Antonio Machado's manuscripts

James Whiston

The vicissitudes of the Spanish Civil War continue to cast their long shadow over the cultural life of Spain. This has been very much in evidence in the case of Antonio Machado over the past couple of years, with the publication of a number of his working notebooks in Burgos and Malaga/Seville¹. In 1948 the Burgos manuscripts, separated into two parts, corresponding to writings and some personal effects of Manuel Machado on the one hand and to writings of Antonio on the other, had been handed over respectively to the Institución Fernán González in Burgos, and to a priest, Bonifacio Zamora Usábel, a poet and founder member of the same Institución, by Antonio's sister-in-law Eulalia Cáceres a year after the death of her husband Manuel. The manuscripts of Antonio Machado remained in Zamora's care until 1977, two years after the death of Franco, when Zamora Usábel transferred them to the keeping of the Institución. In the immediate post-Civil-War period of winners and losers it is more than likely that Eulalia Cáceres was following her husband's wishes that Antonio's manuscripts be placed in the safe keeping of a sympathetic scholar, yet one who would not have been branded as 'desafecto al Régimen'. Antonio's Burgos papers have now been published in two large volumes by the Institución. While it is appropriate to acknowledge the good offices of Zamora, and his hugely generous gesture in freely donating these valuable documents, in every sense of the word, to the Institución Fernán González, one can only express the wish that he had not made his own marks in pen on the papers, mostly in the shape of a reference number that was designed to link the manuscript version of a poem to its equivalent page number in the then so-called Obras completas of Antonio and Manuel².

The present existence of the Malaga manuscripts, which contain exclusively the work of Antonio Machado, except for some of the theatrical collaborations of Antonio and Manuel, is due to one of Antonio's other brothers, Francisco, who passed them on to his three daughters. While at that time they could not have represented 'el pan de mañana', come the millennium Machado's nieces decided to sell them, and they were bought by the Fundación Unicaja of Málaga for 600,000 euros at a public auction in Seville in 2003. The Bank then commissioned Hispanist editors from the Universities of Seville and Jaén to transcribe the notebooks, which have now been published, together with facsimiles of the original. (The Burgos manuscripts do not have transcriptions, being facsimiles only.)

Four of the volumes of the Malaga manuscripts are what their editors call 'Textos de creación'. There is another edited grouping of manuscripts, which the editors of the Malaga volumes have labelled 'Textos profesionales de Antonio Machado', and mostly consist of notes on French, on history and on Spanish literature made for his classes. One intriguing cuadernillo titled Aritmética mercantil was prepared by Machado when he was considering applying for a post in the Banco de España: had he been successful, what poetry might have emerged from Machado's contemplation of the Bank's activities, printing money and helping to stabilize the peseta! The four 'creative' volumes of the Malaga notebooks are denominated Cuaderno 1, Cuaderno 2, Cuaderno 3 and Poemas sueltos. These contain drafts and manuscript versions of poems which the authors have dated variously as belonging to the Baeza period (1912-1919), and poems leading up to the period of Nuevas canciones (1924) or close to the same period (1924-1926). The dates assigned by the editors to the volume they call Poemas sueltos are 'entre 1912 y 1933' in the general introduction which is common to all the volumes, this quotation appearing on page 14 of each of them. The great majority of the dates, however, for the Poemas sueltos volume, quoted by the editors, are from 1923 to 1926. Volume II of the Burgos manuscripts has three pages (613-17) of a draft of Machado's review of Moreno Villa's Colección, which contains some of Machado's best known reflections on poetry. Other reflections on poetry are 'Apuntes sobre la lírica' and a further draft of the latter, retitled 'Sobre la poesía del porvenir', both in the Malaga manuscript's Cuaderno 2.

