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.What he saw, by extension, was also the soul of Spain made personal and particular.More important, those outer landscapes of Spain’s soul were also the silent fiery lands of his solitude.He communicated an image of his being with minimum means and minimum loss.Like Frost’s genius of a few monosyllabic sentences to say the land, Machado used few words, with extraordinary subtlety in their plain utterance.There is a huge gallery of possibility in the right placement of words in a line, and in each case he labored until no labor showed and the word was sonorously invisible.To his willing reader he bequeathed with unlimited generosity and modesty an intimate picture of an interior landscape.And Antonio el Bueno remains a lucent world.He inhabits a sky below the earth where the poet, filled with solitary sky, walks alone amid his remembered streets and far mountains.1 The epithet “the good” (el bueno) was born of nastiness as a result of his poem “Portrait,” in which he speaks of himself as “good.” His brother Manuel, writing a parallel autobiographical poem—both poems being written in 1908, at the request of a contemporary Madrid newspaper—speaks ironically of himself as one who lounges in his garden, eating the fruit fallen from the Arabian trees.In times of suspect moralizing, Manuel was dubbed, by mischievous comparison, “Manuel the bad” (Manuel el malo), le poète maudit (the damned poet).His later active siding with the Franco revolt and regime confirmed the negative title to many minds, but Antonio’s cognomen stayed mythically with the schoolteacher poet throughout his life.Machado’s kindness, ethical courage, and dusty suit were legendary.2 Barea, Arturo, Lorca: The Poet and His People, trans.Usa Barea, New York: Grove Press, 1951, p.9.3 Azorín, Clásicos y modernos, Madrid: Archivos, 1919, pp.235–236.4 Salinas, Pedro, “Spanish Literature,” Columbia Directory of Modern European Literature, ed.Horatio Smith, New York: Columbia University Press, 1947, p.770.5 Machado began as a young Spanish poet in part influenced by a movement misleadingly called modernismo, which, despite protests from some Spanish critics, has not only nothing to do with the European and American modernism of Eliot, Borges, Beckett, and Lorca but represents very much what modernism was thoroughly rejecting: fin de siècle aestheticism.Yet Machado takes the best of modernismo, that concise, gnomic lyricism he shares with Juan Ramón Jiménez, which is found in many lyrics in Solitudes, Galleries, and Other Poems (1899–1907), in his sonnets, and in his late brief lyrics.Indeed, elements of modernismo persist after the more declamatory aspect of the ’98 poet has entirely disappeared.The sonnets are their own world, and especially those of the civil war, which speak with astonishing beauty, love, and tragedy.6 Translated by Willis Barnstone.7 Machado, Antonio, Obras: Poesía y prosa, ed.Aurora de Albornoz and Guillermo de Torre, Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1964, p.711.8 Ibid., p.317.9 A close literary friend of Machado who helped him very much during his lastjourney.10 Pradal-Rodríguez, Gabriel, Antonio Machado, New York: Hispanic Institute, 1951, p.12.11 This episode was related to me by the philosopher Professor Juan Roura-Parella in fall 1958 in Middletown, Connecticut, where we were both teaching at Wesleyan University.Roura-Parella examined this brief text in its written form for accuracy.The event took place at Cervià de Ter, near Figueras, in the patio of a hacienda.12 This story is confirmed by the Spanish writer and close friend of Machado, Corpus Barga.In his memoir—which appeared in Los últimos días de Don Antonio Machado, La Estafeda Literaria, Madrid, May 7, 1966, num.349—Corpus Barga himself, rather than Navarro Tomás, tells the French customsofficer that with him is the poet Antonio Machado.Recalling that Navarro Tomás read over his narration to me, which I typed up for him to see, I preferto think that even this minor detail did not stray.I interviewed Tomás Navarro Tomás twice: at Middlebury College in 1947, and at Columbia University in August 1956, where I wrote down his dictation.Having said this, Barga was theangel of these days for Machado in caring for him and helping him to survive.In another version, parts of which are denied by Corpus Barga, another closefriend, Pepe y J.Xirau, describes in detail that there was an infernal walk ofsome six hundred meters to the frontier.The poet was drenched with rain andsnow.Machado passed to the frontier, two Senegalese soldiers in red fezzes lifted the iron chain, and Machado fainted, needing to be held up for the remaining walk to the French compound.13 Barga, Corpus, Crónicas literarias, Edición de Arturo Ramoneda Salas, Madrid: Ediciones Júcar, 1985, p.155.14 Pradal-Rodríguez, Antonio Machado, p.15.15 Barga, Corpus, Crónicas literarias, p.40.16 Machado, José, Ultimas soledades del poeta Antonio Machado {recuerdos de su hermano José), Madrid: Forma Ediciones, 1977, p.159.In 1962, in Madrid, the Spanish poet José Bergamín told me this story: One evening during the civil war, Manuel Azaña, president of Spain, had a party in the parliament attended by the leading political figures.Bergamín and Machado were also there.Azaña spent most of the evening chatting with the two poets.When the poets left, on the way down the stairs, Don Antonio said to Bergamín, “Pobre de Azaña que tiene que ser presidente de la república, cuando mi sueño siempre era de ser portero del palacio”: Poor Azaña who has to be president of the republic, when my dream was always to be doorkeeper of the palace.17 The third fragment on Machado’s page is a revision from an earlier published poem to Guiomar.See Jacques Issorel, Collioure 1939, Les dernier jours d’Antonio Machado (Perpignan 1982: p.96).18 Machado, Antonio, Obras: Poesía y prosa, p.16.Note on the PoemsMany of the latter poems of Antonio Machado are interwoven among his prose writings, often attributed to his heterónimas, Abel Martin and Juan de Mairena.When he is anthologized, sometimes the prose context is included.Readers are most often confused by the delightful and whimsical settings, unable to locate the poem.In the normal Spanish editions of Complete Poems, the poems found among his prose works are omitted altogether and one must find them in the Juan de Mairena, Abel Martin, and The Complementaries volumes.Here, the poems alone, not their prose frame, are given, and their place in the prose writings is always cited; the poems of his personae are indicated in the subtitle.When a poem does not have a title, I have used the first line to identify the poem [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]