Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Spanish Edition) (30 page)

1

Señor, me cansa la vida,

tengo la garganta ronca

de gritar sobre los mares,

la voz de la mar me asorda.

Señor, me cansa la vida

y el universo me ahoga.

Señor, me dejaste solo,

solo, con el mar a solas.

2

O tú y yo jugando estamos

al escondite, Señor,

o la voz con que te llamo

es tu voz.

3

Por todas partes te busco

sin encontrarte jamás,

y en todas partes te encuentro

sólo por irte a buscar.

1

Lord, life gets me tired,

my throat is sore

from shouting over the seas.

Sea voices deafen me.

Lord, life gets me tired,

the universe drowns me.

Lord, you left me alone,

solitary with the sea.
⁵⁷

2

O you and I are playing

hide-and-seek, Lord,

or the voice I say

to you is your voice.

3

I look for you everywhere

and never find you;

in every place I find you

only to go off and look.

⁵⁷
As one of “Three songs sent to Miguel de Unamumo in 1913,” we have what appears to be a remarkable version of the previous poem, “Lord, what I loved the most,” one of Machado’s most despairing and indignant quatrains. Earlier or later, “Lord, life gets me tired” has Machado’s crushing whimsy and is of equal, ironic power, followed by two more playful poems, which also carry the dilemmas of God’s existence, which Unamuno develops in poem, story, and essay.

1

En San Millán

a misa de alba

tocando están.

Escuchad, señora,

los campaniles del alba,

los faisanes de la aurora.

Mal dice el negro atavío,

negro manto y negra toca,

con el carmín de esa boca.

Nunca se viera

de misa, tan de mañana,

viudita más casadera.

1

In San Millán

bells are tolling

mass at dawn.

Hear, my lady,

steeple bells of dawn:

pheasants of daybreak.

Black dress, black cloak,

and black hood curse

with lipstick on her mouth.

Never seen at dead

dawn mass a young widow

so on fire to be wed.

1

Hay una mano de niño

dispersa en la tarde gris,

o en la tarde gris se borra

una acuarela infantil.

Otoño tiene en el sueño

un iris de abril.

... no sueñes más, cazador

de escopeta y galgo.

Ya quiebra el albor.

2

Y es una mañana

tan coloradita

como una manzana.

3

En el lagar, rojo vivo;

agua en la pera madura,

oro en los chopos del río.

4

¡Mas... ya seca tos,

y las hojas negras

en el ventarrón!

1

A child’s hand is dissolving

into the gray afternoon,

or in gray afternoon

a childhood watercolor fades.

Autumn has an April iris

in its dream...

Stop dreaming, hunter

with shotgun and hound.

Dawn is breaking.

2

A morning

all colored over

like an apple.

3

In the winepress, blazing red.

water on the ripe pear,

gold on the river poplars.

4

But by now a dry cough,

and black leaves

in the gale winds.

Alborada

Como lágrimas de plomo

en mi oído dan,

y en tu sueño, niña, como

copos de nieve serán.

A la hora del rocío

sonando están

las campanitas del alba.

¡Tin tan, tin tan!

¡Quién oyera

las campanitas del alba

sentado a tu cabecera!

¡Tin tan, tin tan!

Las campanitas del alba

sonando están

Soneto

Nunca un amor sin venda ni aventura;

huye del triste amor, de amor pacato

que espera del amor prenda segura

sin locura de amor, ¡el insensato!

Ese que el pecho esquiva al niño ciego,

y blasfema del fuego de la vida,

quiere ceniza que le guarde el fuego

de una brasa pensada y no encendida.

Y ceniza hallará, no de su llama,

cuando descubra el torpe desvarío

que pedía sin flor fruto a la rama.

Con negra llave el aposento frío

de su cuarto abrirá! ¡Oh, desierta cama

y turbio espejo! ¡Y corazón vacío!

El milagro

En Segovia, una tarde, de paseo

por la alameda que el Eresma baña,

para leer mi Biblia

eché mano al estuche de las gafas

en busca de ese andamio de mis ojos,

mi volado balcón de la mirada.

Abrí el estuche, con el gesto firme

y doctoral de quien se dice: Aguarda,

y ahora verás si veo...

Abrí el estuche, pero dentro: nada;

point de lunettes...
¿Huyeron? Juraría

que algo brilló cuando la negra tapa

abrí del diminuto

ataúd de bolsillo, y que volaban,

huyendo de su encierro,

cual mariposa de cristal, mis gafas.

El libro bajo el brazo

la orfandad de mis ojos pasaeba

pensando: hasta las cosas que dejamos

muertas de risa en casa

tienen su doble donde estar debieran,

o es un acto de fe toda mirada.

Dawn Song

Like tears of lead

in my ears they ring,

and in your dream, girl, a bed

of snowflakes falling.

In the hour of dew

the tiny bells of dawn

are tinkling through:

Ding-dong, ding-dong!

Whoever hears

the tiny bells of dawn,

lying on the pillow!

Ding-dong, ding-dong!

The tiny bells of dawn

are tinkling through.

Sonnet

Never a love without blindfold or chance.

Forget sad love, or love gentle and kind,

claiming to be the safest circumstance,

free of madness. Whims of a stupid mind!

