Translated from the Spanish of Antonio Machado
Midway the month of July. It was a beautiful day.
I, alone, rose along the broken rock way,
Seeking shade along the bends, taking time,
at stretches, to wipe my face, to arrest my climb,
providing me some respite to my chest’s broken wind;
or, at hard steps, forced my body to be disciplined
with the left hand pulling and the right hand with a stick
for support, a kind of pastoral crook,
to climb the hills where the raptors loft the sky,
at bird’s eye, where I trampled on the mountain’s dry
and overpowering herbs—rosemary, thyme, sage, lavender.
On bitter citrus fields fell a sun of fire.
Wide wings of a vulture with majestic flight
alone crossed the sky of pure blue light.
I made out, in the distance, a peak high and sharp,
and a round hill like an embroidered coat of arms,
and above the brown earth crimson tors
—scattered rags of old armors of war—
where the bald serrated saw twists the Duero
to form the curve of the archer’s bow
around Soria—Soria is a barbican,
to Aragon, the tower of the Castilian.
I saw the horizon enclosed by unseen
distant hills crowned by oak and evergreen;
impoverished stony places, some meadow thin and lowly,
where merino sheep pace and a bull, on bended knee
ruminates on the grass, while the banks of the river
display the green poplars in the clear sun of summer,
and, soundlessly, distant travelers pass
So tiny! —wagons, riders and mule—cross
the long bridge, and under the arches of stone
that overshadow the waters silver shone
of Duero.
The Duero crosses the heart of oak
Iberia and Castile.
Oh, sad and noble cloak,
the high plains and desert and rocks,
of unplowed fields, without canals or stocks;
decrepit cities, roads without mesones,
and flabbergasted locals without dances or songs
still they go, from dying hearths they flee
like your long rivers, Castile, to the sea!
Miserable Castile, yesterday magnificent
now wrapped in tatters, despising what ignores it.
Does it wait, sleep or dream? Does spilled blood
remember the fever of the sword?
All that moves, flows, rushes, turns or hooks;
changing the sea and mountains and the eye that looks.
What happened? On its still fields is the rigid specter
of a people who put to God their war.
The mother who once gave birth to commanders
is now just a step-mom to jacks-of-all-traders.
Castile is not so very generous as the day
when El Cid, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, returned its way,
proud of his new fortune, and gave to Alfonso
Valencia’s opulent orange groves;
or, after the adventure that proved their vigor,
called the conquest of the immense river
known as Indians to the Court, the mother of soldiers,
whose warriors and champions came back loaded with silver
and gold in the name of Spain, in royal galleons,
for preying crows, for fighting lions.
Philosophers nourished by soup from the convent
contemplate idly the vast firmament;
and if they arrive in a dream, like a rumor distant,
a clamor of merchants on the wharves of the Levant,
they will not even ask what it all was for,
as more desert war winds blow against their doors.
Miserable Castile, yesterday magnificent
now wrapped in rags, despising what ignores it.
The sun is sinking. From the distant city
a harmonious ringing of bells reaches me
—the old bereaved women already go to their rosaries.
Among the rocks two pretty weasels flee;
they watch me and they move away, then appear again,
Very curious! ... The fields will darken.
Along the white road is the meson
with the darkened field and the desolate stone.
