water in its stone gutters!
Only a smell of jasmine,
nightingale of perfumes.
How the war seems
asleep from sea to sea,
while blossoming Valencia
drinks the Guadalaviar!
Valencia of slender towers
and tender nights, Valencia,
I shall be with you
when I cannot see you,
where sand grows on the land
and gone is the violet sea!
Rocafort, May 1937
El crimen fue en Granada
A Federico García Lorca
1. EL CRIMEN
Se le vio, caminando entre fusiles,
por una calle larga,
salir al campo frío,
aún con estrellas de la madrugada.
Mataron a Federico
cuando la luz asomaba.
El pelotón de verdugos
no osó mirarle la cara.
Todos cerraron los ojos;
rezaron: ¡ni Dios te salva!
Muerto cayó Federico
—sangre en la frente y plomo en las entrañas—
...Que fue en Granada el crimen
sabed—¡pobre Granada!—, en su Granada.
2. EL POETA Y LA MUERTE
Se le vio caminar solo con Ella,
sin miedo a su guadaña.
—Ya el sol en torre y torre, los martillos
en yunque—yunque y yunque de las fraguas.
Hablaba Federico,
requebrando a la muerte. Ella escuchaba.
“Porque ayer en mi verso, compañera,
sonaba el golpe de tus secas palmas,
y diste el hielo a mi cantar, y el filo
a mi tragedia de tu hoz de plata,
te cantaré la carne que no tienes,
los ojos que te faltan,
tus cabellos que el viento sacudía,
los rojos labios donde te besaban...
Hoy como ayer, gitana, muerte mía,
qué bien contigo a solas,
por estos aires de Granada, ¡mi Granada!”
3
Se le vio caminar...
Labrad, amigos,
de piedra y sueño en el Alhambra,
un túmulo al poeta,
sobre una fuente donde llore el agua,
y eternamente diga:
el crimen fue en Granada, ¡en su Granada!
The Crime Was in Granada61
to Federico García Lorca
1. THE CRIME
He was seen, walking between rifles
down a long street
and going out to the cold countryside
still with stars of early dawn.
They killed Federico
when light came.
The squad of executioners
didn’t dare look him in the face.
They all closed their eyes.
They prayed, “Not God can save you!”
Dead fell Federico,
—blood on his forehead and lead in his stomach—.
That the crime was in Granada—
know it—poor Granada!—in his Granada.
2. THE POET AND DEATH
He was seen walking alone with her,
not afraid of her scythe.
—The sun already on tower and tower; the hammers
on the anvil—anvil and anvil of the forges.
Federico was speaking,
flirting with death. She listened.
“Companion, because yesterday in my verse,
the clapping of your dry palms resounded
and you gave ice to my song, and edge
of your sickle of silver to my tragedy,
I will sing you your missing flesh,
the eyes you lack,
your hair the wind was ruffling,
the red lips where they kissed you...
Today as yesterday, gypsy, my death,
how good alone with you
in these breezes of Granada, my Granada!”
3
He was seen walking...
Friends, carve
a tomb of stone and dream in the Alhambra,
for the poet,
over a fountain where the water weeps
and forever says,
The crime was in Granada, in his Granada!
61 Usually the elegy for Lorca appears near the end of this sequence of war poems. I follow the conventional numbering, established by Aurora de Albornoz, but place the poem first in the sequence. He wrote it in the first days of the Spanish civil war (1936–1939) while still in Madrid, a few days after being informed that Lorca had been executed in Granada on August 19, 1936. The remaining poems carry the shadow of Lorca’s death, especially “The Death of the Wounded Child.”
Meditación del día
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.
Valencia, Febrero de 1937
Today’s Meditation
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 March62
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.
Valencia, February 1937
62 A medieval Catalan lyric poet.
“Y te enviaré me cancion”
Y te enviaré me cancion:
“Se canta lo que se pierde,”
con on papagayo verde
que la diga en tu balón.
Rocafort, Valencia, Mayo, 1937
“I will give you my song”
I will give you my song.
One sings what is lost,
with a green parrot
to say it on your balcony.
Rocafort, Valencia, May, 1937
Coplas
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.
Songs
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.
Collioure, Febrero 1939
These blue days and this sun of childhood.63
Collioure, February 1939
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:
I will give you my song
one sings what is lost,
with a green parrot
to say it on your balcony.
The pocket also contained Hamlet’s phrase, or a variation: “Being or not being.”
Note on the Book
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.
—WB
About the Author
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.
1917
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).
1931
—Antonio Machado
translated by Willis Barnstone
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.
Chronology of Antonio Machado
1874
Manuel Machado y Ruiz, first son of Antonio Machado Álvarez and Ana Ruiz y Hernández, grandson of Antonio Machado Nuñez, is born in Sevilla.
1875
July 26, Antonio Machado y Ruiz is born in the Palace of the Dueñas in Sevilla.
1883
Antonio Machado Nuñez, the grandfather, becomes professor at the University of Madrid, and the family moves to the capital. At age eight the images of Sevilla become memory. Antonio, Manuel, and their younger brothers José and Joaquín attend the Free Institute of Learning, an enlightened and formative school founded by Francisco Giner de los Ríos, who is portrayed in one of Machado’s finest poems.
1893
The poet’s father, worn down by failed attempts in Puerto Rico to improve the family’s fortunes, returns to Sevilla, where he dies. Antonio is eighteen, writing articles in magazines, and collaborating with Manuel on literary ventures.
1898
A disastrous war between Spain and United States. With the sinking of the fleet of Spain and slaughter of her soldiers in Cuba and the Philippines, the huge Spanish empire and colonial dream are dead. Cuba gains independence, the Philippines and Puerto Rico pass to American control. After the defeat by America and international humiliation, a revolutionary literary movement emerges known as the “Generation of ’98.” The term, coined by Azorín in 1913, describes a group of writers seeking a cultural and moral rebirth of Spain by turning to popular culture and contemporary literary movements in France, England, and America. They discover an essential Spain in the austere life of the Castilian and Andalusian peasants, poignantly depicted in Machado’s Fields of Castilla (1917) and Lorca’s Poem of the cante hondo (1931). Among those associated with the ’98 movement are the philosophers Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset, essayist Azorín, novelist Pío Baroja (whom Hemingway claimed as his master), playwright Ramón del Valle Inclán, and poets Juan Ramón Jiménez and Antonio Machado. Following ’98 there is another wave of world poets,
the Generation of ’27—Federico García Lorca, Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén, Rafael Alberti, and Vicente Aleixandre—who carry on Generation of ’98 ideals while embracing experimental movements such as ultraism and European surrealism. The poet and playwright Lorca, who has both popular song and surrealist elements in his work, reflects principles of both ’98 and ’27.
1899
Antonio joins Manuel in Paris, where they work for the publisher Garnier and meet leading Spanish literati, among others.
1900
Antonio earns his baccalaureate at the Instituto Cardenal Cisneros, writes, and does part-time acting.
1902
Second trip to Paris, he meets Rubén Darío, and on his return begins a lifelong friendship with the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez.
1903
He publishes his first book of poems, Soledades (Solitudes).
1907
Antonio obtains the French chair at the Instituto General y Técnico, in Soria, a small Castilian city northeast of Madrid. Institutos are advanced public high schools from which one goes directly to university. He publishes his first major book, Solitudes, Galleries, and Other Poems. In Soria he lives in a boardinghouse, where he meets Leonor Izquierdo Cuevas, thirteen, the owner’s daughter.
Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Spanish Edition) Page 32