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

  And you, Lord, through whom

  we all see and who sees our souls,

  tell us whether one day

  we are all to look upon your face.

  In the eternity of Spain’s evil war, which joined her in a monstrous and terrible way with the other eternity, Antonio Machado, with Miguel de Unamuno and Federico García Lorca, all three so alive in death—each in his own way—have gone, in a different, lamentable, and yet beautiful manner, to look upon the face of God. Great it would be to see how God’s face, a foremost sun or moon, shines on the faces of the three who have fallen, more fortunate perhaps than we others, and how they are seeing the face of God.

  Juan Ramón Jiménez

  1940

  Introduction

  Antonio the good

  Spain of the twentieth century was a nation of extraordinary poets, each distinctive and original. The most beloved of those poets, then and now, is Antonio Machado. He is the quietest, the least pretentious, the most subtle and amusing in aphoristic skepticism, the deepest in the spirit’s labyrinths, the freshest in voice, and the plainest in clear, landscape vision. Don Antonio of Sevilla and the provincial cities, of Madrid and internal and foreign exile, would be the first to ignore these superlatives, yet the cognomen Antonio el bueno (Antonio the good) sticks with him1.

  The poet read and loved philosophy. But he iterated many times that logic doesn’t sing. Machado sings in all his poems. In early poems of shadow and sun, in long poems about harsh Castilla, in fragmentary mountain songs, even in philosophical lyrics when he hauntingly plays with metaphysics: “The eye you see is not / an eye because you see it. / It is eye because it sees you.” Look carefully at his minimal speech, for he fools you with spinning insights. He tells us that the eye of the other already is, and not because by perceiving it you render it living, but because it is there waiting to come into more apparent being by seeing you. In waking you to its being, it gives you life. And you are companions. Like the world, the eye is on its own. And the world and the eye will go on being, when you are darkness.

  Often in his landscapes, as in a Chinese Taoist painting, the author seems to disappear because scene is all. Even the live figures in the field participate in a vibrant still life—a black bull, two slow oxen plowing, a man with a crease on his forehead walking behind the beasts, a rainbow of birds, a stork sitting absorbed in the sky over a spire. Yet behind the vision, the poet is there, guiding you, walking with open eyes filled with memory of poplars by the river, a dry elm waiting for resurrection, and the Espino hill on which he wheels his dying wife. Or, on a cobbled street in an ancient Castilian village, he tramps alone at midnight by night jasmine, by the illuminated clock on the town hall, a moon at its zenith, all in the severe solitude of his widowerhood. When you walk with blind open eyes in his fields, you have disappeared with the poet.

  Spain when Antonio Machado began to write

  Antonio Machado began to write his first poems in the last years of the nineteenth century. He was a Spanish poet already aware of his French counterparts Baudelaire and Verlaine and the Americans Whitman and Poe, all of whom represented the new poetry. The late Spanish romantic Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer also left his mark in the early sensitive, intimist poems of elusive love, a city pastoral landscape, and youthful melancholy. But the avant-garde voices of Rimbaud and Mallarmé had not yet crossed the Pyrenees into Iberia. Then came the earthquake of Spain’s war with America in 1898. It took a decade before that catastrophe permeated Spanish letters. Yet already in Machado’s second book, Solitudes, Galleries, and Other Poems (1899–1907), the poet moves from the subjective and sensitive young poet, who recalls unrequited love, kitsch European melodies, and the shadow of gallows and graveyard, to being the observer and critic of a traditionalist, fraudulent Spain marked by greed and anger in the countryside and political office. The history of Spain and contemporary intellectual artistic movements come self-consciously into his poetry. He has a powerful social agenda, at times rhetorical and journalistic, for creating a new Spain. A few of his poems take on the ethical lexicon and tones of the Generation of ’98. In these national aspirations he is prophetic. At least in the arts, the new self-awareness and energy will help fuel a cultural renaissance.

