Neruda, p.53
Neruda, page 53
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, it’s true, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, and forgetting is so long.
Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is not at peace with having lost her.
Though this may be the final sorrow she causes me,
and these the last verses I write for her.
—From Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924). Translated by Mark Eisner in The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems, City Lights Books, 2004.
Walking Around
Comes a time I’m tired of being a man.
Comes a time I check out the tailor’s or the movies
shriveled, impenetrable, like a felt swan
launched into waters of origin and ashes.
A whiff from the barber shops has me wailing.
All I want is a break from rocks and wool,
all I want is to see neither buildings nor gardens,
no shopping centers, no bifocals, no elevators.
Comes a time I’m tired of my feet and my fingernails
and my hair and my shadow.
Comes a time I’m tired of being a man.
Yet how delicious it would be
to shock a notary with a cut lily
or to kill off a nun with a blow to the ear.
How beautiful
to run through the streets with a green knife,
howling until I died of cold.
I don’t want to go on like a root in the shadows,
hesitating, feeling forward, trembling with dream,
down down into the dank guts of the earth,
soaking it up and thinking, eating every day.
I don’t want for myself so many misfortunes.
I don’t want to keep on as root and tomb,
alone, subterranean, in a vault stuffed with corpses,
frozen stiff, dying of shame.
That’s why Monday burns like kerosene
when it sees me show up with my mugshot face,
and it shrieks on its way like a wounded wheel,
trailing hot bloody footprints into the night.
And it shoves me into certain corners, certain damp houses,
into hospitals where bones sail out the window,
into certain shoe stores reeking of vinegar,
into streets godawful as crevices.
There are sulfur-colored birds and horrific intestines
adorning the doors of houses I hate,
there are dentures dropped in a coffeepot,
mirrors
that must have bawled with shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, poisons and belly buttons.
I pass by peaceably, with eyes, with shoes,
with fury and forgetting,
I cruise the offices and orthopedic stores,
and patios where clothes hang from a wire,
where underwear, towels and blouses cry drawn out, obscene tears.
—From Residencia en la tierra II (1933). Translated by Forrest Gander in The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems, City Lights Books, 2004.
The Heights of Macchu Picchu: XII
Rise up and be born with me, brother.
From the deepest reaches of your
disseminated sorrow, give me your hand.
You will not return from the depths of rock.
You will not return from subterranean time.
It will not return, your hardened voice.
They will not return, your drilled-out eyes.
Look at me from the depths of the earth,
plowman, weaver, silent shepherd:
tender of the guardian guanacos:
mason of the impossible scaffold:
water-bearer of Andean tears:
goldsmith of crushed fingers:
farmer trembling on the seed:
potter poured out into your clay:
bring all your old buried sorrows
to the cup of this new life.
Show me your blood and your furrow,
say to me: here I was punished
because the gem didn’t shine or the earth
didn’t deliver the stone or the grain on time:
point out to me the rock on which you fell
and the wood on which they crucified you,
burn the ancient flints bright for me,
the ancient lamps, the lashing whips
stuck for centuries to your wounds
and the axes brilliant with bloodstain.
I come to speak through your dead mouth.
Through the earth unite all
the silent and split lips
and from the depths speak to me all night long
as if we were anchored together,
tell me everything, chain by chain,
link by link and step by step,
sharpen the knives you kept,
place them in my chest and in my hand,
like a river of yellow lightning,
like a river of buried jaguars,
and let me weep, hours, days, years,
blind ages, stellar centuries.
Give me silence, water, hope.
Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes.
Fasten your bodies to mine like magnets.
Come to my veins and my mouth.
Speak through my words and my blood.
—From Canto general (1950). Translated by Mark Eisner in collaboration with John Felstiner and Stephen Kessler in The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems, City Lights Books, 2004.
Ode to Wine
Wine color of day,
wine color of night,
wine with your feet of purple
or topaz blood,
wine,
starry child
of the earth,
wine, smooth
as a golden sword,
soft
as ruffled velvet,
wine spiral-shelled
and suspended,
loving,
marine,
you’ve never been contained in one glass,
in one song, in one man,
choral, you are gregarious,
and, at least, mutual.
Sometimes
you feed on mortal
memories,
on your wave
we go from tomb to tomb,
stonecutter of icy graves,
and we weep
transitory tears,
but
your beautiful
spring suit
is different,
the heart climbs to the branches,
the wind moves the day,
nothing remains
in your motionless soul.
Wine
stirs the Spring,
joy grows like a plant,
walls, boulders,
fall,
abysses close up,
song is born.
Oh thou, jug of wine, in the desert
with the delightful woman I love,
said the old poet.
