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

bringing her down to earth for a girl to use as a fan or Castanet. Both poets equally esteemed popular Andalusian song and its mischievous joy in paradox. But beyond these possibilities of common sources, national or foreign, there were deeper labyrinths of transfer. Lorca adored Machado’s poetry. He would recite Machado’s short-story-length ballad, “The Land of Alvargonzález” at gatherings, and surely Machado’s revolutionary use of the ballad to capture the Castilian peasant affected the form and violent scene of Lorca’s
Gypsy Ballads.
And we may also recall that in Lorca’s last poetic drama,
The House of Bernalda Alba,
the setting is no longer the gypsy south but, for whatever reason, peasant Castilla, the precincts of Machado’s rebirth.
    But the thread of confidence and art went both ways. The older poet found in the poetry of his fellow Andalusian a colorful surrealism and sensuality. Using elements of the surreal, Machado took his own fantastic dream imagery one step further. Lorcan imagery and intense eroticism glow in Machado’s many love poems to Guiomar. In fact, Lorca’s mark cuts even deeper in the poems to Guiomar than in “The Crime Was in Granada,” Antonio Machado’s later elegy to the assassinated poet, where he consciously uses Lorca’s gypsy images to honor and mourn the death of the fabled poet of Granada.

Almost naked like the children of the sea

    When the Spanish Civil War began on July 18, 1936, Machado was in Madrid. He tried to enlist in the Republican army, but he was too oldand, moreover, not in very good health. Friends, particularly the poet Rafael Alberti, persuaded him to be evacuated to Valencia, and in November 1936 he went together with his mother, his brother José, and José’s wife and children to Rocafort, a small village twenty minutes from the city of Valencia. There he wrote poems about the luxuriant nature, about the orchards and fields, which provoked other scenes of childhood in Andalucía. There he also wrote his “Poesías de la guerra” (“Poems of the War”).
    In April 1938 Machado followed the government from Valencia to Barcelona. Louis MacNeice relates that he saw Machado during those last days in Barcelona, at a time when the Spanish poet was expending all his energy toward trying to save the remnants of the tormented Spanish Republic. He wrote regularly for
Hora de España
and
La Vanguardia
of Barcelona. Ever since the exodus from Madrid, he had suffered from arterial sclerosis and a heart ailment, which now caused a swelling in his feet and compelled him to walk with a cane. Though in frail health, he was chain-smoking and, as MacNeice notes in his
Autumn Journal
(1939), he was scarcely aware that his clothes were covered with ashes fallen from his cigarettes. But his health problems and the gloom of war only made him write more intensively in essays and war journalism. (We do not know how much unpublished poetry was lost.) And he was in close touch with many dear literary friends who had taken refuge in this part of Spain, which had not yet been overrun by the Nationalist troops.

    During the last months in Barcelona, Antonio and a number of his friends used to have weekly reunions in a house outside the city. On a Sunday, January 11, 1939, the explosion of bombs from Italian airplanes constantly interrupted the singing that was going on inside the house. At least thirty bombers were in the sky all day long. Nevertheless, the music continued, Joaquin Xirau 9 recounts, and on Monday, the several professors who were at the university gave their usual lectures at the university. 10

    On January 22, three days ahead of the incoming Franco army, Machado and his family left Barcelona for the border in a government vehicle that carried other writers and scholars. His close friend TomásNavarro Tomás, the Spanish linguist and director of the National Library, had been with him in those days, but Navarro Tomás delayed his flight, finally leaving with