from
Canto General
1950
Era el crepúsculo de la iguana.
Desde la arcoirisada crestería
su lengua como un dardo
se hundía en la verdura,
el hormiguero monacal pisaba
con melodioso pie la selva,
el guanaco fino como el oxígeno
en las anchas alturas pardas
iba calzando botas de oro,
mientras la llama abría cándidos
ojos en la delicadeza
del mundo lleno de rocío.
Los monos trenzaban un hilo
interminablemente erótico
en las riberas de la aurora,
derribando muros de polen
y espantando el vuelo violeta
de las mariposas de Muzo.
Era la noche de los caimanes,
la noche pura y pululante
de hocicos saliendo del légamo,
y de las ciénagas soñolientas
un ruido opaco de armaduras
volvía al origen terrestre.
El jaguar tocaba las hojas
con su ausencia fosforescente,
el puma corre en el ramaje
como el fuego devorador
mientras arden en él los ojos
alcohólicos de la selva.
Los tejones rascan los pies
del río, husmean el nido
cuya delicia palpitante
atacarán con dientes rojos.
Y en el fondo del agua magna,
como el círculo de la tierra,
está la gigante anaconda
cubierta de barros rituales,
devoradora y religiosa.
It was the twilight of the iguana.
From the rainbow-arch of the battlements,
his long tongue like a lance
sank down in the green leaves,
and a swarm of ants, monks with feet chanting,
crawled off into the jungle,
the guanaco, thin as oxygen
in the wide peaks of cloud,
went along, wearing his shoes of gold,
while the llama opened his honest eyes
on the breakable neatness
of a world full of dew.
The monkeys braided a sexual
thread that went on and on
along the shores of the dawn,
demolishing walls of pollen
and startling the butterflies of Muzo
into flying violets.
It was the night of the alligators,
the pure night, crawling
with snouts emerging from ooze,
and out of the sleepy marshes
the confused noise of scaly plates
returned to the ground where they began.
The jaguar brushed the leaves
with a luminous absence,
the puma runs through the branches
like a forest fire,
while the jungle’s drunken eyes
burn from inside him.
The badgers scratch the river’s
feet, scenting the nest
whose throbbing delicacy
they attack with red teeth.
And deep in the huge waters
the enormous anaconda lies
like the circle around the earth,
covered with ceremonies of mud,
devouring, religious.
PART I describes South America before the Europeans arrived: the plants and trees, birds, rivers, and minerals, and the Aztec priests coming down the temple stairs looking like “brilliant pheasants.” There are eleven poems in this section; we have chosen the second poem, about the animals.
Translated by James Wright
El ser como el maíz se desgranaba en el inacabable
granero de los hechos perdidos, de los acontecimientos
miserables, del uno al siete, al ocho,
y no una muerte, sino muchas muertes llegaba a cada uno:
cada día una muerte pequeña, polvo, gusano, lámpara
que se apaga en el lodo del suburbio, una pequeña muerte de alas gruesas
entraba en cada hombre como una corta lanza
y era el hombre asediado del pan o del cuchillo,
el ganadero: el hijo de los puertos, o el capitán oscuro del arado,
o el roedor de las calles espesas:
todos desfallecieron esperando su muerte, su corta muerte diaria:
y su quebranto aciago de cada día era
como una copa negra que bebían temblando.
PART II, called The Heights of Macchu Picchu is made up of twelve1 poems suggested by a visit Neruda made in 1943 to the old ruins of Macchu Picchu, high in the Andes.
The human soul was threshed out like maize in the endless
granary of defeated actions, of mean things that happened,
to the very edge of endurance, and beyond,
and not only death, but many deaths, came to each one:
each day a tiny death, dust, worm, a light
flicked off in the mud at the city’s edge, a tiny death with coarse wings
pierced into each man like a short lance
and the man was besieged by the bread or by the knife,
the cattle-dealer: the child of sea-harbors, or the dark
captain of the plough,
or the rag-picker of snarled streets:
everybody lost heart, anxiously waiting for death, the
short death of every day:
and the grinding bad luck of every day was
like a black cup that they drank, with their hands shaking.
