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A orillas del Duero : Machado's Walk through the Country

2012; Routledge; Volume: 84; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00393274.2012.667244

1651-2308

Anthony John Lappin,

Latin American Literature Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 See the discussion in John Butt, “Embarrassed Readings of Machado's ‘A orillas del Duero’”, The Modern Language Review 86, 1991, pp. 332–36, at pp. 332 et seq. 2 For the process which led to the appearance of Campos de Castilla, see Jordi Domenech, “Sobre la publicación de Campos de Castilla”, Ínsula 594, June 1996, pp. 3–7. 3 I will cite the poem in the modernized orthography used in Antonio Machado, Obras completas, ed. Oreste Macrì with Gaetano Chiappini. 2 vols, Madrid, 1998, pp. 493–95. 4 “A orillas” was not the first poem of the collection to be published: “Retrato” (Feb. 1908); “Fantasía iconográfica” (Dec. 1908, but entitled “Retrato”); the main body of the “Proverbios y cantares” in La Lectura 98, Feb. 1909; during the same year a bundle in La Lectura 101, May 1909, which formed in Campos de Castilla the poems “Amanecer de otoño”, “Pascua de resurrección”, most of the rest of the “Proverbios y cantares”; and, later that same year in the same magazine, “Soledades”/“En tren” (as above). 5 Its location is at 41°45′02′′N 2°26′49′′W. It is more commonly known now as the Monte de Santa Ana, and is 1268 m above sea level. 6 Agustín de Rojas Villandro, El viaje entretenido, ed. Jacques Joset, Madrid, 1977, II, 115; the work was first published in 1603. 7 Benito Galdós, Episodios nacionales: Cánovas, 4 vols, Madrid, 1976, IV, 800. Cánovas was first published in 1912, although set some thirty years earlier. A rare contrary example of pastoril in the economic sense of “sheep-rearing” rather than the literary shades of “pastoral”, is found at the turn of the century, and is taken from Justo Sierra, Evolución política del pueblo mexicano, ed. Abelardo Vargas, Caracas, 1985, p. 304: “la esterilización sistemática, por un desmonte secular, de comarcas enteras, parecería condenar la altiplanicie mexicana a la vida pastoril, a la explotación de la ganadería” – but even here, in this resolutely modern, economic context, the literary flourish of “vida pastoril” requires a twentieth-century gloss via “explotación de la ganadería” to make clear that what is being described is not a fading echo of Arcadia. 8 For the Romantics, see for example Sarkar Sunil Kumar's discussion of Wordworth's archetypal (in more ways than one) “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798”, in his A Companion to William Wordsworth, New Delhi, 2003, pp. 23–42; for the early modern bucolic, see Terry Gifford, Pastoral, The New Critical Idiom Series, London, 1999. 9 Machado, Obras completas, ed. Macrí with Chiappini, at I, 512. More generally, for the repetitious aspects of Machado's description of nature, see James Whiston, ‘“Unas pocas palabras verdaderas’: The Naming and Framing of Nature in Machado's Campos de Castilla”, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 82, 2005, pp. 509–27. 10 I am grateful to the eminent geneticist, Dr Karim Labib of the Paterson Institute, Manchester, for sharing his ornithological expertise with me on this point. 11 Medieval shields were constructed with a central boss, to protect the hand holding it, and to hold together the structure of plywood that formed the shield proper, which was often painted; more decorative Renaissance shields were cast in metal and embellished with, on the whole, mythological scenes. Machado might possibly have had in mind Charles V's shields present in the Royal Armouries in Madrid. 12 See, for example, Lise Hull, Understanding Castle Ruins of England and Wales. North Carolina, 2008, p. 81. 13 These lines are doubly important, since they are additions to the original version. 14 It is important to keep these two concepts – warfare between the Christian kingdoms, and warfare of the Reconquista – apart, as is not done, for example, by Patricia McDermott, “La voz colectiva postmodernista en ‘A orillas del Duero’”, in Hoy es siempre todavía: curso internacional sobre Antonio Machado. Córdoba, 7–11 de noviembre de 2005, ed. Jordi Doménech, Córdoba, 2006, pp. 173–94, at p. 188. 15 A suggestion that veía might be third- rather than first-person is found in Butt, ‘Embarrassed Readings’, p. 331, n. 16, as an ingenious move to exculpate Machado for his expression of ideas that the critic finds not only displeasing but dishonourable; yet the likelihood of this being Machado's intention is so remarkably small that it does not bear consideration. After the insistence upon yo doing things, it would require rather more adjustment to the flow of the lines to indicate that, in fact, someone else was seeing these things. 