  The Generation of ’98 had a violent political origin. When the United States defeated Spain, quickly and decisively, certain Spanish intellectual elements began to waken from the lethargy of long national decline, of passivity and an imitativeness of France, which earlier in the century had humiliated the nation when Napoleon 1 invaded and occupied Spain in 1808. Goya responded with fury in paintings and engravings at the grotesque massacre of Spanish civilians and soldiers. A century later, an inflamed generation of writers and thinkers became acutely aware that their country had again lost everything, and there was a response in the air—a demand for change.

  A climate of defeat had beset the nation. Along with military disgrace, Spain was reduced territorially to the Iberian peninsula, with the exception of a few strips of land in North Africa. After centuries of decline, there were indeed few other signs of the golden chain of colonies, all now liberated and culturally rejecting Spain in favor of France. The Siglo de oro was long gone, and gold from the old Indian mines and plundered treasuries no longer poured in from the Americas to support an unproductive economy, one that could barely provide its people with bread.

  While the new gods of the industrial revolution were winning Western Europe and North America to a faith in progress and prosperity, Spain was still castles, beauty, churches, landless peasants in Andalucía, and a skeletal industry in the north. There remained the cartoon version of the nation: Bizet’s colorful Carmen, a French dream of gypsies and toreadors: glittering, romantic, and utterly cheap and unreal. In truth the countryside was a medieval relic, feudal in land ownership, but at the same time the village and city life were fascinating for the emerging naturalist novelists who examined the lives of peasants and the other classes in this time-warped ancient nation. Spain had known Phoenicians, Greeks, lews, Romans, Visigoths, and Arabs who came to inhabit this Celtic-Iberian peninsula. The old structures were everywhere: a great functioning Roman aqueduct in the center of Segovia, Moorish watchtowers on the coast and the great mosque of Córdoba, a medieval synagogue in Toledo and the whitewashed Jewish ghetto of Sevilla, medieval and renaissance buildings in Salamanca, built on Roman foundations. Not least was the diversity of peoples, languages, and customs of prideful Catalans, Castilians, Andalusians, Galicians, and Basques.

  Popular culture was alive and even preserved by the insignificance of industry and the stagnating economy. (Unfortunately there is a universal inverse relationship of growth between folkloric culture and economic prosperity.) Antonio Machado’s father, Antonio Machado Álvarez, was himself a folklorist, the founder of the Spanish Folklore Society, as well as the first anthologist of the lyrics of flamenco song. Popular culture was also celebrated in the festivals. To this day Spaniards still celebrate the Semana santa (Holy Week) of Málaga, with its floats carrying embellished statues of the Virgin and accompanied by the penitentes, men parading with crosses in white robes and high conical hats, alongside priests and uniformed guardias civiles. This is followed a week later by the celebration of the Feria de Sevilla, with its dancing sevillanas in the casetas, the bulls, and the aristocratic horsewomen riding as elegant, anachronistic dolls in the morning streets. Everywhere and in full strength was the canción anónima (popular song), which, with the exception of a brief period of total Italianization in the early sixteenth century, had nourished even the most culto (culturally European) of Spanish poets. Yet eternal popular culture aside, in 1898 the nation as a whole lay impoverished after its civil wars and seemed removed from Europe, ensconced behind the isolating walls of the Pyrenees.

  Of this Spain drifting into the twentieth century, the esteemed novelist Arturo Barea wrote, “Her fertile but mismanaged lands were exhausted; the country was short of bread. And she was plagued by earthquak
es, epidemics and flood which seemed to herald the Apocalypse in the eyes of the bewildered masses”2. Fifty years of church burning and those exhausting Carlist wars between traditionalists and liberals (liberal as a political term was invented in Spain) had preceded the military defeat of 1898. Spain had dissipated prestige and hegemony. It was no longer the dominant power of Europe as when it ruled Austria, parts of Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, most of the two continents of the Americas, even the Philippines.

  Yet just at this low moment of national stagnation, the dynamic beginnings of a new Spain came on the scene. There was an influx of literary and social ideas from abroad and an explosion of Spanish talent that led to rebirth in all the arts. Perhaps a just comparison can be made with the emergence of the great novel in nineteenth-century Russia at a time when the nation was similarly characterized by feudal landowner-ship, abysmal government, and conflicting Russian and Europeanizing cultural currents. In Spain, soon the blossoming would become self-nourishing, leaving the initial ’98 impulse and programs behind.