Translated by James Wright
Balboa, muerte y garra
llevaste a los rincones de la dulce
tierra central, y entre los perros
cazadores, el tuyo era tu alma:
Leoncico de belfo sangriento
recogió al esclavo que huía,
hundió colmillos españoles
en las gargantas palpitantes,
y de las uñas de los perros
salía la carne al martirio
y la alhaja caía en la bolsa.
Maldito sean perro y hombre,
el aullido infame en la selva
original, el acechante
paso del hierro y del bandido.
Maldita sea la espinosa
corona de la zarza agreste
que no saltó como un erizo
a defender la cuna invadida.
Pero entre los capitanes
sanguinarios se alzó en la sombra
la justicia de los puñales,
la acerba rama de la envidia.
Y al regreso estaba en medio
de tu camino el apellido
de Pedrarias como una soga.
Te juzgaron entre ladridos
de perros matadores de indios.
Ahora que mueres, oyes
el silencio puro, partido
por tus lebreles azuzados?
Ahora que mueres en las manos
de los torvos adelantados,
sientes el aroma dorado
del dulce reino destruido?
Cuando cortaron la cabeza
de Balboa, quedó ensartada
en un palo. Sus ojos muertos
descompusieron su relámpago
y descendieron por la lanza
en un goterón de inmundicia
que desapareció en la tierra.
Balboa, you brought death and claws
everywhere into the sweet land
of Central America, and among those hunting dogs
your dog was your soul:
with his bloodstained jowls Lioncub
picked up the slave escaping,
sank his Spanish teeth
into the panting throats;
pieces of flesh slipped from
the dogs’ jaws into martyrdom
and the jewel fell in the pocket.
A curse on dog and man,
the horrible howl in the unbroken
forest, and the stealthy
walk of the iron and the bandit.
And a curse on the spiny crown
of the wild thornbush
that did not leap like a hedgehog
to protect the invaded cradle.
But the justice of knives,
the bitter branch of envy,
rose in the darkness
among the bloody captains.
And when you got back, the man
named Pedrarias stood
in your way like a rope.
PART III turns to the European discoverers of South America, and the conquistadors. One poem describes Columbus’ first arrival in 1493, and his later arrival at Mexico in 1519. Cortez, Balboa, and Ximenez de Quesada have their own poems; Neruda describes the death of Atahualpa, and the careers of Valdivia and Magellan. The picture he gives of these men is often very different from the images of them in American history books. There are thirty-three poems. We have translated three, the poems on the fall and death of Balboa, on the death of Atahualpa, and on Almagro, the discoverer of Chile.
They tried you surrounded by the barkings
of dogs that killed Indians.
Now you are dying, do you hear
the pure silence, broken
by your excited dogs?
Now you are dying in the hands
of the stern authorities,
do you sense the precious aroma
of the sweet kingdom smashed forever?
When they cut off Balboa’s
head, it was stuck up
on a pole. His dead eyes
let their lightning rot
and descended along the pole
as a large drop of filth
which disappeared into the earth.
Translated by Robert Bly
En Caj amarca empezó la agonía.
El joven Atahualpa, estambre azul,
árbol insigne, escuchó al viento
traer rumor de acero.
Era un confuso
brillo y temblor desde la costa,
un galope increíble
—piafar y poderío—
de hierro y hierro entre la hierba.
Llegaron los adelantados.
El Inca salió de la música
rodeado por los señores.
Las visitas
de otro planeta, sudadas y barbudas,
iban a hacer la reverencia.
El capellán
Valverde, corazón traidor, chacal podrido,
adelanta un extraño objeto, un trozo
de cesto, un fruto
tal vez de aquel planeta
de donde vienen los caballos.
Atahualpa lo toma. No conoce
de qué se trata: no brilla, no suena,
y lo deja caer sonriendo.
“Muerte,
venganza, matad, que os absuelvo”,
grita el chacal de la cruz asesina.
El trueno acude hacia los bandoleros.
Nuestra sangre en su cuna es derramada.
