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A Voice in Time
A selection of poems
by Antonio Machado
T R A N S LAT E D B Y
Patrick Early
First published in 2014 by Our Glass Publishing
1
Translations, Introduction
copyright © Patrick Early 2014
The moral rights of the copyright holders have
been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted
in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior
permission of the publisher, except for brief quotations
made for purposes of criticism or review.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
ISBN 978-0-9930210-0-8
Typeset in Monotype Dante and designed by
James Atkins Design Limited.
Illustration of Antonio Machado by James Atkins.
Contents
Introduction 1
Selected poems 27
28
Yo voy soñando caminos Dreaming of roads
29
30
El limonero
The lemon tree 31
32
He andado muchos caminos
Caravans of sorrow
33
34
Anoche cuando dormía
Last night as I was sleeping
35
38
Es una tarde cenicienta y mustia
Dismal grey afternoon
39
40
Vosotras moscas
My friends the flies
41
En el entierro de un amigo
44
At the burial of a friend
45
46
Retrato Self-portrait 47
50
A orillas de Duero
By the banks of the Duero
51
54
Por tierras de España
In Spanish lands
55
58
Del pasado efímero
On the ephemeral past
59
Saeta
60
Saeta
61
A don Francisco Giner de los Ríos 62
For don Francisco Giner de los Ríos
63
64
Un loco
A madman
65
66
El hospicio
The old almshouse
67
68
Son de abril las aguas mil
April brings a thousand showers
69
En tren
70
By train
71
Campos de Soria
74
Soria country
75
Caminos
84
Roads
85
Proverbios y Cantares (1) 92
Proverbs and Songs (1)
93
Los ojos
116
The eyes
117
Al olmo viejo
118
To the old elm 119
A José María Palacio
120
To José María Palacio 121
Proverbios y Cantares (2) 124
Proverbs and Songs (2)
125
Poema de un día152
Poem of a certain day
153
Tres sonetos
164
Three sonnets
165
Mi padre en su despacho 168
My father in his study
169
170
El crimen fué en Granada The crime happened in Granada
171
174
De mi cartera
From my notebook
175
Los sueños dialogados
176
Dreams in dialogue
177
178
Últimas lamentaciones de Abel Martín Abel Martin’s last lamentations
179
Canciones a Guiomar 182
Songs for Guiomar
183
190
Al Gran Cero
To the Great Nought
191
Oración por Antonio Machado – Rubén Darío
192
Rubén Darío’s prayer for Antonio Machado
193
Chronology 194
Essential reading 195
Translations and Versions
196
Further reading 197
About the Author 198
Acknowledgements198
Antonio Machado Ruiz
poet 1875–1939
Introduction
In 1916, the young Federico García Lorca visited Antonio
Machado in Baeza with a group of fellow students from
Granada. With the publication of his masterpiece Campos de
Castilla or Fields of Castile in 1912, Antonio Machado at the age
of 37 had emerged as Spain’s leading poet. Lorca and his young
friends had come to pay a traditional homage to an artist they
greatly admired. They found a man still mourning the death of
his young wife who had died a few years earlier, but it seems
they succeeded in cheering Machado up. Machado broke his
silence to read from some of his better known poems.
Later that evening, Lorca gave a piano recital in the
local casino (Gibson Federico García Lorca 1898-1929 chapter
6). He was still only 18 and not yet the world-famous poet
and dramatist he would become. The two poets remained
friends till the tragic death of Lorca whose casual and brutal
execution in 1936, the first year of the Spanish Civil War,
alerted the world to the repressive nature and ruthlessness of
1
the Nationalist forces led by Franco and his generals. Lorca
was seen from that day as a martyr to fascist repression. He
was also clearly a poetic genius who had barely completed the
first phase of his life’s work when he was killed. Outside the
Spanish-speaking world, until recent years, Lorca’s celebrity,
his tragic glamour, have tended to overshadow the quiet
distinction of the older poet’s work. But there are signs that
this is changing.