16 The fleece's profitability was common knowledge, imparted in school textbooks of the period; thus Pilar Pascual de Sanjuán, Flora: la educación de una niña, first published in 1881 and constantly reprinted even after the author's death in 1899: “la lana [de oveja] constituye uno de los comercios más lucrativos” (Barcelona: Hijo de Paluzíe, 1923), p. 178. 17 The expression is found, for example, as “el corazón de roble o peña” to describe a hard-hearted woman (at least from her unrequited admirer's point of view) in Luis Bermúdez Belmonte's La hispálica (written c. 1618), ed. Pedro Piñeiro Ramírez, Seville, 1974, p. 124. 18 In the period that Machado was writing, we find Emilia Pardo Bazán, San Francisco de Asís: siglo XIII, Madrid, 1903, p. 12, “Van a encontrarse frente a frente los hijos del desierto y los reconquistadores de Iberia”; or Tomás Giménez Valdivieso's argument for African colonialization, “los españoles de los siglos XX y XXI podrían dilatar los límites de Iberia hasta países que en tiempos primitivos formaron con ella una sola y misma región”, in El atraso de España, ed. José Esteban, Madrid, 1989, p. 208; this expansionist prescription for the betterment of Spain was published in 1909. 19 Cf. “Orillas del Duero” where Castile is characterized by apostrophe, “¡Oh tierra ingrata y fuerte, tierra mía!” (l. 18) 20 For a summary of both of these attitudes, see Michael Richardson, Surrealism and Cinema, Oxford–New York, 2006, p. 15. 21 Machado, Obras completas, ed. Macrì with Chiappini, at I, 470; the poem continues, “¡Gran cantar!/Entre los poetas míos/tiene Manrique un altar”. 22 Philip G. Johnston, The Power of Paradox in the Work of Spanish Poet Antonio Machado, Lampeter, 2002, p. 133. 23 Genesis 4:10–12, in the two versions most likely familiar to Machado, the Clementine Vulgate and the Reina-Valera: “dixitque ad eum: Quid fecisti? Vox sanguinis fratris tui clamat ad me de terra; nunc igitur maledictus eris super terram quae aperuit os suum et suscepit sanguinem fratris tui de manu tua. Cum operatus fueris eam non dabit tibi fructus suos vagus et profugus eris super terram”; “Y él le dijo: ¿Qué has hecho? La voz de la sangre de tu hermano clama á mí desde la tierra. Ahora pues, maldito seas tú de la tierra que abrió su boca para recibir la sangre de tu hermano de tu mano: Cuando labrares la tierra, no te volverá á dar su fuerza: errante y extranjero serás en la tierra”. 24 Ganapán is described in the Diccionario de autoridades (Madrid: RAE, 1734), p. 17, as a “mozo de trabajo, que adquiere su sustento llevando cargas, y transportando lo que le mandan de una parte a otra. Covarrubias dice se llama así, porque ganan el pan con excesivo trabajo, cansancio y sudor”. The secondary meaning, “hombre rudo y tosco”, appears only in the Real Academia Española's dictionary of 1884 (p. 522). Ganapán would also seem to be a term linked primarily with Castile: cf. Hernán Cortes, Cartas de relación, ed. Mario Hernández, Madrid, 1988, p. 133, “Hay hombres como los que llaman en Castilla ganapanes, para traer cargas”. The ganapán occupied the lowest rung on the social ladder, and the figure was used by Antonio de Torquemada in the sixteenth century as a means of expressing the extremes of fate: “unos vienen a ser reyes y otros a ser ganapanes” (Jardín de flores curiosas, ed. Lina Rodríguez Cacho, Madrid, 1994, p. 774). 25 Machado perhaps had in mind Juan de Tassis y Peralta's seventeenth-century chagrin: “como madrastra, España me destierra” (Poesías, ed. José Francisco Ruiz Casanova, Madrid, 1990, p. 358); or, less likely, McDermott's suggestion, Lope's equally disenchanted complain in La Arcadia, “¡Ay, dulce y cara España,/ madrastra de tus hijos verdaderos,/y con piedad extraña/piadosa madre y huésped de extranjeros!” (ed. Edwin S. Morby, Madrid, 1975, p. 142). One should also note, however, the characterisation of Spain as a madrastra in South American independentist writings, such as Miguel Luis Amunátegui Aldunate, La dictadura de O'Higgins, Santiago, 1853, p. 11: “parecían predestinados a darse un nuevo amo en el momento de renegar a la España como dura y despiadada madrastra”. 26 Cantar de Mio Cid: texto, gramática y vocabulario, ed. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, 3 vols, Madrid, 1908–11; for an evaluation of Pidal's importance, see the collected essays in Ramón Menéndez Pidal after Forty Years: A Reassessment, ed. Juan-Carlos Conde, London, 2010. The poem was first published in the late eighteenth century by Tomás Antonio Sánchez, in his magnificent Colección de poesías castellanas anteriores al siglo XV, volume I: Los cantares del Cid, Madrid, 1779. 