From Don Paterson’s The Eyes page 9 (The pink highlight, my regular defacement of books, couldn’t be removed.)
Given that the second post of my short sequence on Khursheed’s exploration of the universe within, included a reference to William James’s sense that, in terms of deep reality, even when what we are thinking is true, we can never know for sure that this is so, it seemed appropriate to republish this sequence whose final post comes back to this same issue.
Following on from the previous overview of his life and of issues such as politics and accessibility impacting on Machado’s poetry, there are others at work as well, aspects of Modernism for instance.
There are four main texts referred to in what follows: Alan S Trueblood Antonio Machado: selected Poems, Don Paterson The Eyes, Xon de Ros The Poetry of Antonio Machado: changing the landscape, and Gerald Brenan The Literature of the Spanish People. I have tried to make sure the source of any quotations is clear.
Aphorisms & Obscurity
Xon de Ros points towards the Poem that Paterson has translated. She concludes that (page 214) ‘Overall, the image suggests an interest in form and shape rather than content, a modernist privileging of aesthetic experience over didactic import.’ His use of aphorisms, a long tradition in Spain, that cancel each other out takes potential confusion further, as Xon de Ros quotes Stern to explain (page 222):
. . . the modern aphorism which has been defined as ‘a genre which more than any other aims at preserving in literary expression the discrete and contradictory nature of lived experience.’ (Stern: 1959)
Aphorisms (page 209) ‘also move in ways which problematize any notion of a single truth.’
And last of all we can’t avoid the impact of Cubism (page 223):
Whiston explains cubicación as the systematic scrutiny of received ideas from multiple perspectives in order to extricate ‘the living reality behind the expression.’ (‘The Cubing of Language in Antonio Machado’s Juan de Mareina: 1989 – page 151)
I am still struggling with how far it is legitimate for poetry, or art in general, to capitulate to the chaos of our current complexities so completely that a poem is completely obscure. I have elsewhere referred to this as brick-wall poetry and the conduct of a ‘quisling.’
My own sense so far, from my reading of Machado, is that he does not usually go that far. There is almost always a trace of music or a haunting image for me to hold onto amidst the fog. Perhaps that’s why Xon de Ros’s comment is more praise than criticism for me. She writes (page 246): ‘it is undeniable though that Machado’s poetry has a certain anachronistic feel to it. . . [He’s] a modern poet, as it were, by default.’
Faith, Transience & Memory
Also Machado’s reaction to the world he paints is one to which I strongly resonate, as Trueblood indicates (page 35) when he writes ‘. . . in Machado the poem is less a profession of faith than a doubting with faith.’ He’s following in John Donne’s footsteps here whose injunction to ‘doubt wisely’ I’ve referred to elsewhere. There’ll be more on that later I suspect.
An additional factor, that Xon de Ros picks up on, is the shifting nature of poetic language, something of which Machado was all too aware (page 3): ‘beneath the existential reflection on human transience, there is a preoccupation with the mutability of the poetic word.’
A particularly intriguing issue is the impact of memory on the making of a poem. Trueblood expands on the point (page 20):
Memory for him is less a well than a reservoir, constantly renewed by inflowing and outflowing waters. . . . . [H]owever deliberate the process of recall, time will have been at work on what is recalled. We are thus brought back to the characteristic Machadian emphasis on the transforming action of memory.
My diaries help me grasp this point only too well, as on innumerable occasions I have checked my memory of an incident against my diaries and found my memory significantly at fault. There is no reason why poets should be an exception. Maybe Wordsworth’s dictum, that the core of poetry is ‘emotion recollected in tranquility,’ is no guarantee of accuracy.
It may not even be the memory of the poet alone that works on a poem, as Xon de Ros indicates in Machado’s concept of palimpsest (page 178):
. . . stating that every poem is in a way a palimpsest raises the question of the ontological status of poems, and suggests the view of poetry as a collaborative art…, which involves a ‘comunión cordial’ with the reader.
