Caminante, no hay camino by Antonio Machado

Caminante, no hay camino
by Antonio Machado

You walking, your footprints are
the road, and nothing else;
there is no road, walker
you make the road by walking.
By walking you make the road,
and when you look backward,
you see the path that you
will never step on again.
Walker, there is no road,
only wind-trails in the sea.

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.

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Some translations have “Traveler…” I think because I have been influenced by the role of the Walker in Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom fiction series, and even earlier, The Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper, I prefer the “Walker” translation. But that aside, I love so much the truthiness of “you make the road by walking”. That is the path of uncertainty that we are all on. I once started a keynote to a group of entrepreneurs with this poem, and this also applies in the arts space, where I think of Sondheim’s “making a hat where there never was a hat.” More philosophically, Machado was reading Heidegger and Bergson, thinking about temporality and becoming, and the poem is a compressed phenomenology of self-making.