Border of a Dream : Selected Poems of Antonio Machado

Rating:
Summary: Delving Deeper into the Dream Below the Sun
Review: Antonio Machado is one of the world's greatest poets. This new addition to the slowly growing opus of Machado in English is the largest yet published, and the closest to a "Collected Poems" that we are likely to have for some time to come. (Might Mr. Barnstone be persuaded to put together a Collected Poems of Antonio Machado?) I believe there are certain felicitous pairings of poets and translators, and that the pairing of Willis Barnstone with Machado is just such a case. Mr. Barnstone's earlier volume, The Dream Below The Sun, (The Crossing Press,1981), was my first introduction to Machado's "spare, luminous, profound" poems, and so his translations have been imprinted upon my psyche as "Machado in English." I have read other translations of Machado's work, but none have yet surpassed Mr. Barnstone's.
This selection of Machado's work incorporates the 150 poems from The Dream Below The Sun, the sonnets included in Six Masters of The Spanish Sonnet, an expanded version of the evocative, highly readable and informative essay from that volume as an introduction, and about eighty-five new poems. The crowning addition here is Mr. Barnstone's inclusion of the long ballad "The Land of Alvargonzález," the longest single sustained poem that Machado wrote, presented here for the second time in English (the first translation was published in 1982 in the U.K. by Dennis Doyle). Though Mr. Barnstone rhymes in many of the translations (no mean feat, as I know from personal experience), or uses assonance to help capture the musical quality so integral to Machado's work, in this longer piece he has chosen a kind of blank ballad verse that reads with the fluency, directness and starkness of the original. Like many "folk ballads," the poem deals with greed, jealousy, murder (in this case: particide) and the supernatural force of a justice which metes out an appropriately grim punishment for the evildoers.
Mr. Barnstone has also included fuller translations of long sequences that Machado titled "Proverbs and Songs" (there are two different ones with this title: one from Fields of Castilla, 1907-1917, and another from New Songs, 1917-1930), plus numerous others featured in selected form in the earlier Crossing Press volume, and a few new ones. These sequences are full of intensely lucid perceptions, aphoristic incisiveness, paradoxical wisdom and sharp lyrical beauty. Their short, trenchant and suggestive nature brings many of them close to Japanese haikus in quality-certainly some of the closest produced by any major European poet.
I recommend this generous, beautiful volume to anyone who seeks a poetry that sings deeply and resonantly while imparting a heartfelt and soul-deep wisdom about the paradox of being alive as a human being. You will find yourself returning to these poems over and over again, as I have done.

Rating:
Summary: Delving Deeper into the Dream Below the Sun
Review: Antonio Machado is one of the world's greatest poets. This new addition to the slowly growing opus of Machado in English is the largest yet published, and the closest to a "Collected Poems" that we are likely to have for some time to come. (Might Mr. Barnstone be persuaded to put together a Collected Poems of Antonio Machado?) I believe there are certain felicitous pairings of poets and translators, and that the pairing of Willis Barnstone with Machado is just such a case. Mr. Barnstone's earlier volume, The Dream Below The Sun, (The Crossing Press,1981), was my first introduction to Machado's "spare, luminous, profound" poems, and so his translations have been imprinted upon my psyche as "Machado in English." I have read other translations of Machado's work, but none have yet surpassed Mr. Barnstone's.
This selection of Machado's work incorporates the 150 poems from The Dream Below The Sun, the sonnets included in Six Masters of The Spanish Sonnet, an expanded version of the evocative, highly readable and informative essay from that volume as an introduction, and about eighty-five new poems. The crowning addition here is Mr. Barnstone's inclusion of the long ballad "The Land of Alvargonzález," the longest single sustained poem that Machado wrote, presented here for the second time in English (the first translation was published in 1982 in the U.K. by Dennis Doyle). Though Mr. Barnstone rhymes in many of the translations (no mean feat, as I know from personal experience), or uses assonance to help capture the musical quality so integral to Machado's work, in this longer piece he has chosen a kind of blank ballad verse that reads with the fluency, directness and starkness of the original. Like many "folk ballads," the poem deals with greed, jealousy, murder (in this case: particide) and the supernatural force of a justice which metes out an appropriately grim punishment for the evildoers.
Mr. Barnstone has also included fuller translations of long sequences that Machado titled "Proverbs and Songs" (there are two different ones with this title: one from Fields of Castilla, 1907-1917, and another from New Songs, 1917-1930), plus numerous others featured in selected form in the earlier Crossing Press volume, and a few new ones. These sequences are full of intensely lucid perceptions, aphoristic incisiveness, paradoxical wisdom and sharp lyrical beauty. Their short, trenchant and suggestive nature brings many of them close to Japanese haikus in quality-certainly some of the closest produced by any major European poet.
I recommend this generous, beautiful volume to anyone who seeks a poetry that sings deeply and resonantly while imparting a heartfelt and soul-deep wisdom about the paradox of being alive as a human being. You will find yourself returning to these poems over and over again, as I have done.