Landscape & Inscape
Landscape is of immense importance to Machado, and, in a way that matches my own desire to find hints in the outside world to help me decode my inscape. Many of his poems, according to Trueblood (page 42), show ‘with particular clarity that the shifts from outer scene to inner landscape and back again are never absolute breaks in Machado.’ This is reminiscent of what I learned about Munch as well. Ulrich Bischoff in the Taschen book on Munch explains (page 38) that in his painting The Storm, ‘Munch has transfigured the seen world into a landscape of the soul,’ and (page 80) ‘for Munch, landscape always had to convey a message of human import: his visual idiom transformed the reproduction of landscape scenes into landscape of the soul.’ And finally, (page 82) ‘The details of Munch’s landscapes – trees, snow-covered hills, beaches or waves – were also symbols expressing a personal language of the soul.’
Egotism
Many people raise the question of whether art and life are so much at odds that only a self-absorbed narcissist can be an effective artist. For me the jury is still out on that one, even though I have concluded that some great artists are certainly not narcissists. Opinion seems divided about Machado, at least among the critics I have read so far. While Paterson expresses the clear opinion that Machado is not an egotist in his verse at least, when he asserts that (page 55) ‘I can think of no writer so obsessed with the suppression of his own ego . . .’ Xon de Ros seems not so sure (page 202): ‘While Machado’s early poetry shows a degree of ambivalence towards self assertion… the poet’s self-consciousness becomes more apparent in his second collection…’ This caveat has to be balanced against her depiction of the purpose of his poetry (page 207), ‘[The] notion of a depersonalized lyric becomes increasingly linked to an ideal of poetry as the expression of a communal experience beyond the poet’s subjectivism,’ and furthermore the relevance of T.S.Eliot’s tenet that ‘the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continuous extinction of personality’ and his doctrine of poetry as ‘an escape from personality’ and not just ‘the expression of personality.’
His Value as a Poet
In the end, perhaps the clearest summary of Machado’s value as a poet comes towards the end of Xon de Ros’s book (page 245):
. . . while Machado has been a constant presence in Spanish poetry since 1940s, his aesthetics came to the fore in the so-called ‘poetry of experience’ which since the 1980s has become the dominant trend in Spain’s poetic panorama. For the poets of experience the rapport with the reader is a central concern. Rejecting avant-garde poetics and intellectualism, this poetry seeks a rehumanization, focusing on the lived experience and everyday language, while also exploring alternative subject positions and adopting techniques of defamiliarization such as parataxis, dramatic monologue, poetic masks, irony, and metaphysical meditation, to establish a relation with the reader which is close to the ‘comunión cordial’ advocated by Machado.
She earlier attributes part of his recent acclaim to Bloom’s flagging up Trueblood’s translations (page 182):
[Trueblood’s] is the translation recommended by Harold Bloom in ‘The Western Canon,’ where Machado, at least according to Bloom, finally joins the ranks of the modern Immortals.
Interestingly, in my 1994 copy of The Western Canon there is not a single reference to Machado anywhere. Xon de Ros is referring to the 1995 edition, suggesting a rapid change of mind. I felt I had to check this out on the web and did in the end track down a list of Western authors generated by Bloom and published in the Appendix of his Adelaide edition, which includes Machado on the basis of the Selected Poems (see link).
I also do like Gerald Brenan’s verdict (page 435):
He wrote a strong, bare, sonorous verse which has some of the qualities of the best sixteenth-century prose and which is always alive because it is saturated in every part by its rhythm. It has less artifice than that of Yeats and not a trace of mannerism, and when it leaves the ground it takes off with a great spread of wings like, for example, Yeats’ two poems on Byzantium.
Next time more quotes from Machado as we look more closely at the themes that resonate for me. For now there is another poem below that resonates with me. As before the Spanish comes first and Trueblood’s English translation next, both from Alan S Trueblood’s book: my personal rendering will be republished after the sequence is over. Loss is the theme again.
Everybody Means Something 
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