It was Machado’s furious poem of riposte El Crimen fué en
Granada or The Crime happened in Granada that memorialized
Lorca’s murder for the world:
They saw him go with a squad of riflemen
along a broad street and out
to the freezing countryside,
stars still shining in the dawn sky.
They murdered Federico at first light,
his execution squad could not look him in the face,
they all closed their eyes,
and no doubt prayed
that not even God
would be willing to save you, Federico.1
Machado’s life was relatively humdrum, though lived in
times of social unrest and upheaval, but it was conspicuous for
decency, consistency, and courage. Since his death in 1939, his
poetry and prose have entered the bloodstream of the Spanish
1 El Crimen fué en Granada first published in Ayuda Madrid, October
1936 and read aloud at a public meeting in Valencia, December 1936.
2
language, and distillations of his philosophy in the form of
pithy observations about human behaviour have made their
way into the classrooms of Spain and Latin America.
Beyond the Spanish-speaking world, Machado’s reputation
has been left for a specialist breed of scholars to promote
– the hispanists Gerald Brenan and J. B.Trend, and more
recently, Geoffrey Ribbans. Ian Gibson, an Irish scholar, now
an honorary citizen of Spain, has written a comprehensive
life of Machado: Ligero de Equipajen (2008). His detailed and
entertaining work has not yet been published in English.
Fellow poets, particularly Americans, have valued
Machado’s poetry. The American poet Robert Bly did much
in the post-war period to bring Machado to the attention of
the English speaking world (Bly 1983). More recently, we find
Raymond Carver paying a personal tribute to the poet in one
of his poems entitled Radio Waves (Carver 1997)2.
When Carver turns to Machado he is thinking about his
own imminent death:
Today I took your book with me
when I went for my walk.
“Pay attention!” you said,
when anyone asked what to do with their lives.
So I looked around and made note of everything.
Then sat down with it in the sun,
in my place beside the river
where I could see the mountains.
And I closed my eyes
2 Radio Waves Raymond Carver All of Us Ard University Press 1997.
3
and listened to the sound of the water.
Then I opened them and began to read
“Abel Martin’s Last Lamentations.”
More recently, the Scottish poet Don Paterson has
produced The Eyes (1999) a book of original poems, inspired
by Machado’s poetry. Paterson describes this as ‘a version’
and plays expert variations on the original poems, creating
a fresh work of art. Paterson is interested in a bleaker aspect
of Machado’s poetry – his via negativa, his exploration, in
a poem like el Gran Cero, of how one may be reconciled to
living without the prospect of an after-life by embracing
the nada. Another good reason for reading Machado is that
he offers “moral instruction... a function poetry seems to
have forgotten it ever performed” (The Eyes, Afterword).
Everywhere in Machado’s work, there are lessons of humanity
and commonsense which are tempered and rendered palatable
by scepticism and wit.
Seamus Heaney once drily remarked: “It is better to
translate than not to translate, obviously.” As the translator of
Beowulf, he was in a good position to make this claim. Heaney’s
poetic version – a masterpiece in itself – has brought many
new readers to the Anglo-Saxon text. My own enthusiasm for
Machado’s poetry, and for Machado the citizen, has led me to
attempt a new translation of my own selection of his poems,
hoping that it may do the same.
But first let me acknowledge the pioneering achievement
of some very accomplished American poet-translators, in
particular Willis Barnstone’s Eighty Poems (1959), his Borders of
a Dream: Selected Poems (2004), and Alan S. Trueblood’s Selected
4
Poems (1990).
I have referred to their translations sparingly, only referring
to them when, for one reason or another, I was stuck – for
example to see how they dealt with a specific problem of
ambiguity or tone. In the end, a translator has to believe
that he or she can do as well or better than those who have
gone before.