27 The nature of the epithets in that poem is discussed by Rita Hamilton, “Epic Epithets in the Poema de Mio Cid”, Revue de Littérature Comparée 36, 1962, pp. 161–78. 28 See, for example, Richard Fletcher, El Cid, Donostia, 1989, pp. 213–16. 29 See, in detail, Donald L. Shaw, La generación del 98, Madrid, 1977. 30 Neither ufano nor opulencia occur in the Cid. Ufano may well have been taken by Machado from reading chivalresque literature, and is used in both the sense of “contented” but also “swollen with pride”; opulencia first enters Castilian right at the end of the fifteenth century, in a translation of De mulieribus claris by Boccaccio: De las mujeres ilustres en romance, ed. Harriet Goldberg, Madison, 1995, at fol. 32r. 31 The line may be a neat inversion of Psalm 16:12 in the Vulgate, speaking of King David's enemies, “similitudo eius quasi leonis desiderantis praedam”. McDermott, p. 193, claims this is an inversion of Francisco de Herrera's characterization of the Turk at the battle of Lepanto in his “Canción en alabança de la divina magestad por la vitoria del Señor don Juan”, in Fernando de Herera, Poesías, ed. Vicente García de Diego, Madrid, 1914, pp. 25–45, at ll. 111–12, p. 37: “Qual león á la presa apercibido/esperavan los ímpios”. Both this and McDermott's other invocation of Herrera's poem (p. 191), where l. 50, “un pueblo que ponía a Dios sobre la guerra”, is glossed by her as being a reference to Herrera's invocation of the “Dios de las batallas”, are untenable; since this phrase, too, is itself an allusion to the Bible (“domine deus exercituum”: II Samuel 5:10, 7:26; Psalms 58:6, 68:7, 79:5, 79:20, 83:9, 88:9; Isaiah 3:15, 10:23–24, etc.). Machado disliked Herrera's poetry precisely for this web of biblical allusion mixed with Catholic triumphalism (as cited by McDermott, p. 191, n. 25) and cannot be used to assert, as McDermott does, that he disliked medieval or early modern Castilian literature; that is merely a projection of a late twentieth-century prejudice. In any case, if Machado were feeding off the remains of earlier literature in his use of crows/prey and lions/battle, he may have had a number of works in mind. With regard to the lions, he may have been attempting an ironic invocation of Duque de Rivas, El moro expósito, o Córdoba y Burgos en el siglo décimo: leyenda en doce romances, Madrid, 1834, p. 279, since the recompense for the duke's doughty warriors is neither gold nor silver but Victory herself: “Y jurando morir en defensa/de su Dios, de sus leyes, de su patria,/con Velázquez y el conde a la cabeza,/a la lid se arrojaron cual leones/y la victoria fue su recompensa”. 32 Most easily accessible to Machado in the following (or one of its reprints), Escritores del Siglo XVI. Tomo segundo: Obras del maestro Fray Luis de León, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles desde la formación del lenguaje hasta nuestros días, 2., Madrid, 1855, p. 6. 33 For the link between this dismissal of the Spanish religious tradition and contemporary psychological theories, see Gayana Jurkevich, “Abulia, Nineteenth-Century Psychology and the Generation of 1898”, Hispanic Review 60, 1992, pp. 181–94. 34 On this aspect, a connexion may be made with Gerard Flynn, “The Krausistas and lo varonil”, Hispanic Journal 13, 1992, pp. 265–79. 35 McDermott's ingenious linking of this verse to Barcelona's Semana Trágica in July 1909 (p. 194) is probably not wholly correct, as it is not clear where the bourgeois mercaderes fit into the revolt; Levante in any case more usually means the eastern coast of the kingdoms of Valencia and Murcia, if not the eastern Mediterranean. 36 A device used in other poems as well to provide an immediacy to the presentation of experience. Thus “Primeravera en Andalucía” is written, as the note at the end of the poem puts it, “En el tren”, that modernist expression of a place which is in fact no place in particular, or rather, a succession of places, one after the other. 37 Philip G. Johnston, The Power of Paradox in the Work of the Spanish Poet Antonio Machado (1875–1939), Lewiston, NY, 2002, p. 134, interprets the presence of the weasels to “suggest that vibrancy and vitality will persist in the countryside”. 38 Pace Hugo Laitenberger, “Acerca de dos poemas: ‘En Gredos’ de Miguel de Unamuno y ‘A orillas del Duero’ de Antonio Machado”, in Actas del Congreso internacional del cincuentenario de Unamuno, ed. María Dolores Gómez Molleda, Acta Salmanticensia, Biblioteca Unamuno, 13, Salamanca, 1989, pp. 131–42. 39 Johnston, The Power of Paradox, p. 134. 40 In those long-lost days, when I was more atónito palurdo than serious student, I can remember with greater affection and rather less precision Eric Southworth's attempts to render “La Tierra de Alvargonzález” attractive; and so, with gratitude, I would like to dedicate this article to him.