Retrato

My version of the "Retrato" with which Antonio Machado introduces himself in Campos de Castilla (1912, revised 1917.) At this point, trying to translate him is a lunatic venture. This poem rhymes abab, but you'll just have to imagine that part: no way am I trying to do that in English.

Portrait

My childhood is memories of a patio in Seville,

and a bright garden where the lemon tree grows;

my youth, twenty years on the land of Castile;

my history, a few events I don’t care to recall.

I was not a Don Juan or a Casanova

(you know my sartorial attainments!)

but I duly received Cupid’s arrow,

and where I found a welcome, I loved.

There are drops of Jacobin blood in my veins,

but my verse flows from a serene spring;

I’m not a man who lives by a catechism,

but (in the good sense of the word) I am good.

I love what’s beautiful, and in the modern vein

I’ve cut old roses in the garden of Ronsard:

but I don’t love the current stylists’ “product”;

I’m not one who warbles with the new flock of birds.

Not for me, the romances of hollow tenors;

the chorus of crickets who sing to the moon.

I pause to tell voices from echoes,

and among the many voices, I listen to one.

Am I a Classic or a Romantic? I don’t know. I would leave

my verse as a commander leaves his sword:

known for the strong hand that wielded it --

not for the metallurgical lore of its forger.

I talk with the man who always goes with me

(the person who talks to himself hopes someday to talk to God):

my soliloquy is a heart-to-heart with this good friend

who taught me the trick of philanthropy.

And in the end, I owe you nothing. You owe me what I’ve written.

I go to my work. With my money I pay

for the suit that I wear and the house I inhabit,

the bread that feeds me and the bed where I lie.

And when the day of the last voyage arrives,

and the ship that never returns is ready to leave,

you’ll find me already aboard, traveling light;

half naked, like the sons of the sea.

Machado, Roses, Back Pain, and Covid

Another Machado poem, "Tal vez la mano, en sueños…":

in dreams maybe the hand 

of the sower of stars 

sounds the forgotten music 

a note on an immense lyre 

and that humble wave comes to our lips 

in a few truthful words

---

The climbing yellow roses make their serpentine, parasitic way through the laurel, and dangle from the eaves. They're not really roses and the laurel is not really a laurel, I'm told; they both have odd polysyllabic names in clumsily grafted classical tongues. But I'll call them roses and laurel. It's my damn hedge. The roses are gorgeous this year: apparently this ominously dry April suited them.

---

The back? It's no longer giving me pain, if I'm careful. I don't want to be careful, is the thing. And I most particularly want to do what my back least wants me to do: go for long walks. So I'm perpetually peeved.

Nevertheless, my energy returns, and that's welcome. Continual pain, even if it's low-level, easily managed pain, does weird, unwelcome things to my spirit. It shrinks suspiciously from contact: it contracts, and wrinkles. I become a self-absorbed teenager again. Bad enough the first time, when it was age-appropriate. I weigh how much of investment I want to make in learning do-it-yourself physical therapy. My faith in American-trained physical therapists is low enough that I don't even want to bother trying to get insurance to pay for a few random sessions with some random PT. Better to spend that energy actually learning and experimenting.

---

I have a conviction, based on basically nothing, that this week will mark the peak of the second Covid wave in Oregon, and that we really have blundered our way past the halfway mark. The lack of discipline and public spirit so far does not make me optimistic about how we'll fare if a really bad virus comes our way. We are rich children who expect our parents to buy our way out of any trouble we get into. It's not always going to happen that way.

Meanwhile, I personally, continue to bear a charméd life. And this May is quiet, cool, and sweet, whatever the summer will bring.

Lots of love, dear friends.

Anoche cuando dormía...

 Oh well. Sometimes you just have to do something stupid: so here's a shot at "Anoche cuando dormía..." (Antonio Machado, 1903)

Last night as I was sleeping

I dreamed -- blessed illusion! --

that a fountain was flowing in my heart.

Tell me, water, by what hidden channel

do you come to me: spring of new life

that I never drank?

Last night as I was sleeping

I dreamed -- blessed illusion! --

that I had a beehive in my heart,

and golden bees were manufacturing

white wax and sweet honey

out of old grievance.

Last night as I was sleeping

I dreamed -- blessed illusion! --

that a burning sun shone in my heart:

burning because it gave the warmth

of a red hearth; sun because it dazzled, 

and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night as I was sleeping

I dreamed -- blessed illusion! --

it was God that I had in my heart.

There are three obvious things that have to be kept in translating this poem: 1) it needs to be in a popular verse form, something like English ballad measure, with regular meter and rhyme; 2) it needs to be in natural language, with only a few mild poeticisms, and 3) its parallelisms are fundamental and must be preserved.

Okay, so two out of three? It was beyond my powers to render this in any common English rhyme: I had to settle for a rough three-beat rhythm that was a least a little like the Spanish, and no rhyme at all. Yeats could have done it, maybe: but Yeats had his own work to do.

Sundry Remarks

Antonio Machado

I was hungry in the night, and I was wakeful in the early morning; but the moon was just past full and we don’t have the blackout curtains up, so I might have slept through that without noticing, if it had been full dark. Not a ferocious hunger, just a present one. It might have been wise to have eaten a little more when I broke my fast -- say half a bowl of stew -- I don’t think it would have taken much. In any case, I’m feeling quite stable at breakfast. So that’s good. So far I’m impressed by how fast things (meaning hunger, energy, etc.) have normalized. Now that I’ve had my breakfast, I don’t think that -- if you wiped my memory clean -- I’d have any way of knowing I was fasting yesterday.

All this fasting stuff is still experimental, and it’s way too early to plan schedules, but if I were to plan one right now, it would look like this:

1-day fast every other Tuesday (i.e. 4:30 Monday afternoon to 5:30 Wednesday morning), 

except
3-day fast every two months (i.e. 4:30 Monday afternoon to 4:30 Thursday afternoon)
except
5-day fast every six months (i.e. 4:30 Monday afternoon to 4:30 Saturday afternoon)

Yeah but
The thing is
With all this health ruckus settled, you are going to need to figure out what your days are supposed to be made of, Dale
What you are studying
What you are making
And how you know when you’ve done enough for the day
You have found one point of leverage
And that’s the moment you turn to Electoral-Vote.com
You need to turn to the study of the moment instead
There’s probably another point in the evening when you turn to YouTube
But anyway
Here’s a try:
In the morning half an hour, alternating Spanish literature and Canon
In the evening half an hour easy Spanish reading
That’s just an hour a day
And I’m sure you can do it
Even on hectic days
Maybe more on non-hectic days
But give this a shot
Right now it’s Machado’s poetry
And Lucretius
And the easy reading is Spanish’d Narnia
That’s not so hard, is it?
You can totally do this AND enjoy it
Silly boy.

---

Here's a go at translating "Sobre la tierra amarga..." (1903). I take unconscionable liberties with the stanza and the punctuation. Machado has three four line stanzas, but I think it works better in English with two sixes. And I can't bear ellipses in poetry. (What the hell are line breaks for?) But other than that it's a pretty close translation.

Dreaming, on this bitter earth,
has labyrinthine roads,
tortuous paths, parks
in flower and in shade and in silence;
deep crypts, ladders over stars;
altarpieces of hope and memory.

Figurines that walk and smile
(the melancholy toys of age):
kindly images
at the flowered turn of a lane,
and rosy chimaeras making their way
into the distance.