The Eyes

In this text Don Paterson has used the work of the late, great Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1875-1939) to create a spiritual portrait which lies somewhere between translation and imitation, showing Machado to have a surprisingly modern philosophical bent.

Antonio Machado is one of the towering figures of twentieth-century Spanish poetry, a writer whose austere musicality has been said to capture the very essence of the language. By going for as disciplined a treatment of both form and diction as Machado exhibits, Don Paterson succeeds in writing what might be called a spiritual portrait, a synthesis of his own verbal inventiveness and a sympathetic rendering of the works that inspired him.