Let the pitcher of wine
add its kiss to the kiss of love.
My love, suddenly
your hip
is the curve of the wineglass
filled to the brim,
your breast is the cluster,
your hair the light of alcohol,
your nipples, the grapes
your navel pure seal
stamped on your barrel of a belly,
and your love the cascade
of unquenchable wine,
the brightness that falls on my senses,
the earthen splendor of life.
But not only love,
burning kiss,
or ignited heart—
you are, wine of life,
also
fellowship, transparency,
chorus of discipline,
abundance of flowers.
I love the light of a bottle
of intelligent wine
upon a table
when people are talking,
that they drink it,
that in each drop of gold
or ladle of purple,
they remember
that autumn toiled
until the barrels were full of wine,
and let the obscure man learn,
in the ceremony of his business,
to remember the earth and his duties,
to propagate the canticle of the fruit.
—From Odas elementales (1954). Translated by Mark Eisner in The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems, City Lights Books, 2004.
Appendix II
On the Importance of Poetry in Chile
Poetry has been woven into the cultural history of Chile for centuries, giving Neruda a unique and advantageous foundation as a writer. The quality of his mentors, including teachers in his school; the opportunities to publish; the competitions in distant towns—all were products of this environment, and poetry’s stature in Chilean culture continued to provide momentum throughout his development. When he moved to Santiago at age sixteen, the importance of literature among the activists and bohemians who took him in fomented the completion, publication, and wide reception of his first books, launching his career.
While it is impossible to provide hard proof of the theories as to why these conditions arose, there are certain historic truths that lend some solid insight and help us understand the cultural nutrients that fertilized the land from which grew not only Neruda’s poetry, but the verse of a slew of superior lyricists, all from the same soil of such a small country.
Chile has long produced a wealth of luminary poets, from the sixteenth-century epic poetry of Alonso de Ercilla, to early twentieth-century voices such as the Nobel Prize–winning Gabriela Mistral and Vicente Huidobro, to the many important contemporary voices of this day. These include the Mapuche Elicura Chihuailaf; Raúl Zurita, a modern master in the poetry of resistance; and Nicanor Parra, who pushed the limits of Chilean poetry as much as Neruda may have defined them. There are also two legendary singer-songwriters, Violeta Parra (Nicanor’s sister) and Victor Jara. For centuries, Chileans have lived with poetry, reading and reciting and absorbing themselves in it. This tradition traces back to the people who inhabited the land before colonization, especially in Neruda’s south. The culture and oral traditions of the indigenous Mapuche people were steeped in lyric verse through their unwritten language, Mapudungun. The manner in which they elected their leaders exemplifies this. For the position of strategic leader, a candidate must prove he is a sage: that he is wise, prudent, and patient. He also must demonstrate his command of the language. Toward this end, one of the tests was a trial of rhetoric in a ritual exercised through poetry. The candidates recited, they sang, they engaged their audience with poems they created spontaneously, odes to everything that surrounded them (as Neruda did in his four books of odes). Through language they had to connect the tribe to its ancestors (as Neruda did in Canto General).* The most legendary strategic leader in Mapuche history was named Lautaro. The house in which Neruda grew up, in Temuco, was located at 1436 Lautaro Street.
This is how deeply poetry is ingrained in the Mapuche culture, the Mapuche who constituted Chile before the conquistadores. There were other indigenous people in the north with cultural ties to the Inca and the Aymara and Quechua peoples and languages. The claims are uncertain, but these small nation groups seem to also have influenced the importance of poetry in Chilean society. They had their own oral poetic tradition, and some contemporary Chile-specific vocabulary derives from them. Music has always been crucial to the Aymaran culture, with copla, rhymed verse composed by special techniques, playing a central role.†
As a child in Temuco, Neftalí’s worldview was influenced by the Mapuche but not necessarily by their language. At the time it was still a secret language, as missionaries and colonists still repressed the Mapuche when they spoke Mapudungun. He would have rarely heard it and definitely not understood it. If anything, over the years he might have picked up on some of the syllables and sounds.*
The importance of language, especially poetic language and structure, to Chilean indigenous peoples created a foundation upon which conquering Europeans would build. The colonists established a special lyrical culture specific to Chile from their arrival, specifically in the person of Alonso de Ercilla, a member of the Spanish troops. In a 1970 interview for the Paris Review, Neruda said,
Chile has an extraordinary history. Not because of monuments or ancient sculptures, which don’t exist here, but rather because Chile was invented by a poet, Don Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga . . . a Basque aristocrat who arrived with the conquistadores—quite unusual, since most of the people sent to Chile came out of the dungeons.
