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

thinks Spain, feels Spain, and loves Spain over and above all his other activities, converting it into a completely preferred subject of mental preoccupation, making it into the measure of his art, of his life. 4

    The devotion of those of ’98 to Spain had nothing to do with jingoism or exaggerated patriotism. It was precisely the hollow ring of the chauvinists’ rhetoric that they abhorred and that Azorin decried. It isironie that in the act of strong repudiation, some of their writing today should appear rhetorical and chauvinistic. However, they were set on discovering the “eternal” elements in the Spanish tradition, and this turned them to study Castilla, its grave and hermetic plateaus, the heart of Spain. Unamuno and Machado were the poets most associated with the discovery of Castilla, its isolated cities and depopulated
páramos
(harsh steppes). In their enthusiasm for Castilla, however, the writers of ’98 ignored Galicia and Catalunia (each busy with its own self-discovery in its own language). They even forgot about Andalucía. But the younger poets of the Generation of ’27 expanded the national vision to include Spain’s various distinct regions. There was Alberti’s exquisite minimalist lyrics about Cádiz and its port life; Lorca’s dramatic songs and ballads, including a series of moody poems he even wrote in
gallego,
the Portuguese dialect spoken in Galicia, and Aleixandre’s childhood city of Málaga, which in his pulsing verse is the “shadow of paradise.” Such provincialism with respect to Andalucía is odd, for most of the major Spanish poets of the twentieth-century rebirth are Andalusian—Antonio and Manuel Machado, Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Manuel Altolaguirre, Luis Cernuda, and the two Nobel laureates, Juan Ramón Jiménez and Vicente Aleixandre.
    The instance of Machado and his Andalucía is a curious exception and anomoly. Don Antonio discovers his ballads and common speech first in his acquired homeland, Castilian Soria. There he instills in many poems, including his masterpiece “The Land of Alvargonzález,” what is parallel to what Wordsworth and Coleridge preach and voice in the
Lyrical Ballads
(1798): the common speech of the people in traditional forms free of essayistic meters and the clichés of worn poesy. But then in 1912, by the chance assignment of his next job, Machado is sent to a new Andalucía: the rural Andalusian city of Baeza where he teaches, and Úbeda where he strolls on long afternoons. He tastes the salt of popular songs and he, too, as the ultimate poet of ’98, enlarges his vision to include his newfound lyrical south. The younger Lorca will spend most of his literary life as a genius of the popular (the traditional folkloric) in poems and plays, and will die at thirty-eight. Machado turns thirty-seven when he begins to sing in his own, original Andalusian voice.

Antonio Machado, a meditative poet of remembered landscape, begins his pilgrimage

    Machado is a meditative nature poet who has written poems about landscape in which no speaker seems to exist (a quality he shares with classicalChinese poetry), and who is the metaphysical explorer of dream, landscape, and consciousness below language.
    Antonio Machado y Ruiz began his pilgrimage, from a landscape of memory to the sea of death, in the white city of Sevilla, where he was born on July 26, 1875. In that same year Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague. Astrology and stars aside, there is in these poets a coincidence of some essential qualities. They are the quietest, most introspective, and landscape-oriented writers of modern poetry. Landscape, or the open-eyed dream of it, does all. It is thing and symbol. Semioticians speak with restrained ecstasy about that instant of significant communication when all codes are right, when semiosis takes place. For Machado and Rilke the evocation of significant landscape, usually through dream, is the instant of semiosis—when it all comes