El Nica and Don Antonio: Translations from the Spanish of Ruben Dario and Antonio Machado

By Edward Loomis

The book gathers the work of two eminent writers with a view to making a window on Spain and Latin America as they were at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. These were two very different writers; but they knew and admired each other's writing. The Nicaraguan was a little older (born in 1967, while A.M. was born in 1875), and since he got an early start as a writer, his work was available to Machado. They belong together partly because they are so very different--together they give an idea of what was happening in the literary and intellectual worlds of Spain and Latin America. Included here are "Colloquy of the Centaurs" and "Epistle", two long poems by Daro; and "The Land of Alvargonzalez", by Machado, perhaps his best known work, and his longest in the poetic form.

The translations are from Spanish into English free verse, which is rather nicely adapted to this purpose, being noticeably not prose, yet not heavily burdened with prosodic enterprises.

The attempt is to offer some good things by these authors, thus encouraging readers to take up the originals, which are very nice, very nice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 16, 2000
• ISBN: 9781462832170

Edward Loomis

"FRANK GOAD is a retired beach volleyball player, an artist manqué, a barely published writer, a marginal but occasionally successful progenitor of performance art, a very early and accidental dj, a runner-turned-jogger-turned-walker, and an occasional lightweight lifter. He lives in rented digs in Santa Barbara with his diffficult girlfriend and her lazy, sullen, lordly son, and gleans a living by making graphic designs on his computer. His pets have died." "EDWARD LOOMIS is a writer and audio artist, and a collaborator on the Goadian audio projects. His best known work is THE CHARCOAL HORSE, a novel, "A Kansas Girl," a story, and ADVICE TO THE LOVELORN, an audio tape. In recent years he has been working on a non-fiction book on Spain, and translating the poems of Rubén Darío and the brothers Machado."

Book preview

EL NICA AND

DON

ANTONIO

Translations from the Spanish of

Ruben Dario and Antonio

Machado

Edward Loomis

Copyright © 2000 by Edward Loomis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

RUBEN DARIO

CAUPOLICAN

VENUS

LECONTE DE LISLE

WALT WHITMAN

THISTLE 15

RIMA 2

RIMA 3

RIMA 5

RIMA 6

RIMA 12

RIMA 44

THE LYRIC YEAR PRIMAVERAL

SUMMERTIME

AUTUMNAL

WINTERTIME

ON THE SUBJECT OF WINTER

CATULLE MENDES

J.J.PALMA

SALVADOR DIAZ MIRON

IT WAS A MILD AIR

SONATINA

OF THE FIELD

THE PHEASANT

GARGONNIERE (BACHELOR’S FLAT)

MARGARITA

ITE, MISSA EST

COLLOQUY OF THE CENTAURS

ARCHEOLOGICAL RECREATIONS

ARCHAEOLOGICAL RECREATIONS II

THE INTERIOR KINGDOM

THINGS OF EL CID

SYMPHONY IN GREY MAJOR

I PURSUE A FORM

TREFOIL

EPISTLE

ANTONIO MACHADO

INTRODUCTION

TO THE AUTO DA FE CELEBRATED IN GRANADA 1585

XIV DEEP SONG

XVII HORIZON

XX

XXI

XXIII

XXXVI

XXXIX (ELEGIAC VERSES)

XLII

XLIV

XLV

XLVIII THE FLIES

LII (FANTASY OF AN APRIL NIGHT)

LV (BOREDOM)

LX

LXXI

LXXV

LXXVII

LXXIX

LXXXI (TO AN OLD AND DISTINGUISHED GENTLEMAN)

XCIII

XCVI (WINTER SUN)

XCVII (PORTRAIT)

XCVIII (AT THE BANKS OF THE DUERO)

C THE ORPHANAGE

CVI (A LOCO)

CVII ICONOGRAPHIC FANTASY

CVIII (A CRIMINAL)

CIX (DAWN IN AUTUMN)

CXII EASTER

CXIII SORIA COUNTRY

PC-CXIV THE LAND OF ALVARGONZALEZ

CXXIII ONE SUMMER NIGHT

CXXV IN THIS LAND OF MINE,

CXXVIII POEM OF A DAY

CXXIX (NOVEMBER, 1913)

CXXXIII (TEARS FOR THE VIRTUES AND VERSES FOR THE DEATH OF DON GUIDO)

CXXXVII- PARABLES

CXLVI FLOWER OF SAINTHOOD.— MILLENARIAN NOVEL,

CXLVII (TO THE MASTER, RUBEN DARÍO)

CXLVIII

(AT THE DEATH OF RUBEN DARIO)

CL MY POETS

CLI (TO DON MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO)

CLIII (OLIVE TREE OF THE ROAD)

CLIV (APUNTES)

CLVII (157) THE MOON, THE SHADOW AND THE BUFFOON

CLXII (III LOVE AND THE MOUNTAIN

IV PÍO BAROJA

AZORÍN

VI RAMON PEREZ DE AYALA

VIII TO DON RAMÓN DEL VALLE-INCLAN

CLXV (SONNETS)

CLXXII MEMORIES OF DREAMING,FEVER, AND DOZING

Dedication: to Mary O’Connor

INTRODUCTION

I begin with Rubén Darío, born in Nicaragua in 1867 and died there in 1916. He was a literary prodigy, capable of interesting work from the time he was fourteen or fifteen years old, and that talent did not desert him as he carried on a very intense career featuring much travel in Latin America and Europe, and a lifelong struggle with alcoholism. He was on his own in the literary world when he was just emerging from childhood, and he maintained himself in that world to the end; he died famous but not rich, after many wonderful literary successes. He was political, favoring

a union of the Latin states of South America as a counterweight to the United States, and from a Liberal perspective, he was very much on the side of the angels—but he did not pay much attention to political parties. He applied himself directly to the conscience of his readers. That was his theater. His work shows various kinds of novelty, especially in its directness, but it is a traditional art he practises.

