In the Library
Retrato
Antonio Machado, 1907
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by The Daily Canon (2026)
- Original
- Original es
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 0k words
£1.99
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My childhood is memories of a patio in Seville, / and a bright orchard where the lemon tree ripens.
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- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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About the book
A patio in Seville, a bright orchard where a lemon tree ripens: this is how Antonio Machado chooses to begin the story of himself, and everything that follows stays just as unguarded. Retrato opens Campos de Castilla with the poet taking his own measure in plain alexandrine couplets, and the honesty is disarming. He is no Don Juan, he owns up to his clumsy way of dressing, he wants his verse to rise from a serene spring rather than clever doctrine, and he offers the line every Spanish reader carries for life: he is, in the good sense of the word, good. Then he tells how he listens, pausing to sort the true voices from their echoes and hearing, among them all, only one. The poem closes toward a final voyage on a ship that never returns, and anyone who knows how Machado died will feel the whole self-portrait tighten into prophecy. Few reckonings this modest are this impossible to forget.