Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado

Portrait

P O R T R A I T My childhood is memories of a patio in Seville, and a garden where sunlit lemons are growing yellow; my youth twenty years on the earth of Castile; what I lived a few things you'll forgive me for omitting. A great seducer I wasnot, nor the lover of Juliet; —the oafish way I dress is enough to say that— but the arrow Cupid planned for me I got, and I loved whenever women found a home in me. A flow of leftist blood moves through my body, but my poems rise from a calm and deep spring. There is a man of rule who behavesas he should, but more than him, I am, in the good sense of the word, good. I adore beauty, and following contemporary thought have cut some old roses from the garden of Ronsard; but the new lotions and feathers are not for me; I am not one of the blue jays who sing sowell. I dislike hollow tenors who warble of love, and the chorus of crickets singing to the moon. I fall silent so as to separate voices from echoes, and I listen among the voices to one voice and only one. Am I classic or Romantic? Who knows. I want to leave my poetry as a fighter leaves his sword, known for the masculine hand that closed around it, not for the coded mark of the proud forger. I talk always to the man who walks along with me; —men who talk to themselves hope to talk to God somedayMy soliloquies amount to discussionswith this friend, who taught me the secret of loving human beings. [83] Y al cabo, nada os debo; debeisme cuanto he escrito A mi trabajo acudo, con mi dinero pago el traje que me cubre y la mansion que habito, el pan que me alimenta y el lecho en donde yago. Y cuando llegue el dia del ultimo viaje, y este al partir la nave que nunca ha de tornar, me encontrareis a bordo ligero de equipaje, casi desnudo, como los hijos de la mar. [84] In the end, I oweyou nothing; you oweme what I've written. I turn to my work; with what I've earned I pay for my clothes and hat, the house in which I live, the food that feeds my body, the bed on which I sleep. And when the day arrives for the last leaving of all, and the ship that never returns to port is ready to go, you'll find me on board, light, with few belongings, almost naked like the children of the sea. [85] ...