a new jacket perhaps, hurriedly bought in the outdoor market, baggy trousers, and a completely frayed all-season overcoat, which was not the proper size; he wore a hat with a sagging threadbare brim, of no particular period, since death-life levels styles and periods. In place of cuff links he wore little larva-like cords on the cuffs of his huge shirt, and at the waist, for a belt, a cord of esparto, as would a hermit of his kind. Buttons? What for? His were the logical practices of a tree trunk with roots already in the cemetery.

  When his only love died in Soria de Arriba, she who so well understood his transcendental role as a border dove, he had his idyl on his side of the boundary of death. From then on, h
e was master of all reason and circumstances; outwardly a widower, he set up his bridegroom house in the grave: a secret dovecot; and then he came to the world of our provinces only for the sake of something urgent: a publisher, the press, the bookseller, a necessary signature...the war, the terrible Spanish war of three centuries. Then he completely abandoned his death and his most intimate dead, and remained an eternal season in everyday life, in order to die again, like the best of the others, to die better than the others, than we who are more attached to the side of existence that we have accepted as life. And no final death could possibly have been more appropriate to his strange, earthly Spanish life; so much the more now that Antonio Machado, alive forever in an invisible presence, will never again be reborn in his own spirit and body. When bodily death came, he died humbly, miserably, collectively, the lead animal of a persecuted human flock, driven out of Spain—where he as Antonio Machado had had everything, his dovecots, his sheepfolds of love—through the back gate. In this condition he crossed the high mountains of the frozen frontier, because such was the way his best friends, the poorest and most worthy, made the crossing. And if he still lies under the ground with those buried there away from his love, it is for the comfort of being with them, for I am certain that he who knew the rough uneven path of death has been able to return to Spain through the sky below the ground.

  All this night of high moon—moon that comes from Spain and returns to Spain, with its mountains and its Antonio Machado reflected in its melancholy mirror, moon of sad diamond, blue and green, in the palm tree of violet grassy plush by my little door of the true exile—I have heard in the depths of my waking-sleeping the ballad “Night Rainbow,” one of Antonio Machado’s most profound poems and one of the most beautiful that I have ever read: