A yellow roughness in the land

Round Soria the land is dry and cold. Over the hills, the barren ranges, through green bits of meadow, up the cindery peaks the spring advances, leaving its small white daisies scattered in the fragrant grasses. The earth is not reborn: the country dreams...- from 'The Soria Country' by Antonio Machado, trans. Alan S. TruebloodIn 1909 the Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1875-1939), a leading figure in the Generation of '98, was offered a job teaching French in the old city of Soria in northeastern Spain. There he fell in love with Leonor, the young daughter of the owner of his boarding house (like the unfortunate Lars Hertervig, who I wrote about here earlier this year). They married and spent some time in Paris but she was suffering from tuberculosis and died in 1912. Machado had just published the collection Campos de Castilla featuring poems inspired by the landscape around Soria. He was so devastated by the loss of Leonor that he left Soria and never returned. I first encountered…