Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Spanish Edition) Read Free

aqueduct in the center of Segovia, Moorish watchtowers on the coast and the great mosque of Córdoba, a medieval synagogue in Toledo and the whitewashed Jewish ghetto of Sevilla, medieval and renaissance buildings in Salamanca, built on Roman foundations. Not least was the diversity of peoples, languages, and customs of prideful Catalans, Castilians, Andalusians, Galicians, and Basques.
    Popular culture was alive and even preserved by the insignificance of industry and the stagnating economy. (Unfortunately there is a universal inverse relationship of growth between folkloric culture and economic prosperity.) Antonio Machado’s father, Antonio Machado Álvarez, was himself a folklorist, the founder of the Spanish Folklore Society, as well as the first anthologist of the lyrics of flamenco song. Popular culture was also celebrated in the festivals. To this day Spaniards still celebrate the
Semana santa
(Holy Week) of Málaga, with its floats carrying embellished statues of the Virgin and accompanied by the
penitentes,
men parading with crosses in white robes and high conical hats, alongside priests and uniformed
guardias civiles.
This is followed a week later by the celebration of the
Feria de Sevilla,
with its dancing
sevillanas
in the
casetas,
the bulls, and the aristocratic horsewomen riding as elegant, anachronistic dolls inthe morning streets. Everywhere and in full strength was the
canción anónima
(popular song), which, with the exception of a brief period of total Italianization in the early sixteenth century, had nourished even the most
culto
(culturally European) of Spanish poets. Yet eternal popular culture aside, in 1898 the nation as a whole lay impoverished after its civil wars and seemed removed from Europe, ensconced behind the isolating walls of the Pyrenees.
    Of this Spain drifting into the twentieth century, the esteemed novelist Arturo Barea wrote, “Her fertile but mismanaged lands were exhausted; the country was short of bread. And she was plagued by earthquakes, epidemics and flood which seemed to herald the Apocalypse in the eyes of the bewildered masses” 2 . Fifty years of church burning and those exhausting Carlist wars between traditionalists and liberals (
liberal
as a political term was invented in Spain) had preceded the military defeat of 1898. Spain had dissipated prestige and hegemony. It was no longer the dominant power of Europe as when it ruled Austria, parts of Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, most of the two continents of the Americas, even the Philippines.
    Yet just at this low moment of national stagnation, the dynamic beginnings of a new Spain came on the scene. There was an influx of literary and social ideas from abroad and an explosion of Spanish talent that led to rebirth in all the arts. Perhaps a just comparison can be made with the emergence of the great novel in nineteenth-century Russia at a time when the nation was similarly characterized by feudal landowner-ship, abysmal government, and conflicting Russian and Europeanizing cultural currents. In Spain, soon the blossoming would become self-nourishing, leaving the initial ’98 impulse and programs behind.
    Spain became a nation of world composers, painters, musicians, and four Nobel laureates in literature. In music there were the composers Falla, Albéniz, and Granados, all very Spanish as they were European, and Andrés Segovia who made the guitar an essential Spanish and classical instrument, and Pablo Casals who for most of his nine decades made his cello a favor to the world. The twentieth century would bring the painters luán Gris, Joan Miró, Dalí, and Picasso. In Barcelona the eccentric, brilliant Catalan Antonio Gaudi was a secret world figure of architecture in the early 1900s.
    In literature the sense of renovation was messianic. A group of literary men, who identified with the national problems, set out on quixoticmissions to rediscover the soul of Spain. Students, artists, and intellectuals went abroad to