The social and historical background
In Baeza in 1917, when he was already one of Spain’s
leading poets, Antonio Machado wrote a mid-life fragment
of autobiography. In typically modest words, he summarizes
the bare facts of his life to middle-age: he taught French for a
living in the provincial backwaters of Spain, he married, and
soon after, to his great sadness, his young wife died. These few
facts which he gives us about his life conceal the story of his
lifelong engagement with the landscape and destiny of a newly
awakening Spain.
For two centuries Spanish society had been in decline,
suffering from widespread corruption and economic inertia,
living with an outdated illusion of its greatness (Graham
2005; Preston 2006). A coalition of clergy, military and the
aristocracy headed by a Bourbon Monarch had maintained
feudal structures and stood in the way of social change.
The scene was set for fundamental reform, but progressive
elements faced determined opposition from the privileged, as
well as despair among a people which had largely lost hope in
progress through peaceful political change.
The loss of the last important Spanish colonies of Cuba,
Puerto Rico and the Philippines in 1898 shook Spanish
5
society out of its lethargy and provoked a phase of social and
political regeneration. Machado and his fellow-writers, the
‘Generation of 98’, were to play a key role in the movement
for change. These young reformers pressed for fundamental
political change and the replacement of a corrupt monarchy
by a republic with a freely elected democratic government.
However, this political project, which frames the life and work
of Antonio Machado, encountered bitter opposition from the
very start.
Much of Machado’s life was spent as a French teacher in
obscure Institutos (Upper Secondary Schools) in provincial
cities – Soria, Baeza and Segovia. Despite his long stays in the
provinces, Antonio remained in close contact with his family
and with his fellow writers in Madrid, and closely followed
current political and cultural events. He exchanged letters with
his contemporaries such as the Basque philosopher Miguel de
Unamuno, the dramatist Ramón del Valle Inclán, with his close
friend, the actor Ricardo Calvo, and with his brother, the poet,
Manuel Machado.
First and foremost, Machado was a lyric poet, with a genius
for describing the harsh mountains and deserts of Spain,
the turbulent weather, anonymous peasants in the fields or
travelling in train carriages, creating sad or humorous vignettes
of country life. This is the classic Machado that is commonly
taught in Spanish classrooms, and to students of Spanish
literature. In search of a poetic idiom for the new century,
Machado forged a laconic diction in which lyricism is infused
with ironic intelligence, using traditional verse forms and the
rhythms of natural speech. He was exposed to influential
current trends or schools of poetry, from the early influences
6
of Symbolism and Modernism to Surrealism, and, in later
life, to the revival of the Baroque School of Góngora. These
schools left traces in his poetry, but he rejected their allegiance
to pursue his own path. Above all, Machado brought to poetry
a radically new tone which allowed the use of irony and a
disarming self-deprecating humour, even when expressing
intensely felt lyric emotion.
For one contemporary Spanish critic, Machado is essentially
a radical non-conformist, but the same critic acknowledges that
there are as many facets to Machado as there are readers:
…the reader of Machado can read a number of texts which contradict
the image of the poet as non-conformist thinker, dissident and radical.
One can see Machado as a seeker after God, a dreamer, a cantor for
Castile, an elegiac lyricist, a poet of the people, and many more things
besides. But Machado is, and ceases to be all these, due to his multiple
acts of dissidence.3
There is another Machado, the democratic socialist and
poète engagé, who, in his lifetime, became a political icon for
the Left. As Spanish society polarised before and during the
Civil War (1936–39), Machado staunchly supported the Spanish
Republic in its bitter fight with Franco and the insurgent Right.
His battle was fought using the weapons of words, poems,
journalism and constitutional arguments. He believed there
could be no compromise with fascism and it was a writer’s
responsibility to fight, and not just defensively.
3 Ángel González, Speech to the Royal Academy of the Spanish
Language 1997. Author’s translation.
7
Virtue is courage, to be good is to be brave;
in our minds we should bear
our mace, our sword and shield.
