Antonio Machado On Culture—Documents From the Thirties

MACHADO 123 ANTONIO MACHADO ANTONIO MACHADO ON CULTUREDOCUMENTS FROM THE THIRTIES translated by Reginald Gibbons "For us, to defend and to disseminate culture is the same thing: to increase in the world the human treasure of vigilant consciousness." Antonio Machado died in 1939, shortly after crossing the border into France as a refugee from the Fascist forces whose victory in Spain ended the brief life of the Second Republic. Like most intellectuals of his time, he was a defender of the Republic, and recoiled in horror at the military uprising and the ensuing brutality of the civil war. Machado's poetry, which he began to publish around the turn of the century, places him among the greatest European poets of his generation. A technically refined, but straight-forward, poetry, it is humane, philosophical , and rooted in concrete experience and perception.! During the war years, Machado continued to write both poetry and prose, grappling with the problems that confronted his country. It was not a time for aestheticist positions, and younger poets like Rafael Alberti and Miguel Hernandez threw themselves whole-heartedly into participating, as poets, in the defense of the Republic—a defense conceived not only in military but also in cultural terms. The popular genius of these two younger poets is precisely what Machado calls, below, the cultural aristocracy of the pueblo-the people, the folk, the nation. To translate this word, pueblo, as "the people," has proved too daunting an effort, and I have preferred, in the face of the abuse this term suffers in English, to retain the Spanish word pueblo in the translation. A similar problem arises concerning the word "popular"; with this term Machado refers not to some equivalent of our ad-jingles or popular music or television or bestselling novels; nor does his "folklore" correspond to our remnants of Indian lore, black slave culture, or rural tales and songs of a region like Appalachia . On the contrary, both words in Spanish refer to the strong and widespread oral tradition in Spanish literature-ballads, proverbs, and the manifold varieties of folk music found in Spain's very diverse regions, where four languages are spoken, and where local history is a product of geography and of a long span of relatively local political and cultural evolution. The word "popular" refers to something vital and as yet, in the Spain of Macha- 124 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW do's time, free from the pressures of the cash nexus. What is most interesting in Spanish culture, in fact, is, as Machado points out, that even the literary productions of the court and its sphere of influence partake in varying degrees of the vitality of the popular tradition. Thus the defense of culture, for Machado, represents something very different from what we need in the United States. Where Machado could look to the popular as the justification and the substance of the defense-without having to exclude even those authors whose circumstances, temperament , and talents did not lead them to participate much in it-we find ourselves faced with the necessity of a defense against consumerism, passivity, and the jaded imagination which is the informing attitude of our own "popular " culture -predominantly shaped by the media, which are themselves characterized by the present-day necessity to sell the news and to market art. Despite the differences, however, between Spain in the 1930s and the United States today, Machado is worth attending to as he satirizes a Spanish variety of the custodial view of culture which, in English, was most forcefully advocated by Matthew Arnold, and which still has many adherents . And we should not forget what Machado says about the creation of culture; his main point against the custodial view is that culture needs rather to be created than to be protected-it is not a storehouse but a process . With this translation I hope to suggest that the problems of a culture can -and should-be faced not only by theorists but also by writers. What Machado calls "vigilant consciousness" (which resembles, certainly, what others may call "critical consciousness" or "negativity") was never more needed in American culture than it is today. Machado, writing literally in the middle of...