António Machado: Border of a Dream : Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA, 2004. ISBN 1-55659-198-5. 515pp, 9 x 6ins, pb, $17.00).

Willis Barnstone – now over 80 years old, I should think – is in many ways the doyen of American translators of Spanish poetry and this volume is the culmination of over 40 years work on the poetry of Machado, one of the seminal poets of 20th century Spain. The book is by some distance the longest and most thorough version of Machado's verse that we have yet seen in English, and it is therefore to be welcomed with open arms — and all the more so because this translator is a generally reliable guide to the landscape. The introduction, for instance, is the best short guide that I've read on Machado in English and the selection of poems is unimpeachable.

Barnstone's approach to the formal questions presented by Machado's poetry is to go metrical but sometimes to abandon rhyme, except in the case of the later sonnets, where he goes for it, lock, stock and barrel. In general his formal choices are solid, defensible, and the movement of the verse in English goes some way towards approximating the originals. Where he does slip up, however, is in the occasional use of some clunking diction and some very unsure choices in the closing lines of the earlier poetry. Here's a mild example of a poorly-rendered final stanza from the poem 'Dabe el reloj las doce' ( The clock was striking twelve ):

Dormirás muchas horas todavía	You still have many hours
sobre la orilla vieja	here on the old bank
y encontrarás una mañana pura	and on one stainless morning
amarrada tu boca a otra ribera.	You find your boat moored on another shore.

Here the translation loses the meaning of 'sleep' (dormirás = you will sleep), which I think is important to the completion of the poem, introduces the quite awful word 'stainless' for 'pura' (= pure, unsullied) and switches to the present tense in the last line (in echo of the first line) where the Spanish 3rd line uses the future (encontrarás = you will find). It's defensible in fact to use the present to translate some Spanish future tenses, but I don't think it appropriate here.

Similarly, Barnstone distrusts some of the pregnant elisions of Machado's earlier poems, leaving one poem to end with a resounding thud:

Y quimeras rosadas	and roseate chimeras
que hacen camino… lejos…	that wander around. Far.

( Sobre la tierra amarga — Over the bitter land )

I do wonder about the suggested aimlessness of 'wander around' but wish even more that he'd trusted himself to write …far… It's this kind of intervention that sometimes spoils the poems in English. Take 'El sol es un globo de fuego' ( The sun is a globe of fire ), where the last line in Spanish is 'Suena el agua en la fuente de mármol'. 'Suena', from soñar, means to sound or resound, but Barnstone translates this as 'water tinkles on the marble fountain'. Now, 'tinkle' is a word that I had hoped never to see in a poem, and I do object to its terribly twee presence all the more when it purports to translate 'suena'. I'd have much preferred a neutral translation here along the lines of 'the sound of water on the marble fountain'.

The poem after this ( O figures in the courtyard ) ends similarly badly, but I suspect a typesetting error as the culprit here —

Sobre la negra túnica, su mano	Above his black garment
era una rosa blanca	was a white rose.

Now, in this version, 'su mano' (his hand) has disappeared entirely, which would lead the unsuspecting English reader to believe that it was indeed a rose, rather than an image. Also 'túnica' is rendered witrh the neutral word 'garment', when the word 'tunic' is both available, and also more appropriate, given earlier references in the poem to 'old robes' and 'torn capes'.

If there are problems with the English versions in this part of the book, they tend to occur at the close, as if the translator didn't quite trust the originals to make their way unadorned – so in "A Young face one day appears" the last word of the original – 'quimera' (= chimera) is rendered as 'mythical monster', an unfortunate downgrading of the image and an oddity too, in so far as he allows 'chimera' to be used elsewhere in an English version.

Thus far I've only commented on poems from the early Soledades and Del Camino collections, but Machado's fame really rests on Campos de Castilla ( Fields of Castille ). The long quasi-ballad The Land of Alvargonzález fares well here, the translator offering a reliable guide for the non-hispanophone reader, as he does also in the delightful Proverbs and Songs ( Proverbios y Cantares ) – although, in number 15, half a line seems to have been deposited from another poem entirely…. this is presumably a typesetting error.

The late Songs (Canciones and Canciones del alto Duero ) are enigmatic and lapidary works, and are delightfully rendered by Barnstone. Here are two of them:

16
Si vino la primavera	When spring comes
volad a las flores,	soar into flowers,
no chupéis cera.	don't suck wax
23
Canta, canta, canta,	Sing, sing, sing,
junto a su tomate,	the cricket in its cage
el grillo en su jaula.	next to its tomato.

 

The final period of Machado's life was mostly devoted to the composition of sonnets. Strict forms such as these present problems to any translator. Barnstone makes a brave attempt at rhyming his versions, albeit not following the rhyme scheme exactly all the time – this is courage of a high order and is not misplaced: the results are acceptable, though inevitably awkward here and there and not offering too significant a poetic experience in English. This is the problem with formal poetic translation: with no metre or rhyme, these sonnets would be castrated; with metre and rhyme they are merely compromised, because of the choices forced on the translator. Unless you're lucky enough to have a Brodsky a work (who translated John Donne into Russian, rhyme scheme, metre and all) you're not likely to get a viable replication of the original poetic experience. On balance, I'd vote for Barnstone here, as having made the best choice other than a prose crib (which offers help to someone who has the Spanish, but not to the casual reader).

The best of the translations seem to me to be in the War Poems, with Spring a particular stand-out. The original has the following rhyme-scheme: ABAB ABAB CDC DCD, and Barnstone does a good job here:

More powerful than the war—its terror and crime,
when with the giant bustard's torpid flight
the ominous trimotor starts to climb
and over rooftops hovers in bleak fright—

today your cheerful salaam fires the plains,
the poplars guard your bright transparent green
in buds. The melting snow from high terrains
will flood red ice on lands gone drab and mean.

While mountains rumble and the oceans fume,
a siren wails alarm in deadly gloom
and the plane silvers a blue firmament;

untiring goddess, floating through the sphere,
immortal child, the wind stabs in my ear,
sounding your blooming rebec's harsh lament.

 

Machado was a great poet, a writer of luminous verses. We needed a decent version of his work in English and in extenso. Despite some carping on my part, especially with regard to the earlier poems, this book gets nearer to achieving what was needed than any attempt so far. It is well-produced and is particularly good value for money. Readers outside North America will have to order this via online booksellers as Copper Canyon's own website won't accept foreign orders. A book worth having, and also an easy and reasonably-priced way of getting the majority of Machado's poetry in the original, if you don't have access to a Spanish bookstore.

Copyright © Shearsman Books, 2004. All texts quoted are copyright © Willis Barnstone (translations) and the Heirs of António Machado (original texts).