Armed with all these we can do more
than parry our opponent’s blows –
we can attack, inflict wounds.4
Birth and Upbringing
Antonio Machado was born in Seville in 1875 to an
intellectually distinguished family of politically radical
convictions. Machado’s father, Antonio Machado Álvarez,
better known by his pseudonym Demófilo, was a writer,
anthropologist, and folklorist, who founded a society for the
conservation and study of popular poetry and song, a collector
of romances, coplas and flamenco cante hondo. His grandfather,
Antonio Machado y Núñez, was a prominent scientist and
Darwinian, a member of the progressive generation who in
1868 overthrew the Bourbon Queen, Isabella II, initiating a
brief period of democratic rule. His elder brother, Manuel,
was a gifted writer of poetry and plays, who later, to the great
chagrin of Antonio, became a supporter of Franco.
His younger brother, José, was a painter, like his mother,
Ana Ruíz Hernandez. Antonio’s politically committed father
and grandfather were a major formative influence on his life
and ideas…
Get the full introduction in a printed copy
available from ourglasspublishing.co.uk
4 From the poem sequence Proverbios y Cantares, Campos de Castilla
1907–17. Author’s translation.
8
Selected poems
9
El hospicio
Es el hospicio, el viejo hospicio provinciano,
el caserón ruinoso de ennegrecidas tejas
en donde los vencejos anidan en verano
y graznan en las noches de invierno las cornejas.
Con su frontón al Norte, entre los dos torreones
de antigua fortaleza, el sórdido edificio
de agrietados muros y sucios paredones,
es un rincón de sombra eterna. ¡El viejo hospicio!
Mientras el sol de enero su débil luz envía,
su triste luz velada sobre los campos yermos,
a un ventanuco asoman, al declinar el día,
algunos rostros pálidos, atónitos y enfermos,
a contemplar los montes azules de la sierra;
o, de los cielos blancos, como sobre una fosa,
caer la blanca nieve sobre la fría tierra,
¡sobre la tierra fría la nieve silenciosa!…
66
The old almshouse
It’s an almshouse, an old provincial almshouse,
a ruin of a building with blackened roof tiles
where house-martins nest in summer
and crows caw on winter nights.
A squalid barrack of a place, north-facing,
between the twin towers of an old fort,
with cracked façade and stained walls,
it lies in permanent shadow – the old almshouse!
When the January sun casts its sad
shuttered rays across the barren fields,
a few pale faces can be seen at dusk
peering from an upstairs window, sickly and numb,
gazing at the blue peaks of the sierra;
or at the snow falling on the frozen ground
out of a sky drained white; as if upon an open grave,
snow falling silently on the frozen ground!
67
Los ojos
A Don Miguel de Unamuno
1. Cuando murió su amada
pensó en hacerse viejo
en la mansión cerrada,
solo, con su memoria y el espejo
donde ella se miraba un claro día.
Como el oro en el arca del avaro,
pensó que guardaría
todo un ayer en el espejo claro.
Ya el tiempo para él no correría.
2. Mas pasado el primer aniversario,
¿cómo eran – preguntó –, pardos o negros,
sus ojos? ¿Glaucos?...¿Grises?
¿Cómo eran, ¡Santo Dios!, que no recuerdo?…
3. Salió a calle un día
de primavera, y paseó en silencio
su doble luto, el corazón cerrado…
De una ventana en el sombrío hueco
vio unos ojos brillar. Bajó los suyos
y siguió su camino…¡Como esos!
116
The eyes
For Don Miguel de Unamuno
1. When his beloved died
he thought he would grow old
in the shuttered house,
alone with his memories and a mirror
in which she had gazed
at her reflection one fine day.
Like a miser who keeps his gold in a chest,
he thought he would capture yesterday
intact in that clear mirror.
For him time would simply cease to run.
2. But when the first anniversary had passed,
he began to ask: what were her eyes like,
brown or black?
Were they misty? Grey?
What were they like, for God’s sake,
why can’t I recall them…?
