Description:
Recently, looking for a new challenge, I made a return to the poetry of Antonio Machado. Since the late 1950s Antonio Machado has retained an exalted position among ‘my’ poets. For me, as well as for almost everyone in Hispanic studies, Machado awakens an empathy difficult to define or explain. He is the ‘good gray poet’ in the old park in his clear afternoon, observing the flow of the fountain. He is the wayfarer on his road, sadly watching the light fade away at sunset. He is the poet (following Manrique) of the flowing river, of course the river of time. He is a man who dared to call himself ‘good,’ who early in this century discovered the pueblo, the people, the last ideal of our civilization.

He begins as a poet of ‘solitudes,’ of the loneliness and alienation of our time, but he goes on to look outward and create a Castilian countryside centered in Soria, first real, then even more real in ‘dream,’ in memory. Then, in the pervading irony of our time, the poet becomes metaphysician; philosophy is embroiled with poetry. And in some magnificent poems (strangely mixed among his prose) this Antonio Machado who has no hope somehow gives us hope, or if not hope, courage. After I visited his haunts in Seville and Soria in preparing the Twayne volume devoted to him, Antonio Machado has continued to remain one of ‘my’ poets.
- FROM PREFACE

Anthology of the Poetry of Antonio Machado. A bilingual edition in which the translator has achieved exceptionaly lyric qualities in his excellent translation.


CONTENTS:

Dedicatory Sonnets......v

Preface......1

The Poet Looks Inward: Solitudes, Galleries and Other Poems......8

The Poet Looks Outward: Castilian Countryside......86

The Poet as Metaphyusician......156

Poems from the Civil War......242