Border of a Dream: Selected Poems

by Antonio Machado, Willis Barnstone (Introduction)

Antonio Machado (1875–1939) is Spain’s master poet, the explorer of dream and landscape, and of consciousness below language. Widely regarded as the greatest twentieth century poet who wrote in Spanish, Machado—like his contemporary Rilke—is intensely introspective and meditative. In this collection, the unparalleled translator Willis Barnstone, returns to the poet with whom he first started his distinguished career, offering a new bilingual edition which provides a sweeping assessment of Machado’s work. In addition, Border of a Dream includes a reminiscence by Nobel Laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez and a foreword by John Dos Passos.

from "Proverbs and Songs"

Absolute faith. We neither are nor will be.
Our whole life is borrowed
We brought nothing. With nothing we leave.
*
You say nothing is created?
Don’t worry. With clay
of the earth make a cup
so your brother can drink.

Born near Seville, Spain, Antonio Machado turned to a career in writing and translating in order to help support his family after the death of his father in 1893. His growing reputation as a poet led to teaching posts in various cities in Spain and, eventually, he returned to finish his degree from the University of Madrid in 1918. He remained in Madrid after the outbreak of civil war, committed to the Republican cause, but the violence finally forced him to flee. He died an exile in France.

Willis Barnstone is one of America’s foremost translator-poets, bringing into English an extraordinary range of work, from Mao Tse-tung to the New Testament.

Genres: Poetry, Spanish Literature, Spain

360 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2003

About the author

Antonio Machado was a Spanish poet and one of the leading figures of the Spanish literary movement known as the Generation of '98, a group of novelists, poets, essayists, and philosophers active in Spain at the time of the Spanish-American War (1898).

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful collection of Poems by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado. I came across this book on the Copper Canyon web site and admit that I had never heard of him. Although he was a generation older than Federico García Lorca, Machado met Rubén Darío and Juan Ramón Jiménez, studied with Henri Bergson and worked with José Ortega y Gasset. He certainly knew the current literary mode. All of this is outlined by Willis Barnstone, who does the translation and noted by the two forwards by John Dos Passos and Juan Ramón Jiménez. Copper Canyon does a magnificent tribute to this poet.

Machado writes beautiful, visual poetry. Not just the images, but the colours, sights and sounds are used with such a deft hand that one is easily transported to the lands of Spain. I truly wished that I had a copy of this book with me when I traversed that countryside. Yet there is a sense of underlining dissonance in how he perceived Spain, which was going through a lot of change during his time. Sometimes he come across as pining for the good old days with a very romantic sensability. Spain had become two places, old and modern and from his perspective, having lived in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it is not always clear which he prefers but sees that things change.

And then there are those times where he writes profoundly like in the "Apuntes, parábolas, proverbios y cantares":

Hombre occidental,
Tu meido al Oriente "¿es meido
a dormir o a despertar?

Or "Poema de un día":

Todo llega y todo pasa.
Nada eterno:
ni gobierno.

Simply brilliant.

Of course, there is such sadness after reading his eulogy to García Lorca ("El crimen fue en Granada"), then knowing that several years later, fleeing Franco's troops, Machado flees over the border to France, where he dies. That was a crime and another sad ending but we have his beautiful words from one of his last known poems:

Y te enviaré me canción:
" Se canta lo que se pierde",
Con un papagayo verde
Que la diga en tu balcón.

[Edita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Will the spellbound world die with you
where memory hangs on
to clean breaths in life,
the white shadow of a first love,

a voice that struck your heart, the hand
you wanted to grab in dreams,
and every love
that fell in the soul down to the bottom sky?

Will your world die with you,
the old life you remade in your way?
Have the anvils and crucibles of your soul
been working for dust and wind?
*

For you the sea rehearses waves and foams,
*

you appear on a pier
where the sea of a dream is breaking,
and under the arching frown
of my vigil, treacherously,
always you!
[…]
guilty of having created you,
now I cannot forget you.

[Jeffrey (Akiva) Savett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Machado is magical. I read this after reading huge volumes by Garcia Lorca, Neruda, and Paz as I make my way through the canon of the great poets writing in Spanish. Next on my list is Vallejo as there is a new Selected coming out next month in English that I'm excited for.

There is an innocence to Machado's poetry that makes him feel different (not necessarily better) than the other poets I'd mentioned. It's as if Machado started a beautiful sentence in the beginning of the 20th century and Lorca ended it 50 years later. The events in between colored the content of both poets, but Lorca is much more wild and associative and raging whereas Machado's poem exude the breezes which blow through the places he can't ever seem to leave---the town squares, fountains, trees and the moonlight.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Bly led me to Machado. This bilingual edition makes for wonderful reading and Spanish comprehension.