Cuaderno 1 of the Malaga manuscripts could lay claim to be the most important of the volumes because in it are not only eleven pages of possibly the earliest drafts for 'Poema de un día', one of the poet's best creations, but also several draft pages of another fine poem from Campos de Castilla, 'Recuerdos'. In the case of 'Poema de un día' the critic can also cross-refer from Cuaderno 1 to Volume I of the Burgos manuscripts, because the latter also has a substantial draft of ten pages of that poem. The evidence from the corrections points to the Burgos draft of the poem as the later one, and this draft also has the almost-final title 'El poema de un día', which captures in such an inspiringly simple way Machado's description of his poetry as 'la palabra esencial en el tiempo'. Before settling on the poem's definitive title (without the 'El') Machado had tried out titles such as 'Meditaciones en un pueblo rural', 'Monólogos rurales', 'Meditaciones rurales', 'Mi vida en Baeza', 'Fe de vida', 'Un año más', and possibly 'Al lado del fuego con un libro', none of them coming qualitatively near to the final title chosen, for its pithy encapsulation of 'the word in time'. Neither did the superb opening verse, 'Heme aquí ya, profesor', come immediately to Machado: he began the first draft with verse eight: 'Invierno. Cerca del fuego' (Cuaderno 1, fol. 19r.), while originally the 'pueblo' of verse five was a 'poblachón'. One of the ways that Machado in 'Poema de un día' expressed the idea of chronological time as unfeeling and undifferentiated (the description of the ticking of the clock -'el latido de un corazón de metal') as distinct from the more volatile psychological time of human hopes and fears, was to transcribe the exact repetitive phrase of the clock as 'tic-tic tic-tic' (which is then used thirteen times in the poem). We can now see from one of the early manuscript versions that this was indeed a deliberate choice because in the draft the 'tic-tac-tic-tac' was changed in a later version to the 'tic-tic' that we know today.

Two other versions of time in 'Poema de un día', the rural time of the seasons, of the sowing and the harvest, and that of urban time, the time of the clock, were also consciously contrasted by Machado, to judge by the Malaga manuscript. On fol. 20r. he writes the headline 'mi reloj' and does a draft of that section of the poem, which is followed in the next version (fol. 21r.) by the insertion of what now becomes the earlier section where he compares his work as a poet to that of the farmer.

Some fourteen pages in Cuaderno 1 are devoted to notes for, or versions of, the poem 'Recuerdos', which was published in the first (1917) edition of Poesías completas. Nine lines of the first draft of the poem bear the title or epigraph 'The Hills of the Highlands forever I love', borrowed from Robert Burns' famous ballad 'My Heart's in the Highlands'. Burns' poem begins, 'Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North'³, and Machado either must have known Burns' ballad very well or else had a copy in front of him as he wrote 'Recuerdos'. We can see from this first draft of the latter that Machado began his poem in a very similar manner, with the line 'Adiós estepas frías, adiós el alto llano', situating the 'farewell' motif ('Adiós ... adiós') at the beginning of each of the opening hemistiches, exactly as in the Burns poem ('Farewell ... farewell'). It is worth noting too that, again according to the drafts, Machado did not decide to use the beginning that we have today ('Oh Soria, cuando miro')⁴ until what may have been the actual copy used for the Poesías completas of 1917, since all the drafts of the opening of 'Recuerdos' in this cuaderno begin after the fashion of the Burns poem. The opening line of the chorus of Burns' poem -'My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here'- must also surely have struck a chord with Machado, as he looked out at the Andalusian landscape, only to realize that his heart was in the Sorian uplands even as he wrote about what he was seeing (or imagined himself seeing) in his native region.

As noted earlier, Machado persisted with his opening repetitive address of farewell through all the drafts of 'Recuerdos': none of the notebook versions begins with the current one, the apostrophe 'Oh Soria'. This exclamatory opening of the final version of 'Recuerdos' is in keeping with his practice, in other poems, of striking into the heart of the poetic matter, in the manner of a direct, immediate and unstoppable Bergsonian intuition that invades the poet's consciousness, as here. Burns' opening two lines, 'My heart's in the Highlands / My heart is not here', achieve the same immediacy of effect as the opening of 'Recuerdos', where our poet is looking at the Andalusian countryside, but is seeing a different landscape in his mind's eye. Other effects of immediacy in 'Recuerdos' are achieved by the constant use of the present tense in the poem, as is also the case in the Burns poem, and by the structure, which is an extended apostrophe to Soria, complete with four pairs of exclamation marks.

