The poetry thread

[maureen]

i like clare
he's very direct

that was quite nice

[stephen w]

If

If your hand came, dead in the dead of night,
And touched my forehead, waking me to see
You standing dead there in the dead of night,
I who fear ghosts would have no fear at all.
I'd greet you with the tenderest hello
And you would smile, though sad. And then you'd go.

There would be nothing deathly in your death
For your love always was the laughing sort
That quickened life and would not die with death.
And when you'd gone, I would not want to weep --
That loving gaiety would still be there
Filling with its own peace the quickened air.

November 1972

[stephen w]

There, in that high plateau,
where the Duoro River draws back
its crossbow
around Soria, among lead-coloured hills,
and patches of worn-out oaks,
my heart is walking about, daydreaming. . .

Leonor, do you see the river poplars
with their still branches?
You can see the Moncayo, bluish and white; give me
your hand, and we will walk.
Through these fields of my country,
with their embroidery of dusty olives,
I go walking alone,
sad, tired, thoughtful and old.

[micrologus]

Originally Posted by stephen wainman

There, in that high plateau,
where the Duoro River draws back
its crossbow
around Soria, among lead-coloured hills,
and patches of worn-out oaks,
my heart is walking about, daydreaming. . .

Leonor, do you see the river poplars
with their still branches?
You can see the Moncayo, bluish and white; give me
your hand, and we will walk.
Through these fields of my country,
with their embroidery of dusty olives,
I go walking alone,
sad, tired, thoughtful and old.

Beautiful! Who wrote this poem?

[dancer1912]

Originally Posted by micrologus

Beautiful! Who wrote this poem?

I would think he did, if there is no attribute?

[micrologus]

Originally Posted by dancer1912

I would think he did, if there is no attribute?

Yes, I think so too

That's why he doesn't answer

[maureen]

no the river is in portugal

not stephen's country

[stephen w]

Originally Posted by micrologus

Beautiful! Who wrote this poem?

Not me! !

It's by the great Spanish poet Antonio Machado. My book is by Robert Bly, 'Times Alone' (Wesleyan Poetry).

Information on Machado, from

Antonio Machado
LANDS OF CASTILE and Other Poems (Campos de Castillas)
Translated, with an Introduction, by Paul Burns and Salvador Ortiz-Carboneres:


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 three or 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.

From Seville, Machado took the memory of an all-enveloping light. The family moved to Madrid when he was eight, and at twenty-two he took a job teaching French in Soria, some hundred miles north-east of the capital. There he fell in love with the landscape and with his landlady's daughter, Leonor, whom he married two years later, when she was fifteen: 'There I married; there my wife died' of tuberculosis three years later. His sense of the land and his loss marked all his subsequent poetry. The landscape was that of the essential Castile, the symbol of the valid tradition of Spain seized on by the 'Generation of '98' as the building-block for a new future after the 'sunset' of the old Spain of carnival, casinos, and church bells in the loss of the last colonies in 1898. Its beauty, productive of patriotism, fused with its sadness as Leonor's resting-place, gave Machado his distinctive voice intimate, elegaic, at once detached and involved, most characteristically expressed in Campos de Castilla (1917), from which many of the poems here selected are taken.

Machado left Soria immediately after Leonor's death, saved from suicide, as he claimed, by the book's success, which showed him he still had work to do. After some years teaching in Baeza, he moved back to Castile, dividing his life between teaching in Segovia and the literary and theatrical circles of Madrid. His tone became more philosophical, meditating constantly on identity, inventing the philosopher Juan de Mairena and his master Abel Martin to pursue his dialogues on appearances, illusions, personality, mystery, dreams and death.

The language of his poems 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.

It would be fair to add that I have read a lot of criticism of Robert Bly's translations. For me they work very well and some I love very much.

[stephen w]

Better be with the dead,
Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave;
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;
. . .
Come, seeling night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day;
And with thy bloody and invisible hand
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
Which keeps me pale! Light thickens; and the crow
Makes wing to the rooky wood. .

[Herzeleide]

Predictable, but:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that does fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong,
Hark! Now I hear them – Ding-dong, bell.