Sweet taste of being alive - some clearer Antonio Machado

Antonio Machado became a schoolteacher in 1907 – French, and later Spanish.  He taught in schools all over Spain, and in each case wrote poems about the landscape, or about himself in the landscape.

    Yes, I have brought you along, landscapes of Soria,
still evenings, lavender hills,
poplar lanes by the river, green dreaming
of gray soil and drab-brown earth,
aching melancholy of a town’s decay,
you have found your way to my heart –
or were you already there?  (from “The Soria Country,” ll. 129-35, p. 121)

Do these poems ever feel Spanish.  Maybe too much so, as if they were written for the tourism board.  But they make it easy to understand how Machado became a beloved poet.

At the end of his life, he was involved in the awful politics of the 1930s, and Trueblood only includes three poems from the period, all clear and lovely, including a heartbreaking tribute to Federico García Lorca (“The Crime Was in Granada”) and a return to the landscape seen above, “The Poet Remembers the Soria Country,” but this time he asks an “avión marcial,” a “warplane,” if the river “recalls its poet still / amid red ballad sagas reenacted.”

I wanted to counter my trouble understanding Machado’s philosophical or mystical side with some poems with a clearer surface.  Whatever else the poems might mean, the political poems have a public purpose, and the landscape poems have something specific to evoke.

I am tempted by a perfect sonnet Machado wrote about his father, and his childhood:

    My father, young still.  He reads and writes,
leafs through his books and muses.  He gets up,
goes toward the garden door and walks about.
Sometimes he talks out loud, sometimes he sings.
  And then his large eyes with the restless look
seem to be wandering in a void,
unable to settle anywhere.  (Sonnet IV, ll. 5-11, p. 217)

A portrait as self-portrait.  And I am tempted by another kind of self-portrait, “Gloss,” meaning notate, interpret, a poem that begins with a Heraclitean quotation from the Coplas of Jorge Manrique, another tribute to a father:

    Our lives are rivers
flowing in to the sea,
the sea of dying.  Matchless lines!
    Among all my poets
I worship Manrique most.
    Sweet taste of being alive,
hard learning how things pass,
blind rushing to the sea.
    After the fright of dying,
the joy of having arrived.
    Boundless joy!
But – that dread of a return?
Endless pain!

In the Spanish, most of the lines end with an infinitive verb as part of a prepositional phrase, a series of ongoing actions – living, passing, dying, returning – somehow all at once.  The lines do not exactly rhyme, but all end with -ar, -er, or -ir, and even the lines that do not end with verbs repeat these sounds, like “placer” (pleasure) and “la mar” (the sea).  A poem of great complexity constructed from the most basic materials.

I’ll be wandering about for a couple of weeks.  Writing resumes sometime during the last week of July.

Oh, deep wisdom of the cipher - some Antonio Machado

Spanish Literature Month!

My July vacation has gelled so that I will be away for most of the month and will thus not write about Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta until the last week, starting on July 26th if I have la fuerza.  I have finished the novel, but will leave it atop my Currently Reading list to encourage other readers.  When I return, I will have completely forgotten everything about the book, so it is essential that other readers do not wait for my return, but write long, detailed posts which I can use as refreshers.  ¡Muchas gracias por anticipado!

Before vacation, a couple of posts of poet Antonio Machado (1875-1939), as translated by Alan S. Trueblood in Selected Poems (1982, Harvard UP).

Oh, deep wisdom of the cipher, savor
of ripe fruit for man alone to taste,
dream-water and dark wellsprings,
God-given shade cast by the mighty hand!  (from “The Death of Abel Martín,” ll. 21-4, p. 253)

I found Machado to be, in general, difficult, largely because he is a genuinely philosophical poet.  By “philosophical” I mean that he read Henri Bergson, Miguel de Unamuno, etc. – by the 1930s, of course, yikes, Martin Heidegger – for fun, like I read Trollope, and wrote poems that express specific moods or states drawn from his own experience but filtered through philosophy.  Here is an Idea approached analytically through philosophy; here is the same Idea approached through some kind of lived experience, perhaps something as simple as a walk by a river.

Abel Martín, the subject of the above poem, is a fictional philosopher and the “author” of some of Machado’s poems; the poems about his death is “by” one of his students.  Machado has got a little Fernando Pessoa action going.

Luckily for me, Machado’s favorite philosopher is Heraclitus, who is not so hard – water and fire.

The Waterwheel

    Evening was falling,
dusty and sad.
    The water sang
its workaday tune
in the brimming scoops
of the slow-turning wheel.
    The old mule was dreaming,
poor worn-out mule,
keeping time with the shadowy
sound of the water.
    Evening was falling,
dusty and sad.
    I can’t say what noble
and godlike poet
linked the soft accord
of the dreaming water
    to the bitter toil
of the endless round
and blindfolded you,
poor worn-out mule…
    But that poet, I know,
was noble and godlike,
a heart steeped in shadow
and ripe with knowing.  (pp. 85-7, ellipses in original)

The lovely match between subject and stanzaic form is visible in English, whatever other rhythmic pleasures have been lost.  Machado has a strong post-religious mystical side, which is visible here in this metaphor for the nature of existence – I am, we are, generally, the blindfolded mule, not the godlike poet who somehow is able to make a little more sense of the shadows and dream, of that inexplicable, endless sound of flowing water.

A reader with some Spanish might well notice that Machado’s vocabulary is mostly entry-level and his syntax untangled.  He was anti-Baroque, anti-gongorism.  He is a perfect poet for anyone working on his Spanish, with some level of meaning available to a basic level of the language.  Then there’s that next level, a whole other problem.