Evidently Machado decided in the final draft to distance his poem formally from that of Burns and to begin with a very localized and direct address that emphasizes his unyielding emotional and creative involvement with a particular place, rather than his bidding farewell to it. This latter sentiment is then consigned to the second-last stanza of the poem, but is retracted in the final one, as Machado invokes the power of memory to recreate the spirit of Soria within himself ('En [...] tu recuerdo, Soria, mi corazón se abreva') and to continue to sustain this creation unencumbered by distance of time or space ('Tierra de alma, toda [...] mi corazón te lleva'). At the end of the drafts Machado wrote a note that would appear to confirm the movement away from Burns, and that may be interpreted as both detaching himself from the inspiration that Burns offered, while at the same time accepting what he was able to take from the renowned Scottish balladeer. In the note (12r.) he wrote: 'El paso que necesariamente hay que dar en la poesía es un sentimiento más hondo del campo, de la vida rural.- Preciso es ya huir del campo como espectáculo, como motivo de contemplación'. After the note, Machado pens on 12r. some verses which enable us to see further what he might have meant by these remarks:

Adios

Conmigo vais oh campos de Soria hacia tierra

Del sol por donde huye Guadalquivir al mar.

Firstly, there is the direct invocation to the 'campos de Soria' (a phrase omitted in the final draft, as we will comment on later), then there is the very close link made between the poet and this landscape in 'Conmigo vais': Machado moves beyond viewing the countryside as something 'out there' ('el campo como motivo de contemplación') to an identification with its creation as an integral part of his own life. (In the draft 11r. writing of the nightingales, he had just penned the verse 'Conmigo vais en sueños por esta tierra mía'.)

'Conmigo vais oh campos de Soria': this is the equivalent of Burns' 'My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here' (the Machado line was virtually unusable, of course, because of the awkward ungrammatical break at the hemistiche of the 7/7 alexandrine line). Yet, while not having the anapaestic urgency of Burns' verse, the line contains a similar emotional charge. The 'sentimiento más hondo' in Burns comes from the reiteration of the mention of the heart, and also from the strength of the temporal adverb in the line quoted by Machado as his epigraph, 'The hills of the Highlands forever I love'; there are, too, Burns' repeated apostrophes of farewell. Burns' nature has evidently been directly experienced by him in the past. In this context, in Cuaderno 2, Machado the institucionista wrote in a draft address to the young poets who visited him in Segovia in 1923, that Spaniards have not been used to experiencing nature directly, being a people, he writes, 'educado en las plazas de toros [y] que se apasiona por los bailes'. Such a people, again according to Machado, 'necesita salir al campo y aprender de nuevo a distinguir una nube de una bambalina' (427).

The scale of 'Recuerdos', as it pertains both to Soria and to Andalusia, but particularly the former, is worthy of note; indeed the implied contrast here between these two Spanish regions is the means by which the poet situates himself within the poem. Burns gives the impression of a plenitude and freedom of space and resources in the Highlands that he describes, suggesting that in his point of departure in the poem -his 'here'- lie the constrictions of urban life. Machado similarly leaves us with two images, one of a profusion of growth, a multitude of the resources of the earth to be exploited, and the other one of constriction, of hard work to be done in its realization, of carefully husbanded fields, and small-scale farming enterprises of 'menudas sementeras' and 'humildes abejares', with the crow at the bottom of the scale of husbandry 'buscando su infecto expoliario'. While for Burns in his poem the Scottish Highlands constitute an ideal romantic playground, and for Machado the Sorian uplands represented the unstinting husbandry of the glebe, the latter is no less haunted by the memories of the place he has left, to which the reference to the ghostly shapes and shadows of the large and small oaks in 'Recuerdos' gives testament. Indeed we can see that Machado turns the topos of constriction and freedom on its head in 'Recuerdos', opting here for the graft and effort of surviving in a harsh environment, rather than revelling in the ready-made abundance of nature, as does Burns. In this context it may be noted that in 'Recuerdos' both the adjectives 'altas' and 'hondas' used to describe the contrast of the mountainous terrain that has to be negotiated by the transmigrant sheep were products of a later draft. (Originally Machado had written 'verdes praderas numantinas', and 'mestas y cañadas'.)

The decisive shift away from the Burns poem is in the presentation of what Machado called in his note 'el campo como espectáculo'. Burns' poem is in part a 'spectacle' of sight and sound. The vision of 'chasing the wild deer', of bidding farewell to 'wild-hanging woods', to 'torrents and loud-pouring floods' is a long way from Machado's picture in 'Recuerdos', of the holm-oak burning in the hearth, the pines, bay trees, oaks, and the margins of a river planted with elms and poplars, all the latter domesticated and to a greater or lesser degree linked into the rural economy, the rhythm of the seasons and the human need to survive and provide some amenity in the forbidding landscape as it moves through a freezing winter towards an uncertain spring. Where Burns the individual skips through the Highlands inhabited only by deer to be hunted to the drumming rhythm of his anapaestic metre, Machado prefers to dwell in alexandrines on what he imagines as the contemporary epic struggle of the inhabitants of this 'vida rural' to see another spring into blossom.