Los príncipes rodean como un coro
al Inca, en la hora agonizante.
Diez mil peruanos caen
bajo cruces y espadas, la sangre
moja las vestiduras de Atahualpa.
Pizarro, el cerdo cruel de Extremadura
hace amarrar los delicados brazos
del Inca. La noche ha descendido
sobre el Perú como una brasa negra.
In Cajamarca, the anguish of death began.
The youthful Atahualpa, sky-blue stamen,
illustrious tree, listened to the wind
carry the faint murmur of steel.
There was a confused
light, an earth-tremor from the coast,
an unbelievable galloping—
rearing and power—
from iron and iron, among the weeds.
The governors were arriving.
The Inca came out to the music
surrounded by his nobles.
The visitors
from another planet, sweaty and bearded,
go to do reverence.
The chaplain,
Valverde, treacherous heart, rotten jackal,
brings forward a strange object, a piece
of a basket, a fruit,
perhaps from the same planet from which the horses come.
Atahualpa takes it. He does not know
what it is made of ; it doesn’t shine, it makes no noise,
and he lets it fall, smiling.
“Death ;
vengeance, kill, I will absolve you,”
the jackal of the murderous cross cries out.
Thunder draws near the robbers.
Our blood is shed in its cradle.
The young princes gather like a chorus
around the Inca, in the hour of the anguish of death.
Ten thousand Peruvians fell
under crosses and swords, the blood
moistened the robes of Atahualpa.
Pizarro, the cruel hog from western Spain,
had the slender arms of the Inca
tied up. Night has now come down
over Peru like a live coal that is black.
Translated by James Wright
Del Norte trajo Almagro su arrugada centella.
Y sobre el territorio, entre explosión y ocaso,
se inclinó día y noche como sobre una carta.
Sombra de espinas, sombra de cardo y cera,
el español reunido con su seca figura,
mirando las sombrías estrategias del suelo.
Noche, nieve y arena hacen la forma
de mi delgada patria,
todo el silencio está en su larga línea,
toda la espuma sale de su barba marina,
todo el carbón la llena de misteriosos besos.
Como una brasa el oro arde en sus dedos
y la plata ilumina como una luna verde
su endurecida forma de tétrico planeta.
El español sentado junto a la rosa un día,
junto al aceite, junto al vino, junto al antiguo cielo
no imaginó este punto de colérica piedra
nacer bajo el estiércol del águila marina.
Almagro brought his wrinkled lightning down from the north,
and day and night he bent over this country
between gunshots and twilight, as if over a letter.
Shadow of thorn, shadow of thistle and of wax,
the Spaniard, alone with his dried-up body,
watching the shadowy tactics of the soil.
My slim nation has a body made up
of night, snow, and sand,
the silence of the world is in its long coast,
the foam of the world rises from its seaboard,
the coal of the world fills it with mysterious kisses.
Gold burns in its finger like a live coal
and silver lights up like a green moon
its petrified shadow that’s like a gloomy planet.
The Spaniard, sitting one day near a rose,
near oil, near wine, near the primitive sky,
could not really grasp how this spot of furious stone
was born beneath the droppings of the ocean eagle.
Translated by Robert Bly
PART IV, called “The Liberators” is the longest section in the book, with over fifty poems. It concentrates on the liberations in the various South American countries from the European nations that had colonized them. We have chosen the twenty-eighth poem, on the liberator of Haiti, Toussaint L’Ouverture. There are fine poems also on O’Higgins, Lautaro, San Martin, Bolivar, José Marti, and others.
Haití de su dulzura enmarañada,
extrae pétalos patéticos,
rectitud de jardines, edificios
de la grandeza, arrulla
el mar como un abuelo oscuro
su antigua dignidad de piel y espacio.
Toussaint L’Ouverture anuda
la vegetal soberanía,
la majestad encadenada,
la sorda voz de los tambores,
y ataca, cierra el paso, sube,
ordena, expulsa, desafía
como un monarca natural,
hasta que en la red tenebrosa
cae y lo llevan por los mares
arrastrado y atropellado
como el regreso de su raza,
tirado a la muerte secreta
de las sentinas y los sótanos.