  Spain became a nation of world composers, painters, musicians, and four Nobel laureates in literature. In music there were the composers Falla, Albéniz, and Granados, all very Spanish as they were European, and Andrés Segovia who made the guitar an essential Spanish and classical instrument, and Pablo Casals who for most of his nine decades made his cello a favor to the world. The twentieth century would bring the painters luán Gris, Joan Miró, Dalí, and Picasso. In Barcelona the eccentric, brilliant Catalan Antonio Gaudi was a secret world figure of architecture in the early 1900s.

  In literature the sense of renovation was messianic. A group of literary men, who identified with the national problems, set out on quixotic missions to rediscover the soul of Spain. Students, artists, and intellectuals went abroad to bring back new ideas. Within Spain the provinces were discovered: landscapes in Antonio Machado, Azorín (José Martínez Ruiz), and Miguel de Unamuno; the popular song and ballad in Machado and later in Lorca and Alberti. Popular culture became legitimate raw material for art forms. The so-called primitive authors were resurrected: the medieval poets Gonzalo de Berceo, Juan Ruiz the archpriest of Hita, and Jorge Manrique. Spanish philosopher-essayists Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset were engaged in labors of reexamination and rebellion, critical introspection, and re-evaluation.

  The decay in the national life did not of course automatically disappear upon being articulated by a group of ardent scholars, artists, and philosophers. Azorín wrote essay after essay calling for hard work and the exertion of la voluntad (the will). In politics the figures of ’98 had no single party or program—they did have an influential professor, Francisco Giner de los Ríos, founder of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free Institution of Learning), which educated many leading intellectuals, including the Machado brothers. Azorín, with his usual thoroughness, listed the evils against which his generation was rebelling:

  The old times also mean the vicious practices of our politics, administrative corruption, incompetence, unlawful practices, nepotism, caciques, verbosity, the mañana attitude, parliamentary frauds, the overbearing quality of grandiloquence, the political expediencies which make those go astray who were quite prepared to do so, the falsified elections...all in a dense and impenetrable atmosphere, against all of this the Generation of 1898 protested. (Azorín 235~36)3

  Few have better expressed these conditions of dismay and hope with more rhetorical mastery than Antonio Machado in “Una España joven” (“A Young Spain”), a poem vividly infused with the spirit of ’98 in good and not-so-good ways. It has the stentorian slogans of his programmatic poems of ’98, which stand in contrast to Machado’s essential poems that sing an image before the poet’s eyes or in bright memory. To the detriment of the poet’s name, his declamatory poems figure disproportionately high among those favored for comment and anthologies. They define a literary movement and period. But they are not Machado’s song. “A Young Spain” echoes the traditional “ship-of-state poem,” with its origin in famous paradigms in Alcaeus and Horace, and modernly in Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” His anthem is strong, devout, and trite:

  A time of lies, of infamy, they dressed

  our sorely wounded Spain in carnival costume,

  and then they made her drunken, poor, debased

  so that no hand might touch her open wound.

  The past. Almost adolescent in an era,

  an evil hour—pregnant with grim prophecy,

  we wished to ride an unrestrained chimera

  while shipwrecks rotted in the sleeping sea.

  We left the squalid galley in the harbor,

  choosing to sail a golden ship through gales

  into high ocean waves. We sought no shore

  but cast away anchor, rudder and sails...