Apart from Machado's interest in the Burns poem, another intertextual presence in the section of the manuscript devoted to drafts of 'Recuerdos' is represented by Machado's Spanish prose version of an equally famous ballad, this time Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 'Excelsior'. To judge by his version, Machado attempted to keep as close as possible to the original, and displays a good knowledge of English in so doing, if indeed he translated the poem from the original English. There is strong evidence for the latter, because he initially mistakes the adverb of time 'as' for 'since' instead of 'when', firstly mistranslating 'as' in the lines 'The shades of night were falling fast, / As through an Alpine village passed'⁵ by using 'como' and then correcting it to 'cuando'. (Incidentally, the copy is clean apart from this correction, suggesting the existence of earlier drafts.) The ballad tells the tale of a young man carrying a banner with the word 'Excelsior', evidently urging him to go onward and upward in his aspirations, as he passes through this village. On his way he rejects the voices of prudence and love, in the shape of an old man and a young maiden, and the blandishments of domestic life, as he sees the village's 'household fires gleam warm and bright'. The next day the young man is found buried in the snow, where, 'lifeless but beautiful, he lay', yet still holding the banner, and a voice is heard from the sky intoning the word 'Excelsior'.

Machado's interest in this ballad, enough for him to take the trouble to translate it, will be of particular interest to students of his work; not perhaps for the ballad's gothic, romantic qualities but for the picture of the 'ethical exile' that it gives us. In 'Recuerdos', Machado too is an ethical exile from his native Andalusia, even though he is living again in this land of his youth, because of what he saw as its inward and backward political character. We sense, also, in 'Poema de un día' that the poetic persona is isolated from the society of Baeza, immured in the walls of his own consciousness (as he depicts it in another Andalusian poem of the period, 'Caminos') notwithstanding the description of his visit to the local pharmacy in 'Poema de un día' to take part in (or more likely just to observe) the predictably dreary tertulia conversations that ensue. These then are linked to the repetitive cadences of the clock in the lines that immediately follow: 'Tic-tic, tic-tic... ya pasó / un día como otro día, / dice la monotonía / del reló'.

The editors' transcription of Machado's translation of 'Excelsior' is reasonably accurate, which is not surprising, given the clean state of the copy. But familiarity with the original Longfellow poem would have meant avoiding the error that renders Machado's version of the monks' 'oft-repeated prayer' as 'la respetada plegaria', when Machado has correctly written 'la repetida plegaria'. Also 'half-buried in the snow', correctly rendered by Machado as 'medio enterrado en la nieve', is transcribed as 'murió enterrado en la nieve'. This is not to take away from the excellent work done by the editors, merely a reminder to the prospective user of the Malaga volumes that reading Machado's own handwriting will repay the extra time spent in deciphering the original text, even though on rare occasions the poet's script is miniscule in the extreme. Thus, for example, in the line 'En la desesperanza y en la melancolía' of the last draft of 'Recuerdos', the letters and words are so tiny that the editors have transcribed the third word as 'esperanza'; and the line 'dispersos en los campos huir de sus colmenas' becomes in the editors' transcription 'dispersos en el campo humilde sus colmenas'.

Not to be outdone by its Malaga 'rival', the Burgos manuscripts also contain many fragmentary draft versions of one of Machado's best-known poems, 'Campos de Soria'. These drafts are of considerable use in helping to determine how Machado viewed the overall structure of the poem, which has puzzled critics, and led Geoffrey Ribbans to write on the poem's unity in 1973⁶. Firstly, it may be of interest to note that the famous opening line 'Es la tierra de Soria árida y fría' originally read 'Era una tarde anubarrada y fría' (Burgos, Vol. 2, 575), and that there was a title for this first section, 'La sierra'. The change to the opening line we know today is decisive in distancing the landscape by removing the reference to a particular afternoon, and replacing it with a more generalized depiction of the march of the seasons from spring to winter through the first five sections of the poem. The definitive insertion of the personal perspective of the poetic voice is thus delayed until the last three sections of the poem.

