Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Spanish Edition) (32 page)

Frente a la palma de fuego

que deja el sol que se va,

en la tarde silenciosa

y en este jardín de paz,

mientras Valencia florida

se bebe al Guadalaviar

—Valencia de finas torres,

en el lírico cielo de Ausias March,

trocando su río en rosas

antes que llegue a la mar—,

pienso en la guerra. La guerra

viene como un huracán

por los páramos del alto Duero,

por las llanuras de pan llevar,

desde la fértil Extremadura

a estos jardines de limonar,

desde los grises cielos astures

a las marismas de luz y sal.

Pienso en España vendida toda

de río a río, de monte a monte, de mar a mar.

In front the palm tree of fire,

which the setting sun is leaving

on a silent late afternoon

in this garden of peace,

while flowery Valencia

drinks the Guadalaviar waters—

Valencia of slender towers

in the lyrical sky of Ausias March
⁶²

changing its river into roses

before it gets to the sea—

I think of the war. The war

comes like a hurricane

through the barren lands of the upper Duero,

through the fields of standing wheat,

from fertile Extremadura

to these gardens with tribes of lemon trees,

from gray skies of the north

to the marshes of light and salt.

I think of Spain—all of it sold out

from river to river, mountain to mountain, sea to sea.

⁶²
A medieval Catalan lyric poet.

Y te enviaré me cancion:

“Se canta lo que se pierde,”

con on papagayo verde

que la diga en tu balón.

I will give you my song.

One sings what is lost,

with a green parrot

to say it on your balcony.

Papagayo verde,

lorito real,

di tú lo que sabes

al sol que se va.

Tengo un olvido, Guiomar,

todo erizado de espinas,

hoja de nopal.

Cuando truena el cielo

(¡qué bonito está

para la blasfemia!)

y hay humo en el mar...

En los yermos altos

veo unos chopos de frío

y un camino blanco.

En aquella piedra

(¡tierras de la luna!)

¿nadie lo recuerda?

Azotan el limonar

las ráfagas de febrero.

No duermo por no soñar.

Green parrot,

royal lorikeet,

say what you know

to the parting sun.

I have a memory, Guiomar,

all bristling with thorns,

a leaf of cactus fruit.

When the sky thunders

(how beautiful

for blasphemy!)

and there is smoke on the sea.

In the high wilderness

I see some cold poplars

and a white road.

In that stone

(lands of the moon!)

can no one remember them?

Gusts of February

lash the lemon trees.

I don’t sleep so I won’t dream.

Estos días azules y este sol de la infancia.

These blue days and this sun of childhood.
⁶³

⁶³
Last line on a scrap of paper found in his overcoat by his brother José Machado, at Collioure, France, where he died on February 22, 1939, in the Hotel Quintana, a month after crossing the Spanish frontier. In his notebook was also “I will give you my song,” a quatrain forecasting loss. It is a revision of a poem to Guiomar:

The pocket also contained Hamlet’s phrase, or a variation: “Being or not being.”

Some of the poems in this book first appeared in
Eighty Poems of Antonio Machado
(1959), a Cypress Book of Las Américas Publishing in New York. It was an attractive edition. Picasso’s drawing of Machado graced the white book jacket, William Bailey’s exquisite drawings accompanied the bilingual text. In prefatory pages, an American novelist and a Spanish poet created a perfect lens for glimpsing the poet’s person and work. As a young man John Dos Passos had known don Antonio in Segovia in 1922. He recorded their conversations in a chapter of his
Rocinante to the Road Again
(which also had Machado’s first poems in an English book translation). Dos Passos wrote a new introduction for
Eighty Poems,
and the Spanish Nobel-laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez gave us an earlier reminiscence of his lifelong friend. Both are reprinted here.

This new expanded edition has most of Antonio Machado’s poems, including one I recently dared to translate: his long “The Lands of Alvargonzález,” an implacably dark morality play based on an article the poet read in a local newspaper in Castilla. The teacher in Soria cast the family-murder report into a
romance
(the octosyllabic ballad), an old popular narrative form going back to the medieval frontier poem. Federico García Lorca loved this poem, which was a crucial model for his ballads and verse plays. In Indiana, an Argentine colleague, Roberto García Pinto, once told me about a Buenos Aires evening in 1934 when, at a private party following a performance of
Blood Wedding,
he heard Lorca recite the twenty-page “La tierra de Alvargonzález.”

Antonio Machado is the first poet I attempted to translate. At Bowdoin College in Maine, during a winter as cold as Machado’s “cold Soria” in Castilla La Nueva and eight years after the poet’s death, I received a friend’s letter with Machado’s “Parabola” in it. I put the poem on my desk and—who knows why?—was compelled to convert his words into English. I came on a poetry that John Dos Passos heard as dry, spare and luminous Castilian speech whose cadenced words are so stuffed with feeling that they throb. Maybe in a few of these English versions of a Spaniard wandering in his skies under the earth, one can hear his plain, sonorous art, or overhear the meditation of the solitary walker.

My Life

I was born in Sevilla one night of July in 1875, in the Palace of las Dueñas,
⁶⁴
located on the street of the same name.

My memories of my natal city are all of childhood, since at the age of eight I went to Madrid, to which my parents had moved, and I was educated at the Free Institute of Learning, for which I have a vivid affection and, to its teachers, profound gratitude. My adolescence and youth are Madrilenian. I have traveled somewhat in France and Spain. In 1907 I obtained a chair in French Language in Soria, where I taught for five years. There I married; there my wife died, whose memory is with me always. I moved to Baeza, where I now reside. My pastimes are walking and reading.

From Madrid to Paris at age twenty-four (1899). Paris was still the city of the “Dreyfus Affair” in politics, symbolism in poetry, impressionism in painting, and elegant skepticism in criticism. I personally knew Oscar Wilde and Jean Moréas. The great literary figure was Anatole France.

From Madrid to Paris (1902). In this year I met Rubén Darío.

From 1903 to 1910, various trips through Spain: Granada, Córdoba, lands of Soria, the sources of the Duero River, cities of Castilla, Valencia, Aragón.

From Soria to Paris (1910). I attended a course with Henri Bergson at the Collège de France.

From 1912 to 1919, from Baeza to the sources of the Gundalaviar River and to almost all the cities of Andalucía.

Since 1919 I spend approximately half my time in Segovia and the other half in Madrid. My last excursions have been to Ávila, León, Valenica, and Barcelona (1928).

⁶⁴
The Palace of the Dueñas, the palace of the Dukes of Alba, had apartments rented at moderate rates to the Machado families: Antonio Machado Nuñez, former liberal governor of the province of Sevilla, rector and professor of natural sciences at the University of Sevilla; and his son Antonio Machado Álvarez, father of young Antonio, a lawyer and the leading scholar and anthologist of Andalusian popular song.