  However, most of Machado’s poems reflecting the ’98 ethos depict old stark villages and cities, and the peasants, fields, and mountains around them. Machado’s Fields of Castilla (1912) was, and still is, an ideological focal point, containing a few celebrated poems of mystical bombast as well as his enduring poems of land and people, which are at the heart of his volume. In those days Spaniards were obsessed with nationalist concerns, asking, “What is Spain?” Pedro Salinas, an outstanding poet of the Generation of 1927 and a seminal critic of Spanish literature, captures the spirit and preoccupations of the time:

  The national tragedy functions as a lens, catching the spiritual energies of the new writers and joining them in concentrated form on a single, shining focal point, to lo español. For that which distinguishes the “man of ’98” is that he thinks Spain, feels Spain, and loves Spain over and above all his other activities, converting it into a completely preferred subject of mental preoccupation, making it into the measure of his art, of his life.4

  The devotion of those of ’98 to Spain had nothing to do with jingoism or exaggerated patriotism. It was precisely the hollow ring of the chauvinists’ rhetoric that they abhorred and that Azorin decried. It is ironie that in the act of strong repudiation, some of their writing today should appear rhetorical and chauvinistic. However, they were set on discovering the “eternal” elements in the Spanish tradition, and this turned them to study Castilla, its grave and hermetic plateaus, the heart of Spain. Unamuno and Machado were the poets most associated with the discovery of Castilla, its isolated cities and depopulated páramos (harsh steppes). In their enthusiasm for Castilla, however, the writers of ’98 ignored Galicia and Catalunia (each busy with its own self-discovery in its own language). They even forgot about Andalucía. But the younger poets of the Generation of ’27 expanded the national vision to include Spain’s various distinct regions. There was Alberti’s exquisite minimalist lyrics about Cádiz and its port life; Lorca’s dramatic songs and ballads, including a series of moody poems he even wrote in gallego, the Portuguese dialect spoken in Galicia, and Aleixandre’s childhood city of Málaga, which in his pulsing verse is the “shadow of paradise.” Such provincialism with respect to Andalucía is odd, for most of the major Spanish poets of the twentieth-century rebirth are Andalusian—Antonio and Manuel Machado, Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Manuel Altolaguirre, Luis Cernuda, and the two Nobel laureates, Juan Ramón Jiménez and Vicente Aleixandre.

  The instance of Machado and his Andalucía is a curious exception and anomoly. Don Antonio discovers his ballads and common speech first in his acquired homeland, Castilian Soria. There he instills in many poems, including his masterpiece “The Land of Alvargonzález,” what is parallel to what Wordsworth and Coleridge preach and voice in the Lyrical Ballads (1798): the common speech of the people in traditional forms free of essayistic meters and the clichés of worn poesy. But then in 1912, by the chance assignment of his next job, Machado is sent to a new Andalucía: the rural Andalusian city of Baeza where he teaches, and Úbeda where he strolls on long afternoons. He tastes the salt of popular songs and he, too, as the ultimate poet of ’98, enlarges his vision to include his ne
wfound lyrical south. The younger Lorca will spend most of his literary life as a genius of the popular (the traditional folkloric) in poems and plays, and will die at thirty-eight. Machado turns thirty-seven when he begins to sing in his own, original Andalusian voice.

  Antonio Machado, a meditative poet of remembered landscape, begins his pilgrimage

  Machado is a meditative nature poet who has written poems about landscape in which no speaker seems to exist (a quality he shares with classical Chinese poetry), and who is the metaphysical explorer of dream, landscape, and consciousness below language.

  Antonio Machado y Ruiz began his pilgrimage, from a landscape of memory to the sea of death, in the white city of Sevilla, where he was born on July 26, 1875. In that same year Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague. Astrology and stars aside, there is in these poets a coincidence of some essential qualities. They are the quietest, most introspective, and landscape-oriented writers of modern poetry. Landscape, or the open-eyed dream of it, does all. It is thing and symbol. Semioticians speak with restrained ecstasy about that instant of significant communication when all codes are right, when semiosis takes place. For Machado and Rilke the evocation of significant landscape, usually through dream, is the instant of semiosis—when it all comes together. Both these philosophical poets usually left philosophy and theory aside in their poetry and expressed all idea through sound and image, through incantatory speech and landscape. Don Antonio, however, managed in his two long series of notation poems he called “Proverbs and Songs” to combine his passion for philosophy with image. This is his aphoristic side, never without whimsy and self-mockery, in which he manipulated image to tell his metaphysical tale.