Manuel Machado

Manuel Machado Ruiz (Seville, August 29, 1874-Madrid, January 19, 1947) was a Spanish poet and playwright, framed in modernism. He was the brother of the also poet Antonio Machado, as well as the painter José Machado.

Early Years

Casa natal de Manuel Machado en Sevilla.

Portrait of Manuel and Antonio Machado in 1883.

Manuel was the first son of Ana Ruiz Hernández and Antonio Machado Álvarez, who would be followed by Antonio, José, Joaquín and Francisco.

Born at half past two in the morning on August 29, 1874 at number 20 Calle San Pedro Mártir, his childhood was spent in the bucolic space of the Palacio de las Dueñas, where his family had rented one of rooms for individuals. When Manuel was ten years old, the family moved to Madrid, when Antonio Machado Núñez, his paternal grandfather, obtained a professorship at the Central University.

Youth

In Madrid, he began his studies with his brothers at the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, directed by Francisco Giner de los Ríos, a great friend of Manuel's grandfather. Later, he completed them with a bachelor's degree and a degree in Philosophy and Letters by the University of Seville, finally achieved on November 8, 1897. At that time he met, in the Andalusian capital, Eulalia Cáceres, whom he would marry thirteen years later.

Devoted to the bohemian life of Madrid together with his brother Antonio, Manuel began to publicize his first poems and collaborate in young publications such as those edited by Francisco Villaespesa and Juan Ramón Jiménez. In the early 1890s he contributed some poems to the magazine El Álbum Ibero-Americano .In March 1898, Manuel traveled to Paris to work as a translator at the Garnier publishing house. In 1902, still in Paris, he published his first book: Soul, a key term in the symbolist vocabulary. He stayed in the French capital until 1903, sharing a flat with Enrique Gómez Carrillo, Amado Nervo and Rubén Darío, and, in the last stage, with the actor Ricardo Calvo, who also welcomed two other Machados into his apartment: Antonio and Joaquín (who was returning from his American experience "sick, lonely and poor").

Back in Spain, he developed an intense literary activity with collaborations in the recently founded newspaper ABC and in the veteran Blanco y Negro. In 1903, he premiered in Seville Amor al vuelo, a bourgeois comedy with a happy ending written in collaboration with his childhood friend José Luis Montoto (son of the folklorist Luis Montoto). Much more important was the publication in 1905 from his book Caprichos, with drawings by his brother José.

After publishing El mal poema and living on the move between Madrid and Barcelona, he ends up returning to Seville. There, he married in the parish of San Juan de la Palma on June 16, 1910 with the patient Eulalia Cáceres Sierra, thirty years old (Manuel is about to turn 36). The couple moved to Madrid, where, according to Pérez Ferrero, the libertine Manuel Machado "consecrated himself to his wife with unique devotion".

Maturity

In 1913, Manuel competed with the Facultative Corps of Archivists, Librarians and Archaeologists, obtaining a position in Santiago de Compostela, which, thanks to influences in the Ministry, he was exchanged for one in the National Library of Madrid, and, at The following year, he doubled his civil service with another position as archivist in the Madrid City Council. As director of the Municipal Library (later the Municipal Historical Library) and the Municipal Museum of Madrid, he promoted several short-lived literary magazines.

In 1914, the First World War broke out and Manuel made clear his "aliadófila" in various writings ( Day by day of my calendar , 1918).After the war was over, he traveled through France and Belgium as a correspondent for El Liberal .

Churruca street building in Madrid where Manuel Machado lived from 1919 until his death.

In 1921, he published what many specialists have considered his best collection of poems: Ars moriendi. In line with the great reception given to the book and the poet's decision to retire with him from the poetic arena, an epistolary discussion ensues between Manuel and Antonio in which Manuel ends up writing: «Your poetry is not he is old. Mine does." Sentence against which Antonio Machado will conclude, in another letter: "Poetry never has age when it is truly poetry".

Throughout the 1920s, the two brothers collaborated, with great success—popular and critical—in a series of comedies in verse in a display of creative understanding. José Antonio Primo de Rivera attends with his father the tribute paid to the two Machados on the occasion of the premiere of La Lola se va a los puertos . In the speech he gave that night on November 28, 1929 (the first of which news has remained), the young man (who would later become a Falangist leader) said, according to the Blanco y Negro chronicle later,, "[...] two intellectuals full of human emotion, receivers and transmitters of grace, popular joy and sadness...".

In 1931, in a ceremony held at the Ateneo de Madrid on April 26 of that year, Manuel made public (in collaboration with the musician Oscar Esplá) the draft of a hymn for the Second Spanish Republic (which he had provisionally adopted that of Irrigation). The first verses, written by Manuel in his republican fervor, read as follows:

It's a morning sun

of glory and life, peace and love.

Freedom blossoms and grana

in the miracle of his burning.

Freedom!

Spain shines to your fulgor,

like a rose of Truth.

Manuel Machado appears on the list of Spanish intellectuals who founded the Association of Friends of the Soviet Union on February 11, 1933. However, from that same year, Manuel externalized his personal position before the socio-political events that surrounded him. In an article in the Madrid newspaper La Libertad, Manuel Machado set out his ideology:

The world is debated today — far from all freedom — between two dictatorships: the capitalist and the collectivist, the bourgeois and the proletarian, between fascism and communism. Both are equally enemies of individuality(...). Both are equally detestable to me.

Old age

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War physically separated him from the rest of his family. the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart. The couple stays at the Filomena pension, among bullfighters, intellectuals, actors, soldiers, officials and journalists. His colleagues range from his friend Ricardo Calvo or the right-handed Marcial Lalanda to Juan Ignacio Luca de Tena or the future minister José Ibáñez Martín.

