Spanish poetry is in full force today. One of Manuel Machado’s first collections of poetry, published at the end of the nineteenth century, appeared in its entirety in 1895, and which was believed to have been lost! This is the second collection of poems written by this great Seville poet, with a few more … Twenty years ago, it was printed, in Barcelona, with poems by him and his fellow bohemian Madridist Enrique Paradas.
At the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the present century, the vast majority of Machado scholars believed that the complete edition of this collection of poems had disappeared and that the only copy that could be consulted was the one kept in the Machado Library, of the Fernán González Foundation, of the Royal Burgundy Academy of History and Fine Arts, which was missing the vast majority of the pages on which Manuel Machado’s poems were supposed to appear.
In the most important bibliography of Manuel Machado, published by the National Library in 1976, this poetry collection was identified with the title “Eltsetera” and was said to consist of 126 pages, without mentioning that some of the last pages of it may be missing. In other less detailed bibliographies, published in 1972, 1974 and 1975, the same title “Etcetera” was repeated, but in one of them it was noted that the complete copy of it was “a volume that cannot be found”.
The disappearance of a complete copy of this collection of poems means that no one knows exactly which verses by Manuel Machado (or how many) make up the collection.
The status of this collection of poems began to change in the fall of 1979, when Miguel Dors, poet and professor of Spanish literature at the University of Granada and one of the most important researchers of the works of Manuel Machado, after analyzing the distorted version of Burgos, published an article in the academic journal “Cuadernos de Investigacion Filológica” of the University of La Rioja, “Where is the error in Manuel Machadina’s bibliographies have been edited”, where it was said for the first time that the book signed “Paradas” Machado’s work was titled not ‘Etcétera’ but ‘& Versos’ (on the cover of the book the title is ‘& Collection of Poetry’), a title he described as ‘another manifestation of Manuel Machado’s very personal taste in titles’, recalling his poems bearing other tags, such as ‘…!’, ‘***’ and ‘….?’.
The book is titled “&”. Collection of poems, but was previously known as “Etcétera” and “& verses” by some scholars
The first deformed sample
Miguel Dors commented that it seemed “inexplicable” to him that the authors of the aforementioned bibliographies, whom he knew had seen Burgos’s collection of poems, had retained the title “Etcétera,” but it was very likely that even if they had known the real title, they would have chosen the translation, which was much easier to read. The symbol “&” is an abbreviation of the Latin plural conjunction “Et”, which is equivalent in Spanish to “Y” or “Etcétera”.
But Professor Dorr’s article goes further than just talking about the real title of the collection of poems. It also provided important information about the serious mutilation of the volume kept in Burgos. He stated that it is 126 pages long. that in the first 120 verses of Prada were reproduced, and that in the remaining six appeared the name of Manuel Machado, the title of a possible section of poems he had written for the book, “Bocetos,” and a poem, “Ruinas” (a poem that had already appeared in the first collection of the two’s poems, the year before, “Tristes y Alejos”), he concluded that “it would be very strange if Machado’s contribution to the book consisted of only six pages” and “one poem,” and it was clear that “part Machado doesn’t really end there” and that a number of them are missing.
The article ended by encouraging researchers to “explore libraries” in search of the lost collection of poems, “but now they are not looking for ‘Etcetera’ but for ‘&’ in their catalogues.” No researcher or anyone from the academic, lyrical or bibliographic world has announced its finding. Miguel Dors made the same call again, republishing his entire article in a book entitled “Studies on Manuel Machado” published by Renacimiento in 2000. It had no results either. It seemed clear, at least, until shortly after that year, that the entire collection of poems had not yet appeared.
Full version
But with the beginning of 2022, the story turned 180 degrees: a complete copy of the lost poetry collection appeared, although the media was not informed of it. This is the story of its emergence, the story of book lovers, poetry lovers, and researchers of the life and singing work of Manuel Machado.
One morning in January 2022, Manuel Márquez de la Plata (the first signatory of this article), poetry reader, bibliophile, and anthologist Manuel Machado, who had read an essay by Miguel Dors, an author he admired for his poems and essays, suddenly discovered the title of Machado’s lost collection of poems, in an online listing from a Catalan antiquarian bookstore, which was selling it for little. One hundred euros. The Marqués de la Plata, who knew Dors’ article and was a lover of all things Manuel Machado, did not hesitate for a moment and bought it on the spot.
