The Poetics of Otherness in Antonio Machado’s ‘Proverbios y Cantares (review)

Nicolás Fernández-Medina’s thorough and well-researched study places the spotlight on a largely unexplored facet and corpus of Antonio Machado’s poetic production, namely his shorter, more proverbial texts. Fernández-Medina traces examples of these forms throughout Machado’s career and links them to his engagement with the relationship between self and Other. His discussion artfully joins form and content, showing how the popular nature of these texts interacts with their fragmentary character, making this body of work crucial for understanding the rest of Machado’s work. The Poetics of Otherness blends both concise literary analysis and a thorough contextualization of the philosophical, social and literary climate in which Machado’s work circulated and was produced. This strength of Fernández-Medina’s study runs the risk of relying too heavily on external context, though, which at times overshadows the textual analyses offered in the monograph.

The Poetics of Otherness is divided into five chapters and framed by an introduction and conclusion. The study as a whole employs a chronological focus that traces elements from Machado’s life and surrounding social context along with the development of his work. Each chapter begins with a carefully selected epigraph, traces a specific social and intellectual context, and continues with a reading of selected poems. The introduction, “Beyond the Lyrical and Proverbial: Antonio Machado’s Poetic Thinking,” sets up the importance of Machado’s Proverbios y Cantares and the relatively minor role they have played in critical approaches to his work. These poems are, in Fernández-Medina’s words, “so accessible and, often-times, so impossibly elusive” that they have often been left out of critical studies of Machado’s work (2). Their apparent accessibility stems from both their brevity and popular roots, which cause difficulties for critics accustomed to studying more stylized poetic work. Fernández-Medina addresses their elusive character by situating these poems within the context of the literary fragment. The introduction also pays close attention to the existing criticism on Machado’s poetry and situates the rest of the study within this larger critical conversation about Machado’s work.

The first two chapters of the book focus primarily on biographical and contextual matters. Chapter one, “The Problem of Subjectivity: How to Know the Self and Other,” frames Machado’s philosophical ideas and poetic practice together. Adding to the writings of Machado’s alter ego, Juan de Mairena, perhaps the most common source for explorations of Machado’s engagement with the literary and philosophical context of the time, this chapter focuses on Machado’s “Proyecto de un discurso de ingreso en la academia española” (1931). It also examines the question of the individual within a larger European context. This is followed by a discussion of the fragment and its treatment by the key thinkers associated with German Romanticism as well as in the work of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. The genealogies of the “proverbio” and “cantar,” the specific fragments dealt with in this book, receive a significant amount of attention and cover both temporal and geographical territory. The second chapter, “Towards Conceiving the Other: The Formative Years,” employs a biographical focus to situate Machado’s engagement with folklore in both a familial context as well as the larger intellectual and social context in which Machado came of age and began writing. These contexts include the influence of figures like Antonio Machado y Álvarez “Demófilo” (Machado’s father), Friedrich Krause, Eduardo Bonet, Enrique Paradas and Salvador Rueda.

The next two chapters focus on specific examples of self-Other relationships in Machado’s poetry, and in particular those related to religion and its role in society. Chapter three, “From Art to Life: Critical Inquiries and a New Poetry,” uses the story of Cain and Abel and its various manifestations as a vehicle to explore Machado’s increasing engagement with the social and the relationship between self and Other that symbolizes this...