An interview given to a French magazine (Comoedia), that same July 1936, in which Manuel commits the indiscretion of commenting that "this could last seven years, like the Carlist war", is used by Mariano Daranas, correspondent for ABC in Paris, to denounce the "eminent lyrical and lucky bureaucrat." He has broken out the festival of envy in Spain, which will cause as many deaths or more than the war actions. Manuel Machado was detained by the police on September 29, remaining in jail until October 1 (thanks to a long list of intercessors, whose certainty it has not been possible to give a certain reference).

Miguel Pérez Ferrero, one of his first biographers along with Miguel d'Ors, recounts the event of Manuel's unexpected appointment as Academic of the Spanish Language. The news was given to him by "two writers who arrived from Salamanca" (Pemán and D & # 39; Ors), informing him of his unanimous choice on January 5, 1938, and on the condition that he immediately took office. Manuel accepted, giving his induction speech about his own work at the San Telmo Palace in San Sebastián on February 19 of that same year.

Manuel continued to write poetry and participate in projects such as Los versos del combatiente or the Crown of sonnets in honor of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, culminating his political-literary commitment with the poem Al sable del Caudillo, when the rebel troops took Madrid in 1939. It is not clear how Manuel came to know of the death of his mother and his brother Antonio. They entered France in the direction of Paris, but on the way they were informed that the deaths had occurred in Collioure, where he and Eulalia went and stayed for two days, then returning to Burgos.

After the war, he returned to his position as director of the Newspaper Library and the Madrid Municipal Museum, retiring shortly thereafter. He continued to write poetry, largely of a religious nature, influenced by his wife and his surroundings. He died in Madrid on January 19, 1947, he was buried in the La Almudena cemetery, after a funeral presided over by the Minister of National Education, Ibáñez Martín and José María Pemán, in those days director of the Royal Academy. After making a donation from her husband's library and archive to the Burgos Provincial Council and the Fernán González Institution, his widow joined a religious congregation dedicated to the care of abandoned and sick children.

Work

Manuel Machado continued, in some respects, his father's work as a promoter and renovator of popular folklore and deep singing. His poetic production abounds in structures suitable for cante: coplas, seguidillas and soleares. He created a new variant of soleá, in which the central verse has a disproportionate number of syllables (9, 10, 11, or more syllables), which he named soleariyas. Also, he cultivated the romance, the quatrains and serpentesios, and the sonnet, a stanza that he renewed with a variant (the sonetillo), which uses verses of minor art, generally eight syllables and, in some cases, trisyllables (as in the sonnet titled Summer).

Influenced by Verlaine and Rubén Darío, his verse appears ingenious, agile and expressive, with traces of Parnassianism and the cursed French poets. This definitely modernist aspect has often been contrasted with its insertion in the context of the generation of '98.

Author's Bibliography

• Complete works, Madrid: Editorial Mundo Latino, 1922-1924, 5 vols.
• Complete works by Manuel and Antonio Machado, Madrid: Editorial Plenitude, 1947.

Books of poems

Editing Alma. Museum. The Songs, by the bookshop Gregorio Pueyo and by Juan Gris cover drawing.

• Complete poetry, ed. de Antonio Fernández Ferrer, Sevilla: Renacimiento, 1993.
• With Enrique Paradas, Sad and joyful: collection of poems (1894).
• With Enrique Paradas, " Versos (1895).
• Alma (Poesies) (1902). 2.a ed. with title Alma. Museum. The Songs (1907) and 3.a with Alma (Opera selecta) (1910?)
• Caprichos (1905 and 1908).
• The Songs (1905).
• The National Party (1906).
• Bad poem (1909).
• Apollo: Pictorial Theatre (1911).
• Trophies (1911?)
• Cante hondo (1912 and 1916).
• Songs and dedications (1915).
• Seville and other poems (1918?)
• Ars moriendi (1921).
• Phoenix (1936).
• Gold Hours: Poetic Devotionary (1938).
• Poetry: Omnia Lyrica Opera (1940).
• Cadences of cadence: new dedication (1943).
• Timetable: Religious poems (1947).

Plays

The brothers Manuel and Antonio wrote together several dramatic works with an Andalusian setting. His most popular work would be La Lola se va a los puertos, made into a film twice.

• Fortunes or Julianillo Valcárcel (1926).
• Juan de Mañara (1927).
• The alphas (1928).
• The Lola goes to the ports (1929).
• The cousin Fernanda (1931).
• The duchess of Benamejí (1932).
• The man who died in the war (1928. Premiere in 1941)

Although the poetic work of both is very different, certain parallels can be seen. Thus, both composed autobiographical poems (Adelfos, by Manuel, and Retrato, by Antonio), using Alexandrian verses organized in Serventesians.

Novel

• With José Luis Montoto de Sedas, Love of flight (1904).
• Love and death (novel chapters) (1913).

Essay

• The literary war (1898-1914) (1914).
• A year of theatre (1918).
• Day by day of my calendar (Memorandum of Spanish Life of 1918) (1918).

Translation

• Paul Verlaine, Welsh parties (1911).
• Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1913).
• Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues, Reflections and maxims (1914).
• René Descartes, Complete works (1920).
• Victor Hugo, Hernani (1928, in collaboration with Antonio Machado and Francisco Villaespesa).
• Arthur Conan Doyle, The Camp of Naples (192?).
• Edmond Rostand, Aguilucho: drama in five acts (1932, in collaboration with Luis de Oteiza).