Pero en la Isla arden las peñas,
hablan las ramas escondidas,
se trasmiten las esperanzas,
surgen los muros del baluarte.
La libertad es bosque tuyo,
oscuro hermano, preserva
tu memoria de sufrimientos
y que los héroes pasados
custodien tu mágica espuma.
Out of its own tangled sweetness
Haiti raises mournful petals,
and elaborate gardens, magnificent
structures, and rocks the sea
as a dark grandfather rocks
his ancient dignity of skin and space.
Toussaint L’Ouverture knits together
the vegetable kingdom,
the majesty chained,
the monotonous voice of the drums
and attacks, cuts off retreats, rises,
orders, expels, defies
like a natural monarch,
until he falls into the shadowy net
and they carry him over the seas,
dragged along and trampled down
like the return of his race,
thrown into the secret death
of the ship-holds and the cellars.
But on the island the boulders burn,
the hidden branches speak,
hopes are passed on,
the walls of the fortress rise.
Liberty is your own forest,
dark brother, don’t lose
the memory of your sufferings,
may the ancestral heroes
have your magic sea-foam in their keeping.
Translated by James Wright
Cuando sonó la trompeta, estuvo
todo preparado en la tierra,
y Jehová repartió el mundo
a Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, y otras entidades:
la Compañía Frutera Inc.
se reservó lo más jugoso,
la costa central de mi tierra,
la dulce cintura de América.
Bautizó de nuevo sus tierras
como “Repúblicas Bananas,”
y sobre los muertos dormidos,
sobre los héroes inquietos
que conquistaron la grandeza,
la libertad y las banderas,
estableció la ópera bufa:
enajenó los albedríos
regaló coronas de César,
desenvainó la envidia, atrajo
la dictadura de las moscas,
moscas Trujillos, moscas Tachos,
moscas Carias, moscas Martínez,
moscas Ubico, moscas húmedas
de sangre humilde y mermelada,
moscas borrachas que zumban
sobre las tumbas populares,
moscas de circo, sabias moscas
entendidas en tiranía.
Entre las moscas sanguinarias
la Frutera desembarca,
arrasando el café y las frutas,
en sus barcos que deslizaron
como bandejas el tesoro
de nuestras tierras sumergidas.
Mientras tanto, por los abismos
azucarados de los puertos,
caían indios sepultados
en el vapor de la mañana:
un cuerpo rueda, una cosa
sin nombre, un número caído,
un racimo de fruta muerta
derramada en el pudridero.
When the trumpet sounded, it was
all prepared on the earth,
and Jehovah parceled out the earth
to Coca-Cola, Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other entities:
The Fruit Company, Inc.
reserved for itself the most succulent,
the central coast of my own land,
the delicate waist of America.
It rechristened its territories
as the “Banana Republics”
and over the sleeping dead,
over the restless heroes
who brought about the greatness,
the liberty and the flags,
it established the comic opera:
abolished the independencies,
presented crowns of Caesar,
unsheathed envy, attracted
the dictatorship of the flies,
Trujillo flies, Tacho flies,
Carias flies, Martinez flies,
Ubico flies, damp flies
of modest blood and marmalade,
drunken flies who zoom
over the ordinary graves,
circus flies, wise flies
well trained in tyranny.
PART v, “The Betrayed Sand,” concentrates on the men who allowed South American nations to fall back to colonialism, this time to the financial colonialism of the United States, and on the men who support United States’ interests today. He mentions the pressure from U.S. companies to keep wages low. He describes especially events in the year 1946, while he was a Senator in Chile. We have chosen one of the poems in the center of the section, on the United Fruit Company.
Among the bloodthirsty flies
the Fruit Company lands its ships,
taking off the coffee and the fruit;
the treasure of our submerged
territories flows as though
on plates into the ships.
Meanwhile Indians are falling
into the sugared chasms
of the harbors, wrapped
for burial in the mist of the dawn:
a body rolls, a thing
that has no name, a fallen cipher,
a cluster of dead fruit
thrown down on the dump.
