*
Sorrow, it is not true that I know you;
You are the nostalgia for a good life,
and the aloneness of the soul in shadow,
the sailing ship without wreck and without guide.
Like an abandoned dog who cannot find
a smell or a track and roams
along the roads, with no road, like
the child who in a night of the fair
gets lost among the crowd,
and the air is dusty, and the candles
fluttering, --astounded, his heart
weighed down by music and by pain;
thatUs how I am, drunk, sad by nature,
a mad and lunar guitarist, a poet,
and an ordinary man lost in dreams,
searching constantly for God among the mists.
--Antonio Machado
translated by Robert Bly
This is the first poem my husband recited to me when we were courting. I
had no idea what it meant beyond the fact that it made me sad and hopeful
at the same time. I asked him to recite it over and over and with each
listening I discovered something new about it. The first line was the
most intriguing for me-- how Machado says it is not true that he knows
sorrow, and yet all that follows is saturated with sorrow-- the ship, the
dog, the child, even the fair cannot save him from it, and in fact, makes
it only more known, more felt. The air itself is dusty with sorrow, the
candles, the music. I think I love most the line: Q astounded, his
heart/weighed down by music and by pain. We deny our sorrow, and yet it
is, in some odd way, a friend, a feeling that, as it pains us, also offers
us entrance into our deepest and truest nature.
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