Machado poem translated

Antonio Machado

“Excerpts of Proverbs and Songs

29” from Castilian Fields, 1912

Wayfarer, there are your steps

On the path and nothing else;

Wayfarer, there is no path,

You make the path by walking.

By walking you make the path,

And looking backward

You see a trail whose footprints

You can never retrace.

The wayfarer has no path

Except frothy washes on the ocean.

Translated by Jerry Blanton—June 30, 2011, 3-4 a.m.

As you can see, I translated this early today.  The translation was prompted by a conversation with Mauricio Soto, who admires Machado's writing and pointed me to this poem in particular.  I liked the poem and the challenge of translating it and capturing Machado's timeless theme and his melancholy mood.
 
Machado's "Song 29" reminds me of the folksong "I'm just a poor wayfaring stranger / I'm a-travelling through this world of woe."  It also reminds me of Nietzsche's dictum:  "Embrace your fate"; and Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken."
 
In researching some biographical facts about Machado, I ran into another serendipitous moment.  During the conversation with Mauricio, I had told him about something that happened when I was about thirty years old in Tampa and was teaching ESOL to adolescents from around the world during a summer session.  In my class was a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl from Argentina; she had the soft, gentle kind of beauty that made me think she would continue to be beautiful all her life--a kind of internal grace.
 
I, however, was suffering the anguish of my recently broken marriage, although professional teacher that I was and am, I try not to show that to my classes.  Evidently, this quiet beauty had developed a crush on me, for at the end of the course, she gave me a medallion from her home town and told me to come see her in Argentina.  It was an invitation to romance and perhaps more.  She said something like "You would like it in the mountains where I live.  It's a beautiful place.  A wonderful place to raise a family."
 
I didn't go, for, thank goodness, I had enough common sense to know that I was at that time a psychological mess and would just be tossing my wreckage on her shore and she didn't deserve the chaos that could bring.
 
Nevertheless, I have wondered what my life might have been like had I tossed aside my wreckage here and fled to the arms of the beautiful young Argentine.  I'm sure I would have still been a writer and a professor there, but a different writer and professor, perhaps even a happily married one.
 
Here's the serendipity.  When Machado was thirty-four, he met and married a fifteen-year-old girl.  Unfortunately, the girl died a few years later from tuberculosis.  Like the forlorn narrator's lost love in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven," the girl's name was Leonor (Lenore in Poe's poem).  Machado spent many years getting over her death, about which he wrote many poems as if he were Poe reincarnated.
 
So, I thought, Suppose I had gone to Argentina, fallen deeply in love, married this young woman, and then she had died as Machado's wife had died.  I would have been in even more of a mess psyhcologically.  Perhaps I had avoided the Siren's call to disaster.