In the section 'La nieve', which is an interpolated story/ballad ('Campos de Soria' immediately precedes the long ballad 'La tierra de Alvargonzález' in Campos de Castilla), Machado had originally written an expanded version of the story of the young man who has been lost in the snow, and whose parents wait in vain for him to return. In the earlier version, the son, named as 'Juan', returns to his home:

Y en el silencio del hogar poblado

del dolor y el recuerdo y la amargura

del negro pan sacado

con sudor á la tierra ingrata y dura. [sic]

Revive el hijo muerto

y torna al lar donde la leña humea

y el puchero de barro borbotea

en el viejo mesón al campo abierto.

This Section V was already, by many verses, the longest part of the poem, so Machado may have decided to remove the eight just quoted, and several other verses also, in the interest of the overall balance between the sections of the poem. In so doing, he also removed an emphasis on the grim struggle for meagre recompense of the campesinos in the region, and hence a note of bitterness that is almost wholly absent from the final version of 'Campos de Soria', with its valedictory hope of 'alegría, luz, riqueza' for the inhabitants of what he calls the 'alto llano numantino'.

In another version of 'La nieve' the son's return is narrated in more detail:

La vieja mira atónita á la puerta

que da al camino, le mira se obscurece

y una figura familiar cubierta

de nieve hasta los ojos aparece.

Indeed, the many separate versions of Section V in the Burgos manuscript lead one to the conclusion that Machado originally planned this section as a completely independent poem. In Burgos, Vol. 2, 541, the page is titled 'Campos de Castilla', and beneath it is another title, underlined, La nieve, followed by a further version of this section of 'Campos de Soria'. Incidentally, the following Section VI, 'Soria fría Soria pura', also appears in the same manuscript (485), quite removed from any of the other sections. The final key as to the original organization of this structurally enigmatic poem is to be found in the manuscript versions of what are now the last two Sections VIII and IX: in Burgos, Vol. 2, 583-85 these are numbered VI and VII respectively, suggesting that Machado had not at this stage contemplated including Sections V and VI. Another intriguing element is to be found at Vol. 2, 597, because here what is called Section V ('Colinas plateadas') ends with the place and date of publication, 'Soria 15 Octubre 1911', which implies that at one stage of the poem's composition Machado intended this section to be the last!⁷

Volume 2 of the Burgos manuscript contains an early draft of the very interesting poem 'En tren. Flor de verbasco', published in Nuevas canciones in 1925, but dated 'Mayo 1921' in the MS (Burgos, Vol. 2, 327). An even earlier draft bore the title 'Yendo de Madrid a Segovia', together with the subtitle, or dedicatoria, 'A una Casa de Salud, que tiene, según me dijeron, el Guadarrama'. This subtitle, or at least the phrase 'según me dijeron', gives us a clue as to what would appear to be the central intuition of the poem: Machado, a regular traveller by rail between Segovia and Madrid, must have passed the sanatorium on many occasions, but evidently did not see any of the inmates taking outdoor exercise or even just breathing in the air of the sierra. Having been struck by this irony of building a TB hospital in the mountains only to prevent its inhabitants from benefiting from them, Machado constructs his poem around a contrast between what the sierra has to offer and what the inmates are receiving by way of medical treatment. Confined to their bedrooms, they listen for the sound of the passing trains, while the doctor peers at 'los diminutos pasos de la muerte' through his 'áureo microscopio'. In the 1921 draft Machado expanded on the power of nature and its capacity to give strength to the patients being wasted by tuberculosis. Here are some of these previously unpublished verses which the Burgos manuscript has brought to light:

De nieve silenciosa,

¡cuanta he visto caer!... Nunca piadosa,

bella, y buena tal vez, naturaleza,

algo sé de tu fuerza y tu riqueza,

aunque siempre te he amado por hermosa.

He then addresses the shepherds of the mountainy region and urges them to search for cures in this power and wealth of nature, to benefit the inmates of the sanatorium, imagined as 'humanos esqueletos' (another juxtaposed image of death and resurrection to which the poet was drawn):

Por esos vericuetos

del calvo monte y de la selva oscura,

hoja, fruta, raiz, fuente que cura

buscad, otros secretos

para atajar esa cruel flaqueza

que ciñe a los humanos esqueletos

la piel reseca por la calentura.

Finally in this section of the draft, Machado turns to a form of secularized prayer that he had used in other poems, but perhaps with less irony than here, a prayer that stresses the love of life as expressed in nature:

Porque, Señor, aunque la vida sea

camino en eriazo, cuanto vive con ansia la desea,

sin prisa por dormir en tu regazo[.]

Verdad Señor, impía,

pero verdad; porque la vida quiere

ese tu claro sol, tu claro día

mirar que entre tus montes nace y muere.

