Traveler, your footprints
Antonio Machado, There Is No Road, translated by Mary Berg and Dennis Maloney, White Pine Press.
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road
only a ship’s wake on the sea.
I first came across the poems of Antonio Machado (1875-1939) when I was traveling in southern Spain in March 2018. I learned Machado is widely considered one of the greatest Spanish poets of the 20th century.
I’m struck by what his writing is not: it’s not grandiose, not introspective navel-gazing, not self-serving. We may each be small, but we can often choose our steps and make each step matter. Somehow, Machado makes the small stuff feel important: his ideas are the antithesis of the celebrity culture surrounding us.
I feel sad I’m dependent on translators. Nevertheless, I carry some of Machado’s translated poems on my phone. I look to his gentle, modest ideas to help keep my thoughts grounded.
In the end I owe you nothing; you owe me all I’ve written.
Excerpt from Portrait, Antonio Machado, There is No Road, translated by Mary Berg and Dennis Maloney, White Pine Press.
I work, paying with what I’ve earned
for the clothes on my back, the house I live in,
the bread that sustains me and the bed where I lie.
And when the day arrives for the final voyage
and the ship that never returns is set to sail,
you’ll find me aboard, traveling light, with few possessions,
almost naked, like the children of the sea.
Machedo died, too young, in 1939, a refugee from Franco’s army.
