“explores human destiny by using a metaphor of a road: we walk the road and thus walk life, observing the world, making choices. The Department of English at the George Washington University offers a great analysis of Machado’s poem saying that the poem I thought about his poem Caminante no hay Camino (see below in Spanish/ link for English) and how it talks about owning your distinct path. I can’t rely too much on what I read as we will all have different journeys. He lived in the same apartment for fifty-five years.Looking at previous PCV blog’s has been useful in the preperation for my service, but it has also been very overwhelming. I sometimes find myself questioning the motives behind people’s decisions to serve based on what I have read, seen, and heard. However, I have to remind myself that coming from different backgrounds we all have different perspectives that will affect our experience as volunteers. Here you can wait forever / And rejoice at your arrival. Menashe’s road stops running only because the walker does. Machado’s road fades out into the wake of a ship on the water. Yet, it may happen that you / Come to the same place again / Stay! You could not do / Anything more certain. In circularity, he finds the promise of return: of recognition. Motion jarred into loss.Ĭuriously, though, while “Caminante” ends with that loss-the walker confronted with nothing but foam on the open sea when he looks for the road behind him-Menashe does something different in the emptiness. The sense of continuity in the first two lines-the roads, the feet-is suddenly disrupted, darkened, made melancholy by the line break before “falling away.” It’s the break that made me fall in love with this poem: the perfect, startling displacement. Roads run forever / Under feet forever / Falling away: the road isn’t made by walking it vanishes. (This isn’t a hypothesis it’s a consolation.)Īt first, Menashe’s poem seems to invert Machado’s. As if Menashe’s poem, just one line shorter, offered a response, a cover version, a translation of sorts. Maybe not consciously: I’ll never know if Menashe even read the latter (although his recitation of “La primavera” makes me think he could have).īut they’re connected for me, in me, reading them. Today, writing this, I feel certain that Menashe’s poem and Machado’s “Caminante” are connected. He started with a passage from Antonio Machado: Did I know any poems by heart? I didn’t, I lied. Garrulous, charming, and old, he offered me an orange and interrogated me about poetry. There was a clawfoot bathtub in the kitchen. Half an hour later, I was sitting in Samuel Menashe’s studio apartment. The bookseller called Menashe to check, then passed along his phone number to me, at which point I panicked-this had, as they say, escalated quickly-and went outside to calm my nerves and call him back. They were out of his books, the bookseller said when I asked, but the poet himself lived nearby and might have more. Home on a break from college, I found myself poking around a New York bookstore for something by Samuel Menashe, whose brief, tight, cut-glass poems had recently caught my attention. I liked having these sounds in my mouth, this cadence in my ear. But now I could recite a poem by Antonio Machado by heart! There was hope. I didn’t really speak Spanish as a high school student fluency was still an abstraction, a dream. Re-reading it, though, I’m always struck by how melancholy it is.) (I’ve noticed, by the way, that Machado’s poem is often quoted in a self-help-y vein, with a live-in-the-moment kind of earnestness. “Your footsteps are the road” is amended to “there is no road.” “The road is made by walking” surges ahead into a different kind of agency with “Walking you make the road.” Every new turn makes us glance over our shoulder to make sure we’re still going in the same direction-only to find that the path has already changed. Machado’s use of repetition, it seems to me, becomes a way of advancing and retracing along the path of the poem.
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