This book offers a much needed reappraisal of a major twentieth-century Spanish poet, Antonio Machado (1875–1939), offering compelling arguments why his poetry should have a more vital profile not only within the precincts of Hispanism but also alongside the most significant twentieth-century poets of Europe and America, seeking to open up new perspectives for the interpretation of his poetry. The unifying concepts, as the title suggests, are landscape and transformation. Landscape, a topic barely broached in Spanish poetry before Machado, is a central thematic concern in his poetry. His treat ... More

This book offers a much needed reappraisal of a major twentieth-century Spanish poet, Antonio Machado (1875–1939), offering compelling arguments why his poetry should have a more vital profile not only within the precincts of Hispanism but also alongside the most significant twentieth-century poets of Europe and America, seeking to open up new perspectives for the interpretation of his poetry. The unifying concepts, as the title suggests, are landscape and transformation. Landscape, a topic barely broached in Spanish poetry before Machado, is a central thematic concern in his poetry. His treatment of landscape has been studied in connection with questions of tradition, place, and nationality. However, landscape not only describes a visual relation to a literal place but also a metaphorical space in which a relation to the world is imagined. From this standpoint, one aspect reassessed here is the impact of developments in the visual arts and the natural sciences on Machado’s view of landscape. Moreover, because landscape implies perspective—both physical and cultural—and representations of nature are often gendered, they carry an ideological component which is explored in detail. The book also considers how his poetry absorbs and reproduces cultural authority through his treatment of the sublime and the dialectics of place and space. Finally, translation itself represents a change of landscape as well as language, and the examination of the main English translations of Machado’s poetry constitutes a crucial element of this enquiry, including for the first time a comparative analysis of Machado’s Anglo-American translators.