[Damien Travel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Last summer, Céline and I traveled for one week in Andalusia. I was looking for a few good books. I could have read « Tales of the Alhambra » written by the American author Washington Irving during his stay in 1829 in the Moorish fortress. The book is said to have revitalized the interest for this iconic monument in Grenada and for the Islamic past of « Al-Andalus ». I could also have re-read « For Whom the Bell Tolls » by Ernest Hemingway, in particular chapter 10 when we were visiting the city of Ronda and were looking down the canyon of the Tajo. Even if most of the novel is set in Madrid’s region and even if Hemingway said that he fabricated the story entirely, the critics agree that the famous scene where Nationalists are thrown from the cliffs by the Republicans is inspired by real events in Ronda, in early 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.
But during our Andalusian week, it is two verses from two poems by French poet Louis Aragon, sung by Jean Ferrat who were constantly in my head and encouraged me to discover the works of Antonio Machado and Federico Garcia Lorca, two giants of Spanish literature, both born in Andalusia and both dead during the Spanish Civil War era.
In « Les Poètes (The Poets) », Aragon writes:
« Je ne sais ce qui me possède
Et me pousse à dire à voix haute
Ni pour la pitié, ni pour l'aide
Ni comme on avouerait ses fautes
Ce qui m'habite et qui m'obsède

Celui qui chante, se torture
Quels cris en moi, quel animal
Je tue ou quelle créature
Au nom du bien au nom du mal ?
Seuls le savent ceux qui se turent
Seuls le savent ceux qui se turent

Machado dort à Collioure
Trois pas suffirent hors d'Espagne
Que le ciel pour lui se fît lourd
Il s'assit dans cette campagne
Et ferma les yeux pour toujours
Et ferma les yeux pour toujours (…) »

I do not know what possesses me
And pushes me to speak aloud
Seeking neither pity nor help
Nor to make a confession
Just for that which dwells within me and haunts me
He who sings tortures himself
What cries within me, what animal
do I kill, or what creature
In the name of good or evil?
The only ones who knew were silent
Machado is sleeping in Collioure
Three footsteps outside Spain
Were enough for the sky to become heavy for him
He sat in this countryside
And closed his eyes forever

In this last verse, Aragon evokes Machado’s exile after the fall of the Republic, which he supported while his brother was in the Nationalist camp. He flew to France with his mother and stopped, exhausted,in Collioure a few kilometers from the Spanish border. He died in his hotel room on February 22, 1939, three days before his mother.
If he died in Collioure, it is in Sevilla that Machado was born in 1875 in the Palace of las Duenas, the superb residence of the Dukes of Alba in the Andalusian capital. We visited this house with its front covered by bougainvillea and its elegant patios. In one corner stands a plaque with the poet’s words remembering his childhood, the Sevillian light, the fountains’ rumor and the odor of the lemon trees. Machado was not a descendant of the Dukes of Alba. His father rented one of the outbuildings to lodge his family.
He was a modest French teacher who taught in Soria, Segovia but also in Baeza, a superb baroque city in Andalusia, away from the classic itineraries. A statue of the poet, sitting on a bench with a book open on his knees is a testimony to his stay in the city, in which he arrived desperate, just after the death of his wife Leonor, victim of tuberculosis.
One of Machado most famous poem is « Se hace camino al andar (The Path is made by walking ») put in music by Joan Manuel Serrat:
« Caminante, son tus huellas Walker, your footprints
el camino, y nada mas ; are the road and nothing else;
caminante, no hay camino, walker, there is no path,
se hace camino al andar. the path is made by walking.
Al andar se hace camino, When you walk, you make a path,
y al volver la vista atras and when you look back
se ve la senda que nunca you see the path that will never
se ha de volver a pisar. Be stepped on again.
Caminante, no hay camino, Walker, there is no path,
sino estelas en la mar (…)» But wakes in the sea (…) »

The second poem by Aragon sung by Ferrat, « Un jour, un jour (One Day, One Day)» recalls Federico Garcia Lorca and his execution in 1936 by a group of Phalangists in a small village outside Granada.

« Tout ce que l'homme fut de grand et de sublime
Sa protestation ses chants et ses héros
Au-dessus de ce corps et contre ses bourreaux
A Grenade aujourd’hui surgit devant le crime

Et cette bouche absente et Lorca qui s'est tu
Emplissant tout à coup l'univers de silence
Contre les violents tourne la violence
Dieu le fracas que fait un poète qu'on tue

Un jour pourtant, un jour viendra couleur d'orange
Un jour de palme, un jour de feuillages au front
Un jour d'épaule nue où les gens s'aimeront
Un jour comme un oiseau sur la plus haute branche (…) »

“All that man was great and sublime
His protest, his songs and his heroes
Above this body and against its executioners
In Granada today arises before the crime

And this absent mouth and Lorca who is silent
Suddenly filling the universe with silence
Against the violent turns violence
God the crash made by a poet who is killed

One day, however, one day will come the color of orange
A palm day, a foliage day on the forehead
A bare shoulder day when people will love each other
A day like a bird on the highest branch ».

