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New Series No. 18 - 2001

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Antonio Machado

Portrait

My childhood is memories of a courtyard in Seville
and a sunlit garden with ripening lemons;
my youth, twenty years in the lands of Castile;
my story, some events I would rather not tell.
   In my dealings with women I’ve been no Don Juan
(I could never be bothered to dress for the part),
but I received the dart allotted me by Cupid
and have enjoyed all the comforts women bring.
   Through my veins flow drops of rebel blood,
but my verse rises from a calm, clear spring;
and, more than the learned, fashionable pious,
I am, in the true meaning of the word, good.
   I adore beauty, and in the modern fashion
I plucked the old roses from Ronsard’s garden;
but I hate the excesses of modern cosmetics,
and I refuse to trill to the latest tune.
   I disdain the ballads of hollow tenors
and the chorus of crickets singing to the moon.
I pause to distinguish voices from echoes
and among all the voices listen to but one.
   Am I classical or romantic? Who knows? I wish
to bequeath my verse, as a captain leaves his sword,
famous for the virile hand that brandished it,
not valued for the forger’s precious art.
   I talk to the man who always walks with me –
solitaries hope to talk to God one day.
My soliloquies are chats with this good friend
who taught me the secret of loving humankind.
   In the end, I owe you nothing; you owe me all I’ve written.
I bend to my work, and with my earnings I pay
for the clothes that cover me and the house I inhabit,
for the bread I live on and the bed in which I lie.
   And when the day for the last journey comes,
and the ship of no return is ready to set sail,
you will find me on board, travelling light,
practically naked, like the children of the sea.

Antonio Machado, born in Seville in 1885, died in southern France in 1939, escaping from the Nationalist advance in the Spanish Civil War. He is increasingly recognized as one of the three or four greatest Spanish-language poets of the twentieth century. Machado’s family moved to Madrid when he was eight, and at twenty-two he took a job teaching French in Soria, some hundred miles north-east of the capital. There he fell in love with the landscape and with his landlady’s daughter, Leonor, whom he married two years later, when she was fifteen. She died of tuberculosis three years later, and his sense of the land and his loss marked all his subsequent poetry and gave Machado his distinctive voice – intimate, elegaic, at once detached and involved, most characteristically expressed in Campos de Castilla (1917), from which many of the poems here are taken. In later years his tone became more philosophical, meditating constantly on identity, and he invented the philosopher Juan de Mairena and his master Abel Martin in order to pursue his dialogues on appearances, illusions,
personality, mystery, dreams and death.
Paul Burns is a publisher, an Oxford modern language scholar, and a lifelong part-time translator.
Salvador Ortiz Carboneres is Senior Spanish Language Tutor at the University of Warwick.
These translations are from a group which received a commendation from the judges of the BCLA/BCLT Competition in 2000. The translators’ bilingual edition, Antonio Machado: The Lands of Castile and Other Poems is forthcoming in 2001 from Aris and Phillips.

Translated by Paul Burns Salvador Ortiz Carboneres

page(s) 83-84