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 Get your copy of ‘A Voice in Time’ from ourglasspublishing.co.uk For bulk order enquiries or delivery outside of the UK/EU please email [email protected]
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