Traveller, there is no road; the road is made by…
Quote
Traveller, there is no road; the road is made by walking.
The story behind this quote
These lines belong to poem XXIX of “Proverbios y cantares”, a series of short poems in the collection Campos de Castilla. The poem speaks to a traveller: your footprints are the road, and nothing more. After the famous lines, Machado adds that looking back one sees the path that will never be walked again, and ends with another image: there is no road, only wakes upon the sea, traces the water soon erases.
Machado published Campos de Castilla in 1912, while teaching French in Soria. That same year his young wife, Leonor, died, and the poet moved to Baeza. In these “proverbs” he condenses, with the simplicity of a folk song, his reflection on time and the meaning of life.
The idea is as simple as it is deep: life is not mapped out in advance, and the road exists only behind the one who walks it. In 1969 the singer Joan Manuel Serrat set these lines in his song “Cantares”, which made them famous throughout the Spanish-speaking world.
Original text
Caminante, no hay camino: se hace camino al andar.
The source
Proverbios y cantares, XXIX (Campos de Castilla), 1912
Original text checked word for word in the work; the translation is by quotesay.
Author
Antonio Machado
Antonio Machado, a poet of the Generation of ’98, wrote Fields of Castile (1912). His “Proverbs and Songs” condense a philosophy of life and of the road into a few lines.
Quotes by Antonio Machado