A few days later, he was in his possession. It was a copy in excellent condition, and Manuel, like any book lover, enjoyed touching it, smelling it, reading it, leafing through it, and even reciting it. Verify that the collection of poems printed in Barcelona in 1895 consists of 191 pages, that is, 65 pages more than the distorted copy kept in Burgos! Machado’s poems, which occupy from page 121 to page 191, are divided into two parts, “Sketches” and “Poetry in Prose,” and that the Seville poet’s verses in this group of poems total more than eighty.
It is true that about half of these poems have already appeared in publications of the era in which Manuel Machado collaborated, such as “La Caricatura”, or that the Seville poet included them in later books of his… But the other half is not found (at least, with the same beginning) in the list of Manuel Machado’s poems collected in his latest book “Complete Poems”, published by the publishing house “Renacimento” in 2019.
The appearance of this complete collection of poems brought to the rescue poems written by the young Manuel Machado that were practically unknown to readers of his works. Among them are authentic lyrical gems, some of them in one verse:
Be in love, love the night,
Loss of illusion and imagination,
Calling light gold, daylight
And…use your heart freely,
Believe, doubt, and greasy topping,
Laugh with sadness and cry with joy
Keep hope “after”;
You live in hope of loss.
Be thoughtful, be idle,
You have crazy hours, ascetic hours,
Feeling pregnant and lazy,
The prisoner of art in secret passion,
is to be happy a thousand times,
…Unhappy a thousand times… It’s to be a poet!
It will make me tired…
It’s stupid that I love being with you
I must have forgotten.
I deny desire
That made me like this.
A gypsy of bad blood
I see myself like this!
Where did you put it girl?
Your laugh, nothing more, and your words,
And the game of your eyes, I put
I am my life and my soul.
The sound of the sea has no words…
Not even the blowing of trees.
And they talk!
…they say many things!
Woe to me! I love tuberose and nightshade!
The Márquez de la Plata, as a reader of poetry and a lover of books, enjoyed the copy he obtained, but he kept thinking of Miguel Dors’s essay, and although he did not know its author personally, in gratitude for the many moments of satisfaction his writing had given him, he decided, soon after receiving it, to send him by certified mail a copy of the pages on which Machado’s poems appeared. I knew you would love them. In fact, Miguel Dors, now retired, living in his native Galicia, received the generous gift, surprised and excited, and after thanking his donor in a letter, he confined himself to adding it to his very complete collection of first editions of the books of one of his favorite poets and to whose study he had devoted many hours and days.
And so it was, three years later, in the spring of 2025, when Victor Olmos (the second signatory of this text), a retired journalist and writer, currently researching and writing a biography of Manuel Machado, telephoned Miguel to ask him a question, something he did frequently, knowing that Dors was one of the most important experts on the life and works of Manuel Machado. In conversation, the subject of the collection of poems “& Versos” came up and Miguel admitted that, at last, he had obtained a copy of the pages of the supposed lost collection of poems, in which he had finally been able to read those first verses of Manuel Machado, and told how they had come into his possession.
Nothing is final
Olmos, who, despite being about to turn ninety, maintains a certain journalistic nose, concluded that the aforementioned copy could be quite unique (in the world of bibliography nothing is definitive, but from what is known today, no other copy seems to exist) and, therefore, a literary first.
He suggested to Miguel to tell the story of the collection of poems lost and found in some media, a story of particular interest at this time when the Machado family was on everyone’s lips, after the successful exhibition “Los Machado”. “Family Portrait” was exhibited in Seville, Burgos and Madrid, but Miguel replied that this painting belonged to its owner, the Marques de la Plata.
Victor contacted Manuel and liked the idea of reporting the existence of a collection of poems for Machado’s connoisseurs, autobiographies, and bibliographies. He proposed to Victor that they narrate this literary event together in an article that could be sent to the ABC, famous, among other things, for its complete and advanced literary information and, moreover, the newspaper in which Victor wrote and published his story… But, above all, because the ABC is the newspaper in which Manuel Machado has collaborated since its foundation.