Garcia Lorca was born in 1898 in Fuente Vaqueros a few kilometers from Granada. His father was a rich farmer and trader in the sugar industry. At eleven, the family moved to Granada but kept its rural roots.

His knowledge of the countryside in Andalusia, of its sometimes archaic traditions and his acute conscience of the social disparities in the villages have inspired his theater work. I read three plays which he wrote and directed when he led « La Barraca », a student itinerant troupe which had the mission to bring theater to rural Spain: « Blood Wedding (Bodas de Sangre), « Yerma » and « The House of Bernarda Alba (La Casa de Bernarda Alba) ». The three plays illustrate the danger for women to love according to their heart in a setting in which social norms, their good name and « honor » have more value than their feelings and freedom. I read these three works with great pleasure and would very much like to see them played in Spanish or in translation.

Garcia Lorca is also famous, and rightly so, for his poetry. I was for example very surprised to learn that Leonard Cohen’s superb song « Take this Walz » was translated and adapted from his poem « Little Viennese Walz ». The Canadian singer was a big admirer of the Andalusian poet – he called his daughter « Lorca » - and admitted having taken about 150 hours to translate into English « Pequeño vals Vienés ».

Garcia Lorca’s political positions, his homosexuality, made him a symbolic target for the Phalangist groups who were creating havoc in Granada. The details of his arrest and his death remain vague. His remains were never found. But his execution inspired Machado to write one his most famous poems « El crimen fue en Granada (The Crime was in Granada) ».
« The crime
He was seen walking between rifles,
down a long street
and out into the cold countryside,
under a few dawn stars.
They murdered Federico
when the sun rose.
The firing squad
didn’t dare to look him in the face.
They all closed their eyes;
they prayed: not even God saves you!
Federico fell dead,
with blood on his brow and lead in his guts?
... you know the crime was in Granada,
poor Granada!? In his Granada. »

http://www.travelreadings.org/2022/02...

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Machado is Spain’s philosopher-poet of memory, solitude, quiet, darkness, and death, which is understandable since he came of age at the death of the Spanish empire, lived through the crushing death of his wife, witnessed the death of the republic, watched the deaths of his peers and fellow artists in the Spanish Civil War, and finally dying himself right after escaping into France. (The latter event, described in the Introduction, is a stark and somber moment: Machado dies in a bed next to his comatose octogenarian mother, who dies herself three days after the poet. They remain buried in the same tomb in France.) Even when writing love poems, or those searching for some inner truth, the poet is symbolically confined in a cell, in a prison, upon waking from a dream, or even within a mirror:

My eyes in the mirror
are blind eyes looking
at the eyes I see with.

Although written in the simplest language, his poetry is best read slowly and carefully. I spent almost two months reading through this collection, which is the most generous single volume dedicated to a Spanish poet I have yet read (Jiménez’s Three Hundred Poems, 1903-1953 is a close second). The most impressive poem here is also the longest, a multi-part murder ballad titled “The Land of Alvargonzález,” which manages to combine all the themes found throughout the collection. Machado is definitely one of my favorite Spanish poets, along with Miguel Hernández, both of whom express profound ideas in the direct language of the people.

[Peyton · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Guiomar, Guiomar,/see me punished in you:/guilty of having created you, now I cannot forget you."

I didn't really connect with these poems, but the book was well-laid out and provided a good overview of Machado--I actually liked the introductions more than the poetry itself.

[Nicoletta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elegent and yet with simple words it feels so rare to see. Reminded me much of Rilke

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can't really connect to these poems. They just seem dull to me. Maybe it's the translation, but I find nothing special about them. Hills and roads and landscapes. Lorca could take the same things and make them magical. With Machado they're just hills and roads and landscapes.
That's the principle perils of living without a library - people swoon for a poet and you buy his big, expensive book only to find out you don't like it much at all.

[Domhnall · Rating 2 out of 5]

A collection of attractive, often whimsical, generally brief poems with English translations facing the original Spanish text. The book itself is pleasingly produced and I enjoyed it greatly.

I was drawn to Machado by a particular poem which is not after all included in this selection:-

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...

[Mimi Kusch · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVED IT.

[Mills College Library]

861.62 M149b 2004