He was a Rationalist, and a Classicist—the ancient world gave him a rhetoric of symbols that he was happy with; he did not make a mystery—his glamorous verses have a gritty truthfulness, gleaming under their prosodic armor; and he was a poet, a singer, though his music—as he admitted a few times—was often a matter of the thought just as much as of the sound. I will now reproduce his Threshhold Words (Palabras liminares) from Prosas Profanas—it is a man in his late twenties who addresses us:

"THRESHHOLD WORDS

After Azul. . ., after The rare ones, insinuating voices, intentions good and bad, loud enthusiasm and subterranean envy—the whole pretty harvest—solicit that which, in conscience, I have not believed fruitful or opportune: a manifesto.

Not fruitful or opportune:

a) Because of the absolute lack of mental elevation in the thinking majority of our continent, in which rules the universal person-age classified by Remy de Gourmont under the name of That one who does not understand. That one who does not understand is among us professor, academic correspondent of the Royal Spanish Academy, journalist, lawyer, parvenu poet.

b) Because the collective work of the new men of America is still

vain, most of the better talents being in the limbo of a complete ignorance of the very Art to which they dedicate themselves.

c) Because proclaiming—as I am proclaiming—an oppositional

esthetic, the imposition of a model or of a code, would imply a contradiction.

I don’t hold my literature—as a magisterial authority has done—to mark the course for others: my literature is mine in me; whoever follows slavishly in my footsteps will lose his personal treasure and, page or slave, will not be able to conceal the seal or the livery. Wagner one day said to his disciple Augusta Holmes: first of all, don’t imitate anybody, and above all—me. Great saying.

*

I have spoken, in the rosy Mass of my youth my antiphons, my sequences, my profane proses.—Time, and fatiguues of soul and heart, have caused me, like a good author monk, to make my capital letters worthy of each page of the breviary. (Through the divine fires of the storied windows, I laugh at the wind that blows outside, the evil that passes). Ring, bells of gold, bells of silver, ring every day calling me to the fiesta in which glitter the eyes of fire, and the roses bleed from the lips unique delicacies. My organ is an old-fashioned clavichord, to the sound of which happy grandfathers dance their gavottes; and the perfume of your bosom is my perfume, eternal censer of the flesh, immortal Varona, flower of my rib.

I’m a man.

*

Is there in my blood some drop of the blood of Africa, or of the Indian chocolate or dark? It could be, in spite of my hands of a Marquis: but here you will see in my verses princesses, kings, imperial things, visions of countries distant or impossible: what do you want?, I detest the time and the life in which it was my fate to be born; and I cannot greet the President of a Republic in the idiom in which I would sing to you, oh Halagabal! whose court—gold, silk, marble—I remember in dreams …

(If there is a poetry in our America, it is in old things, in Palenque and Utatlán, in the legendary Indian, and the Inca delicate and sensual, and in the great Moctezuma of the golden throne. The rest is yours, democratic Walt Whitman.)

Buenos Aires: Cosmopolis.

And tomorrow!

*

The Spanish grandfather with a white beard indicates for me a series of illustrious portraits: This, he says to me, is the great don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, genius and cripple; this is Lope de Vega, this Garcilaso, this Quintana. I ask him for the noble Gracián, for Saint Theresa, for the fierce Góngora and the strongest of all, don Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas. Afterwards I exclaim: Shakespeare! Dante! Hugo!…(and in my interior: Verlaine … !)

Then, at departing: Grandfather, it’s important to say this: my wife is of my country; my mistress, of Paris.

*

And the metrical question? And the rhythm?

As every word has a soul, there is in every verse, beyond the verbal harmony, an ideal melody. Often the music is only of the idea.

*

The uproar of three hundred geese will not prevent you, O sylvan one, from playing your enchanting flute, as long as your friend the nightingale is content with your melody. When he’s not there to listen to you, close your eyes and play for the inhabitants of your inner kingdom. O people of naked nymphs, of rosy queens, of amorous goddesses!

May a rose fall at your feet, another rose, another. And kisses!*

*

And the first law, creator: to create. The eunuch swells with indignation; when a muse gives you a son, may the other eight be pregnant. "

When Darío came to Europe as a young man, he came as one already well known, and he was the apostle of change. The literary movement called El Modernismo is to some extent his doing (though it is understood that many people, and many ideas were active in that literary movement), and the movement fed into the passionate times some interesting models and some fresh ideas—this is how the brothers Machado must have known him—a writer from America who had something to say to them as they confronted a new century and a new national destiny.

In himself, he was a realist always. A peculiar charm of this writer is that even in moments of high literary ambition he remained a realist. I suppose life trained him in this; he was on his own from about the age of fifteen, and stayed coherent in the literary world until the end. He was rational; he makes sense, even when his fancy is prospering well out of the way of established tracks and stations. And he was something of a classicist. It was a role he was ready to play on many occasions: for him, the ancient world had a charm that fit the meaning like a glove. His version of the classical belief-system is appetizing—it gives this poet some useful symbols, and some refreshing conventions. But he is a poet of his metaphor and his game; he is always on; he is a poet, that is what he does, with a nature allowing us to think of him as a good man and a good heart. He is always ready to surprise, and that in general is what he does—he has startling things to say. He is intelligent and worldly, and he can really write. This was what