Whoever hides his heart from a blind child

and blasphemes the exciting fire of life

wants ashes that will shelter him in a mild

dreamt-up ember unlit and without strife.

And he’ll find ash and nothing of its flame

when he comes on the clumsy ecstasy

he chose: some old fruit rotting on a lame

branch. He will open up, with a black key,

the way to his cold room. O desert cot

and clouded mirror glass! And empty heart!

Miracle

An evening in Segovia I am strolling

along the cobbled street drenched by the Eresma River.

To read a Bible

I slip my hand down to my glasses case

and grope for a platform for my eyes:

a floating balcony of vision.

I open the case firmly

the way a doctor says: Hang on,

now see if you see.

I snap it open. Nothing inside.

Point de lunettes...
No spectacles. I swear

something glittered when I cracked the black

cover of the miniature coffin

in my pocket, but my specs winged through the sky,

springing out of their cloister

like a glass butterfly.

With the book under my arm

yet confined to the orphanage in my eyes,

I whisper: What I left dying

with laughter in my room

has a double hanging out somewhere

or all vision is an act of faith.

⁵⁸
Like the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, Antonio Machado in his last years made up fictitious personages through whom he spoke: mainly Abel Martín and his disciple Juan de Mairena. Machado also has an Apocryphal Songbook, which initially includes twelve poets, and to which he will later add five more. One of these he calls “Antonio Machado,” and cites two poems, “Alborada” (“Dawn Song”) and an untitled sonnet. For each invented poet he has a brief headnote.

Y nunca más la tierra de ceniza

a pisar volveré, que Duero abraza.

¡Oh loma de Santana, ancha y maciza;

placeta del Mirón, desierta plaza!

Con el sol del la tarde en mis balcones

nunco os veré. No me pidáis presencia;

las almas huyen para dar canciones:

alma es distancia y horizonte, ausencia.

Mas quien eschuche el agria melodía

con que divierto el corazón viajero

por estos campos de mi Andalucía,

ya sabe manantial, cauce y reguero

del agua santa de la huerta mía.

¡No todas vais al mar, aguas del Duero!.

And I will never step again on land

of ashes that the Duero hugs with care.

Santana hill of massive rock and sand!

Mirón’s tiny plaza. Deserted square!

Afternoon sun. From my own balcony

never will I see you. Ask for no presence.

Souls flee to render their own melody.

Soul is distance and the horizon absence.

But someone, listening to the caustic notes

with which I entertain my traveler heart

in cante hondo Andalusian meadows,

already knows the source and riverbed

of holy waters in my orchard. Not

all Duero waters reach seas of the dead.
⁵⁹

⁵⁹
Written in Cordoba, 1913, and slightly altered in Segovia, 1924, which is the version used here. In the earlier version, the above “a pisar volveré, que Duero abraza” is “he de volver a ver, que el Duero abraza”; “de la tierra mía” is “de mi Andalucía”,; and “del agua clara de mi huerta umbría” is “del agua santa de la huerta mía.” Passionate, mysterious, and highly crafted, it may be the earliest sonnet Machado wrote and decided to keep. In its nostalgic comparison of geographies, it stands in perfect accord with other poems composed in Baeza. Though he kept and reworked it (unlike many poems and versions of them, which he threw away, especially during his years in Segovia, 1919–31), he did not place it in
New Songs
or in a book contemporary with its content. Rather, he included both “Goodbye” and “Old City” amid the prose of
Apocryphal Songbook,
after his “Twelve Poets Who Might Have Existed” (actually containing fourteen invented poets). These two important sonnets stand among five leftovers at the end of his whimsical songbook.

¿En dónde, sobre piedra aborrascada,

vieja ciudad de pardo caserío

te he visto, y entre montes empinada?

Al fondo de un barranco suena un río.

Vieja ciudad, la luna amoratada

asoma, enorme, en el azul vacío

sobre tu fortaleza torreada.

¡Oh, ruina familiar de un sueño mío!

Mas esos claros chopos de ribera

—¡cual vence una sonrisa un duro ceño!—

me tornan a un jardín de primavera,

goces del sueño, al verdear risueño.

¡Rosa carmín y blanca arrebolera

también salís del fondo de mi sueño!

Old city and its heaps of earth-brown streets,

where, on what precarious and stormy stone

have I seen you? Hanging on mountain peaks?

Deep in a gorge the river waters sound.

The old city? Is it a violet moon

rising enormous in the hollow gleam

of blue over your castle towers and dome?

Oh, the familiar wreckage of my dream!

But those luminous poplars on the shore

—like a wide smile overcoming a frown!—

carry me to a garden in the spring,

hinges of dream, an ecstasy of green.

Carmine rose and white cloudy afternoon,

from caverns of my dream, you also soar!

⁶⁰
Like the previous early sonnet, “Goodbye,” this poem corresponds in theme and time to the Baeza poems of New
Songs
(1912–17), and was probably copied and worked on in 1924 in Segovia. Some scholars date the original poem back to 1907, Machado’s first year in Soria, but this seems most unlikely. The poem has the nondescript title “Soneto.” Following the practice for untitled poems, I’ve used all or part of a first line for the title.