3. One spring day he went out into the street
and in silence began to walk along
with his double grief and closed heart…
But then in the deep shade of a window
he glimpsed a pair of shining eyes. He lowered his gaze
and went on his way… They could be hers!
117
Mi padre en su despacho
Esta luz de Sevilla es el palacio
donde nací, con su rumor de fuente.
Mi padre, en su despacho. – La alta frente,
la breve mosca, y el bigote lacio –.
Mi padre, aún joven. Lee, escribe, hojea
sus libros y medita. Se levanta;
va hacia la puerta del jardín. Pasea.
A veces habla solo, a veces canta.
Sus grandes ojos de mirar inquieto
ahora vagar parecen, sin objeto
donde puedan posar, en el vacío.
Ya escapan de su ayer a su mañana;
ya miran en el tiempo, ¡padre mío!,
piadosamente mi cabeza cana.
168
My father in his study
This Sevilian light is the palace where I was born
to the sound of a murmuring fountain.
My father in his study – his high forehead,
sparse beard, generous moustache.
My father still young – reading, writing,
leafing through his books, meditating.
Now he rises and goes to the garden door.
Strolls out, talking to himself, maybe humming.
His great eyes with their unquiet gaze
seem to wander across fields of empty space,
searching for a resting place.
Dear father, already his eyes have left the past,
and peering tenderly through time
have come to rest on my greying head.
169
Al Gran Cero
Cuando el Ser que se es hizo la nada
y reposó, que bien lo merecía,
ya tuvo el día noche, y compañía
tuvo el hombre en la ausencia de la amada.
¡Fiat umbra! Brotó el pensar humano.
y el huevo universal alzó, vacío,
ya sin color, desustanciado y frío,
lleno de niebla ingrávida, en su mano.
Toma el cero integral, la hueca esfera,
que has de mirar, si lo has de ver, erguido.
Hoy que es espalda el lomo de tu fiera,
y es el milagro del no ser cumplido,
brinda, poeta, un canto de frontera
a la muerte, al silencio y al olvido.
190
To the Great Nought
When the great Being created nothingness
and rested, how well he deserved his rest,
for now there was a night for day, and a man
had company if he should lack a loved one.
Fiat umbra! Human thought was born
and the universal egg emerged in his hand.
Empty, colourless, disembodied, chilled,
full of weightless mist.
Take the whole rounded nought,
gaze at it, if you must, standing upright.
Now you can lean on your wild beast’s back
and the miracle of non-being is done,
poet, dedicate a song of the borderland
to death, silence, and oblivion.
191
About the Author
Patrick Early studied Modern Languages at Cambridge,
and Applied Linguistics at Leeds and Essex universities. He is a
graduate of Goldsmiths School of Creative Writing.
During an overseas career with the British Council, he lived
with his family in a number of different countries in Europe,
Latin America, and the Arab world. Since retirement he has
devoted himself to writing and translating poetry.
Patrick Early’s interest in the poetry of Antonio Machado
began with the study of Spanish language and literature at
school, continued at university, and deepened during years of
living and working in Barcelona and Madrid.
His poems have appeared in a number of British and Irish
journals. In 2013, he published a collection of poems Ice Flowers
over Rock with Lapwing, Belfast.
Acknowledgements
Sincere thanks to friends and fellow poets who read and
commented on pre-publication drafts and provided me with
vital feedback: Don Paterson; Rosy Wilson; Judy Gahagan;
Dermot Murphy; Miguel Angel Meizoso; Chris Dove; Lloyd
Haft; Paul FitzGibbon; Hugh and Alison Keegan, and my wife,
Stephanie Allen-Early.
Special thanks to my dedicated editor, Daniela Oberti for
help in developing the bilingual text; and artist and designer,
James Atkins, for his inspirational design; and finally to
friend and poet, Matt Bryden, for his patient proof-reading,
encouragement and support.
Patrick Early Seignalens, 2014
198
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