So I carried Machado ‘s Campos de Castilla with a dictionary around in my pocket for months. Even today when I try to dredge up some Spanish, it is Machado’s Castilian that I remember. A language dry, spare and luminous. Its music is austere and plain. Eloquence is avoided at all cost. The homely carefully cadenced words are so stuffed with feeling that they throb. Sound and image are woven together to an extraordinary degree. Some stanzas seem almost more pictures than poems; rereading them I find myself renewing the excitement of my first touch of Spain.

The Spain of Antonio Machado’s time was the Spain of what was known as “the generation of ’98.” Defeat in Cuba and the Philippines had fired a fresh crop of young men with a determination to renovate their country at any cost. Their hopes for education, for social justice, for freedom of speech and thought and action still glowed with the warm light of nineteenth century idealism. While their friends planned miracles in social progress, the poets discovered miracles in the tradition-laden villages, the bare landscapes, the harsh dignity of the peasants and drovers and muledrivers who people the Spanish countryside. The bare wheatlands of Castilla were Machado’s special domain.

Most of the men I got to know and esteem during those early trips to Spain met their ends in the civil war. Their hopes died with them. In Paris, after the collapse of the republic, they told me that Antonio Machado, already ill and broken, had been hustled into an ambulance carrying refugees to the border. He died in exile a month later in the French village of Collioure.

John Dos Passos
Spence’s Point
December 1957

Antonio Machado: A Reminiscence

Even as a child, Antonio Machado sought death, the dead and decay in every recess of his soul and body. He always held within himself as much of death as of life, halves fused together by ingenuous artistry. When I met him early in the morning, I had the impression that he had just arisen from the grave. He smelled from far away of metamorphosis. A pit of worms did not disturb him, he was so familiar with it. I think he felt more repelled by smooth flesh than by bony carrion, and butterflies in the open air seemed to him almost as enchantingly sensual as houseflies or flies of the tomb and train,

inescapable gluttons.

A poet of death, Antonio Machado spent hour after hour meditating upon, perceiving, and preparing for death; I have never known anyone else who so balanced these levels, equal in height or depth, as he did, and who by his living-dying overcame the gap between these existences, paradoxically opposed yet the only ones known to us; existences strongly united even though we others persist in separating, contrasting, and pitting them against each other. All our life is usually given over to fearing death and keeping it away from us, or rather, keeping ourselves away from it. Antonio Machado apprehended it in itself, yielded to it in large measure. Possibly, more than a man who was born, he was a man reborn. One proof of this, perhaps, is the mature philosophy of his youth. And possessing the secret of resurrection, he was reborn each day before those of us who saw him then, by natural poetic miracle, in order to look into his other life, that life of ours which he reserved in part also for himself. At times he passed the night in the city, in a lodginghouse or family boardinghouse. To sleep, after all, is to die, and at night we all lie down for our share of dying. He never cared to be recognized, and so he always walked enshrouded when he journeyed through the outskirts of towns, along passageways, alleys, lanes, and stairways; and at times, he may have been delayed by a stormy sea, the mirrors in a railroad station, or abandoned lighthouses, those standing tombs.

Seen by us, in our half-false light, he was corpulent, a naturally earthy hulk, like a big stump just dug out of the ground; he dressed his oversized body in loose-fitting black, ocher, or brown clothes in keeping with his extravagant manner of living death; a new jacket perhaps, hurriedly bought in the outdoor market, baggy trousers, and a completely frayed all-season overcoat, which was not the proper size; he wore a hat with a sagging threadbare brim, of no particular period, since death-life levels styles and periods. In place of cuff links he wore little larva-like cords on the cuffs of his huge shirt, and at the waist, for a belt, a cord of esparto, as would a hermit of his kind. Buttons? What for? His were the logical practices of a tree trunk with roots already in the cemetery.

When his only love died in Soria de Arriba, she who so well understood his transcendental role as a border dove, he had his idyl on his side of the boundary of death. From then on, he was master of all reason and circumstances; outwardly a widower, he set up his bridegroom house in the grave: a secret dovecot; and then he came to the world of our provinces only for the sake of something urgent: a publisher, the press, the bookseller, a necessary signature...the war, the terrible Spanish war of three centuries.