A yellow roughness in the land

Round Soria the land is dry and cold.

Over the hills, the barren ranges,
through green bits of meadow,
up the cindery peaks
the spring advances, leaving its small white daisies
scattered in the fragrant grasses. 

The earth is not reborn: the country dreams...

- from 'The Soria Country' by Antonio Machado, trans. Alan S. Trueblood

In 1909 the Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1875-1939), a leading figure in the Generation of '98, was offered a job teaching French in the old city of Soria in northeastern Spain. There he fell in love with Leonor, the young daughter of the owner of his boarding house (like the unfortunate Lars Hertervig, who I wrote about here earlier this year). They married and spent some time in Paris but she was suffering from tuberculosis and died in 1912. Machado had just published the collection Campos de Castilla featuring poems inspired by the landscape around Soria. He was so devastated by the loss of Leonor that he left Soria and never returned. 

I first encountered Machado via Charles Tomlinson, with Henry Gifford, made a small selection of translations, Castilian Ilexes, in 1963. Their book was named after a poem which compares ilexes to other kinds of tree and describes the regions of Spain in which they grow. A couple of poems in this book particularly appealed to me – ‘To José Maria Palacio’, with its vivid description of springtime, and ‘Novermber 1913’, with its final image of mountains ‘made of stone / of light.’ Castilian Ilexes also introduced me to Machado’s short, aphoristic, haiku-like poems, the ‘Proverbs and Canticles.’

Leonor and Antonio Machado

Henry Gifford's introduction to Castilian Ilexes explains that Machado carried with him to Soria memories of his childhood in Seville, a very different place with its fountains and lemon trees. But 

Soria replaced that vision by the mountains and stony fields, the ilexes and the silent figures in the Castilian solitude. It was Castile that had formed Spain, and here Machado could find a moral dignity born of endurance among the mountains. ... As Yvor Winters has written: 'in an empty place / I met the unmoved landscape face to face.' ... Machado did not go to the landscape like the townsman Rousseau: he sought there 'the countryman's emotion, essentially Georgic, for land that is worked'. ... There is little joy in this landscape, any more than in the Flintcomb-Ash where Tess grubbed swedes, chilled by the rain and buffeted by the wind. Machado like Hardy sees man as 'slighted and enduring': words that apply to the ilexes of Castile and by analogy to the Castilian peasant. 

In Alan S. Trueblood's Selected Poems there are two poems Machado wrote with the same title, 'Along the Duero', both describing walks beside the river that flows past the city. The first recounts the ascent of a hill and moves from a description of the landscape to a meditation on the river of Spanish history. The second begins by describing the humbleness of the river and 'a yellow roughness in the land / like the raw weave of country clothes', then observes the tiny farming plots with shoots of wheat and barley, above them 'rocks and still more rocks' and finally craggy spurs haunted by eagles. This is Castile: a place of woe, a seat of war. The sky begins to darken and Machado hears running water, the Duoro, 'lifestream of Castile, / cutting its way across cold barren plains'. The poem ends with a vision of permanence which is difficult to read now without thinking about the way global heating is affecting the climate of Spain.

Duero, your flowing waters still shall flow
as long as suns of May
melt winter snows and set them loose
through canyons and ravines,
as long as peaks stay capped
in snows and storms
and the sun's bugle flashes
through ashen cloud...