Antonio Machado: Lands of Castile Campos de Castilla and Other Poems

by Ortiz-Carboneres, Salvador; Burns, Paul

• ISBN13: 9780856687426
• ISBN10: 0856687421
• Edition: Bilingual
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-01-01
• Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Summary

Antonio Machado was born in Seville in 1885 and died in southern France early in 1939, escaping from the Nationalist advance in the Spanish Civil War. He is increasingly recognized as one of the four greatest Spanish-language poets of the twentieth century, but lack of adequate translations has limited his appreciation in the English-speaking world. Here a native Spanish and a native English speaker set out to remedy this deficiency. The beauty of his landscape, fused with its sadness as his young wife's resting pace gave Machado his distinctive voice: intimate, elegiac, at once detached and involved, most characteristically expressed in Campos de Castilla (1917), from which many of the poems here selected are taken.The language of his poetry is spare, relying strongly on nouns and adjectives, asserting more than describing, equally anti-baroque and against the 'excesses of modern cosmetics' (Self Portrait). His father had been a collector of folklore, and Machado saw the romance (ballad) tradition as lying at the heart of the authentic Spanish poetic tradition. English cannot recreate the assonance on which he relied, but this translation captures the essential rhythm as well as the poignancy of the original.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
The Traveller	p. 3
I have walked down many roads	p. 5
The square and its orangetrees alight	p. 7
At The Burial Of A Friend	p. 9
I listen to the songs	p. 11
Banks Of The Duero	p. 13
I walk along dreaming	p. 15
Deep Song	p. 17
The clock struck twelve	p. 19
We sit down on the edge of the path one day	p. 19
The corroded mossy hulk	p. 21
The Waterwheel	p. 23
Bad Dreams	p. 25
The clock struck one	p. 25
Gloss	p. 27
Last night, as I slept	p. 29
A rent in the cloud	p. 31
I was summoned from the threshold of a dream	p. 31
One fine day, perfumed with jasmine	p. 33
It no longer matters	p. 33
The house I loved so much	p. 35
It is a gloomy, ashen evening	p. 35
And must it die with you?	p. 37
Spring gently	p. 39
Rebirth	p. 41
Portrait	p. 47
On The Banks of the Duero	p. 49
Around Soria	p. 55
To a Withered Elm	p. 65
To the Master Azorin for his Book Castilla	p. 67
Lord, you have torn from me	p. 69
Up there, on the high plateau	p. 69
I dreamt you were leading me	p. 71
One summer night	p. 71
To Jose Maria Palacio	p. 73
November 1913	p. 75
The saeta	p. 77
The Ephemeral Past	p. 79
The Ephemeral Future	p. 81
Parables	p. 85
For don Francisco Giner de los Rios	p. 87
Proverbs and Songs	p. 93
This Seville light	p. 95
Last Laments of Abel Martin	p. 97
Siesta. In Memory of Abel Martin	p. 101
All love is fantasy	p. 101
The Death of Abel Martin	p. 103
The Death of the Wounded Child	p. 107
The Crime took Place in Granada. To Federico Garcia Lorca	p. 109
Notes	p. 112
Selected Bibliography	p. 119
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