poets and in the case of Borges, to have a shared a friendship with
him for nearly two decades. In the biographical segments, I include
documented information in conventional format, yet there is some
information which is personal memoir and I am obliged to state or
imply it as such. For example, there were long conversations with
the Spanish linguist Tomás Navarro Tomás in New York and the
philosopher Juan Roura-Parella in Middletown, Connecticut, both
companions of Antonio Machado in the military ambulance that
took them out of Spain in January 1939 and across the Spanish
border to safety in France; and talks with Louis MacNeice about
the days he knew Antonio Machado in Barcelona, just before the
flight to France.

My first acquaintance with Antonio Machado was through
Middlebury College's summer language and literature program. In
1947 I had just come from Mexico (my Mexican stepmother Matilde
Franco lives there still) where I had spent a year working with the
American Friends Service Committee in a small Indian village and
later studying at the University of Mexico. Even in Mexico I had
become close to the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War: while in
the capital I lived in an orphanage (run by the Spanish Republican
government in exile) for Spanish orphans of the war who were then
enrolled in Mexican universities. From Mexico then, and the bean-
and-potato tortilla meals of our Spanish orphanage, I went to the
pastoral hills and lawns of Middlebury and the eloquent, expansive
princes of contemporary Spanish poetry. That summer in Vermont
the American diaspora of Spanish literature had congregated. Pedro
Salinas and Navarro Tomás were on the faculty. One evening after
a poetry reading there was a small gathering at which Luis Cemuda
and Jorge Guillén showed up. Francisco Garcia Lorca was the sum-
mer school director for many years. These were my years of first
acquaintance and immersion in that extraordinary rebirth of poetry
in Spain in our century--and in its oral history by the Spanish poets
of exile.

As a result of Middlebury, I spent a week that autumn visiting
Jaime Salinas in Baltimore. Each evening Jaime's father, Pedro Sali-
nas, remembered, as he did in his books, the poets of his generation.
At Columbia, Navarro Tomás spoke to me in great detail about his
last days with Machado in Spain, at the border, and in France. I
recorded his memories in a notebook. In Greece in 1951, where
I was then teaching, Louis MacNeice talked about Machado in
Barcelona--a tired, disheartened, glorious man chain-smoking, the
ashes falling much of the time on his black suit. In 1952 in Madrid
I had the first of many conversations that would take place over the
next three decades with Vicente Aleixandre about Federico and
Miguel--Lorca and Hernández--his two closest friends who had

-xvi-