Literary lottery? Antonio Machado’s reputation at home and abroad

Comparison between the lives of Antonio Machado and Federico García Lorca is inevitable and not just because they are the two major Spanish poets of the twentieth century. They had met and admired each other’s work. Both were victims of the Civil War. Lorca was assassinated at the outbreak in 1936 and Machado died only a few days into his exile after the Republican defeat in 1939. Yet, whereas Lorca’s status as a Republican martyr is based on his political sympathies, Machado’s exile, a trauma which contributed to his death, was the direct result of his political action in favour of the Republic. If Lorca’s ambivalent response to modernity is what, according to some critics, defines him as the paradigmatic Spanish modernist, this is a status he should share with Machado. However, in contrast to Lorca, whose legacy has been judged in the context of the European avant-garde and of Modernism, from a wealth of different critical approaches, Machado stands in somewhat lonely eminence, his work mostly considered within the strict boundaries of Spanish literary historiography, singular and unattached to the international scene.

And yet Machado’s poetry engages with great originality with the major artistic and literary movements of his time. The experiments in the visual arts were for him a source of creative energy and a tool for exploring new forms of poetic expression. His poems test the boundaries of the art and its connection to music and painting, and also deploy remarkable strategies for the exploration of self and the world, including the creation of apocryphal poets (an invention more or less synchronous, albeit it seems independently, with the heteronyms of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa). This in itself links Machado in interesting ways with other contemporaries such as Yeats whose use of the ‘Mask’ could be considered a parallel strategy, and even with T. S. Eliot’s notions of impersonality which were being elaborated at the same time. The title of Ezra Pound’s Personae, as well as Eliot’s dramatic monologues, suggest affinities within an international Modernist setting which would prove fertile ground for comparison and would locate Machado’s poetics far more accurately than an exclusively Spanish terrain. The many strands that could connect Machado’s poetry to the great works of his time have largely gone unexplored in the reception of his work, contributing to his unjust neglect in anthologies and critical accounts of Modernism.

This isolation may partly be the result of his association with the individualist prose-writers of the Spanish generation of 1898 who, as a group, were responding to the country’s sense of decline, and through them his reputation as a national poet was initially forged. But more specific reasons may account for Machado’s neglect. The appropriation of Machado’s legacy by the Spanish right-wing during the first decade of Francoism, might have blinded public perception to those aspects of his work resistant to Christian Nationalist ideology. His transformation into a central figure for Franco’s totalitarian regime, even if short-lived, might have somewhat hindered the reception of his work abroad, but within Spain, this association was soon questioned by critics whose vindication of the formalist qualities of his poetry implied his re-alignment with a poetics of political dissent. But even in the 1970s when there was a renewed interest in Spanish literature within the Anglo-speaking world, Machado’s poetry received nothing like the same attention as that of Lorca or Neruda, the popularity of the latter boosted after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1971.

It seems fair to wonder whether the disparate status of Machado at home where he is usually considered the foremost poet of Spain since the seventeenth century, and abroad, where he is often overlooked, may be due to the poet’s reliance of rhythm and rhyme to communicate meaning, something lost in free verse, considered the default mode for English translators. But the numerous translations of Lorca and Jiménez, neither of them averse to traditional forms, invalidate this claim. Perhaps it may be worth considering the point made by Al Alvarez in his anthology of modern European poetry (Faber & Faber, 1992), where he argues that the scarce interest in foreign poetry in England after the war was linked to a widespread distrust of Modernism itself, which was “both American-led and closely tied to continental literature” and he mentions Eliot and Pound among those whose voices were shaped through their work as poet-translators. So, among the reason for Machado’s neglect in the Modernist canon it may well be, after all, that he was a quintessential Modernist poet.

Featured image credit: DSC02221 by Rafael Jiménez. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.