De Ercilla, “the young humanist,” wrote La Araucana on scraps of paper as the Spanish troops pursued the native people in the forests and towns around Temuco, the region from which the poem’s name derives. Neruda described the poem as “the longest epic in Castilian literature, in which he honored the unknown tribes of Araucania—anonymous heroes to whom he gave a name for the first time—more than his compatriots, the Castilian soldiers.”
Published in full in 1589 and then translated throughout Europe, it is still considered one of the great masterpieces of the Spanish Golden Age, one of the most significant epics of the Spanish canon. It is also the first Spanish American poem where nature emerges as part of the actual narrative story, an element in the heroic quest itself. That was especially important to Neruda, as it is set in the wilderness around Temuco. The forests described in the lines were some of those that he explored; the deluging rains were the same that he endured; he walked the great rivers whose banks became literary and logical obstacles to the conquistadores’ advances. The use of nature as the protagonist in such a fundamental text heavily influenced the poetry of many of the great Chilean poets, Raúl Zurita believes.
The first Spanish who came to Chile gave birth to a creole and mestizo class, who in turn used popular lyric poetry to protest the Spanish rule, which became part of the country’s culture leading to Chile’s independence.
These are the anthropological explanations that help explain the uniqueness of poetry in Chile. But there are social factors that were also of great importance. Chile’s poetry is rooted in the remarkable oral storytelling tradition of the Chilean campesino, the mine worker, the factory worker, the proletariat of the country. Stories told through verse were passed down in front of a fire, from one generation to another. At the turn of the twentieth century, northern miners would break into poetry readings at social gatherings.
In the early twentieth century, coinciding with Neftalí’s coming of age, poetry in Chile served as an art that was accessible to people who were poorly educated. They were the principal audience for the poets, more so than those in the high-society literary salons. Poetry was not perceived as elitist but as an art form with wide appeal. Indeed, this is partly why Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems became so popular at the time.
Rodrigo Rojas, a poet and professor at Chile’s Universidad Diego Portales, says that to this day he encounters many kids who come from “very humble origins who see poetry as a very complex art that they can have access to. It’s not something that is reserved exclusively for very rich or very well-educated people, although it still remains very difficult. But you don’t need a huge education for that.”
Chile has an extraordinary concentration of poets, of all levels of brilliance, per capita. Raúl Zurita provides yet another reason this has happened, why other countries may have somewhat similar social and anthropological histories, but Chile is still unique as a “nation of poets”: geography may have played a role in the flourishing of the art form. Zurita illuminates the circumstances, explaining that while Chileans were not blessed with an Italian Renaissance so that one can walk around the city and say, “There’s the Sistine Chapel!” or “Michelangelo made that sculpture,” Chile does have a huge landscape, a varied landscape. Chile’s Sistine Chapel is the Cordillera de los Andes and its Italian Renaissance painters are its poets. Out of this geographical landscape, the social landscape was molded by their words. That’s Chile’s cultural background, Zurita and others attest. Within such a small country, rugged and sparsely populated, isolated in many ways from the rest of the world, especially before modern communications and transportation, and surrounded by such an overpowering, dominant, impressive landscape, what do you do with it? Do you fight off the situation, or do you celebrate it with language? Chileans have done the latter.
Basic Chronology
July 12, 1904—Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (Pablo Neruda) is born in Parral, Chile.
1915—Neruda writes his first poem.
1918–20—Nearly thirty of Neruda’s poems are published in a variety of different journals, magazines, and newspapers throughout Chile.
1920—Neftalí begins to sign his poems as Neruda. He wins first place at the Temuco spring festival and graduates from high school.
1921—Neruda moves to Santiago and enters the University of Chile to study French pedagogy; he wins first prize in the Federación de Estudiantes de la Universidad de Chile poetry competition.
1923—First book, The Book of Twilights, is published.
1924—Twenty Love Poems and a Desperate Song is published.
1927—Neruda assumes the position of Chilean cónsul in Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar).
1928—Consul in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).
1930—Consul in Holland’s colony of Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia). He marries Maria Antonia Hagenaar Vogelzang (“Maruca”).
1932—Neruda and Maruca return to Chile.
1933—Neruda publishes the first of three volumes of Residence on Earth. He is named consul to Argentina, where he meets Federico García Lorca in Buenos Aires.
April 1934—Neruda is named consul to Barcelona, then Madrid.
August 1934—Neruda and Maruca’s daughter, Malva Marina, is born prematurely with hydrocephaly.
July 1936—General Francisco Franco leads an uprising in Morocco, starting the Spanish Civil War. Lorca is killed by firing squad in August.