The version of this poem published in Nuevas canciones has the dedication, 'A los jóvenes poetas que me honraron con su visita en Segovia', and it is tempting to read it as a kind of masterclass in poetics delivered by Machado to the younger generation of poets⁸. The reference to the verbascum plant in the poem's title is a case in point: its stalky, rather weedy appearance would not make it an object of immediate aesthetic and poetic appreciation. Certainly, these earlier drafts add enormously to our appreciation and understanding of Machado's own poetics. Machado's deceptively simple diction may mask an affective presence with the very light air of metaphor. Take, for example, the image of the mist in the Guadarrama mountains, in this poem:

cuando la niebla va por los barrancos

o, desgarrada en el azul, enreda

sus guedejones blancos

en los picos de la áspera roqueda.

This is not just a fanciful image of the mist wrapping its ageing white tresses around the peaks of the rough sierra, but is also a call on our awareness of how a loving solidarity with the strength of nature can offer hope where little appears to exist.

Volume 5 of the Malaga manuscripts, titled Prosas sueltas, contains a nine-page draft of Machado's article on Moreno Villa's poetry, published as 'Reflexiones sobre la lírica'. There are also approximately one hundred manuscript pages of drafts for his pre-Civil-War series of Juan de Mairena. These latter pages appear to constitute an intermediate draft between the final printed version of 1936 and the manuscript Apuntes inéditos of 1933-1934. A small piece towards the end of Volume 5, unrelated to Juan de Mairena, is worth quoting in full here, because it shows us how Machado pushed to the limit his thoughts on his work as a poet. Titled 'Sobre el tiempo en la lírica', it affords us a very revealing glimpse into why Machado insisted on using rhyme in every single poem that he composed:

La rima es una repetición de sonidos. Porque los sonidos se repiten sabemos que se suceden. Porque se suceden están en el tiempo y no en el espacio. Pero si los sonidos al repetirse fueran idénticos, nuestra conciencia no tendría noción alguna de su iteración; estaría siempre enfrente de una nota en un presente discontinuo, fuera del tiempo; pues la noción del tiempo requiere una reminiscencia del pasado acompañando a una actuación en el presente. Pero reparemos en que la rima no nos da nunca la coexistencia de las sensaciones sonoras, sino de una sensación y de un recuerdo. Son sus elementos distintos y aun heterogéneos los que conjuga la rima. Con ella estamos dentro y fuera de nosotros mismos.

The point made by Machado here is that since rhymes are not the exact repetition of the same sounds but rather of similar ones, in this way they create a memory or echo from the past, of what is in the present. Effectively, rhymes help to turn the representation of objects that occupy space into the sensation of time. The other reason given by Machado for using rhyme in poetry is that the dialectic between similarity and difference that it sets up creates the link between the reader and what is being read, because the example of 'alterity' being absorbed by the consciousness of the reader is contained within the difference that constitutes the necessary change from rhyme to rhyme. These two ideas, the first concerning the placing of 'the word in time', the second suggesting that the slight phonic changes of rhymes can represent the relationship between the 'one' and the 'other', are fundamental concepts in Machado's aesthetics and metaphysics, encapsulated in a few hitherto unpublished sentences from one of his notebooks. If a thoroughgoing examination of these notebooks brings to the notice of Hispanists some more of Machado's insights such as the one just quoted, the value of the cuadernos will be well and truly vindicated. Above all, the notebooks facilitate the study of the creative process in Machado, of work in progress, and dealing with a writer such as Machado, who can be both diffuse and repetitive, and can move with disconcerting speed (like the Bergonsonian stream of consciousness, we might say) from one topic to the next, the analysis of any 'background' content to his work will be of great assistance to scholars.

The editors and coordinators of these texts, of which I have sampled only a very few enticing pages, are to be congratulated for the excellent scholarly work brought to fruition here. The logistical considerations, too, have not been ignored, particularly in the Burgos volumes, where these need to be turned upside down because of the disposition of the original pages, and in which their solidly stitched binding appears set to resist repeated handlings of this kind. These facsimiles, especially the ones dealing with creative concerns, will repay multiple readings, for the illumination of the creative and thought processes of one of Spain's finest poets. They also constitute a deserved tribute to the many hands that have come together, financial, commercial, cultural, educational, intellectual, to bring them into the public domain, which will be much the richer for it, and where they truly belong.