Translated by Robert Bly
Veo el sollozo en el carbón de Lota
y la arrugada sombra del chileno humillado
picar la amarga veta de la entraña, morir,
vivir, nacer en la dura ceniza
agachados, caídos como si el mundo
entrara así y saliera así
entre polvo negro, entre llamas,
y sólo sucediera
la tos en el invierno, el paso
de un caballo en el agua negra, donde ha caído
una hoja de eucaliptus como un cuchillo muerto.
PART VI, called “America, I Do Not Call Your Name Without Hope,” is made of eighteen curious and oblique poems. The long flowing narratives we have become used to in Canto General disappear, and we find instead sudden instants the poem holds back in order to look deep into them. The language is resonant and fragrant. The poems describe an instant on horseback in winter, an instant aware of hunger in the coal mines, an instant aware of the mad frustration of Central America, a meeting with some seamen in Valparaiso, an instant in Patagonia with the seals. We have translated four of the poems, including his famous poem on adolescence, the title poem, a poem on hunger, and “Dictators,” with its powerful, oblique language describing the mood of a Latin American country under a dictator.
I see the sobbing in the coal at Lota
and the wrinkled shadow of the beaten-down Chilean
pick away at the bitter vein in the core, die,
live, be born in the petrified cinder
bent over, fallen as if the world
could arrive like that or leave like that
among black dust, among flames,
and all that would come out of it would be
the cough in winter, the step
of a horse in the black water, where
a eucalyptus leaf has fallen like a dead knife.
Translated by Robert Bly
Un perfume como una ácida espada
de ciruelas en un camino,
los besos del azúcar en los dientes,
las gotas vitales resbalando en los dedos,
la dulce pulpa erótica,
las eras, los pajares, los incitantes
sitios secretos de las casas anchas,
los colchones dormidos en el pasado, el agrio valle verde
mirado desde arriba, desde el vidrio escondido:
toda la adolescencia mojándose y ardiendo
como una lámpara derribada en la lluvia.
An odor like an acid sword made
of plum branches along the road,
the kisses like sugar in the teeth,
the drops of life slipping on the fingertips,
the sweet sexual fruit,
the yards, the haystacks, the inviting
rooms hidden in the deep houses,
the mattresses sleeping in the past, the savage green valley
seen from above, from the hidden window:
adolescence all sputtering and burning
like a lamp turned over in the rain.
Translated by Robert Bly
Ha quedado un olor entre los cañaverales:
una mezcla de sangre y cuerpo, un penetrante
pétalo nauseabundo.
Entre los cocoteros las tumbas están llenas
de huesos demolidos, de estertores callados.
El delicado sátrapa conversa
con copas, cuellos y cordones de oro.
El pequeño palacio brilla como un reloj
y las rápidas risas enguantadas
atraviesan a veces los pasillos
y se reúnen a las voces muertas
y a las bocas azules frescamente enterradas.
El llanto está escondido como una planta
cuya semilla cae sin cesar sobre el suelo
y hace crecer sin luz sus grandes hojas ciegas.
El odio se ha formado escama a escama,
golpe a golpe, en el agua terrible del pantano,
con un hocico lleno de légamo y silencio.
An odor has remained among the sugarcane:
a mixture of blood and body, a penetrating
petal that brings nausea.
Between the coconut palms the graves are full
of ruined bones, of speechless death-rattles.
The delicate dictator is talking
with top hats, gold braid, and collars.
The tiny palace gleams like a watch
and the rapid laughs with gloves on
cross the corridors at times
and join the dead voices
and the blue mouths freshly buried.
The weeping cannot be seen, like a plant
whose seeds fall endlessly on the earth,
whose large blind leaves grow even without light.
Hatred has grown scale on scale,
blow on blow, in the ghastly water of the swamp,
with a snout full of ooze and silence.
Translated by Robert Bly
América, no invoco tu nombre en vano.
Cuando sujeto al corazón la espada,
cuando aguanto en el alma la gotera,
cuando por las ventanas
un nuevo día tuyo me penetra,
soy y estoy en la luz que me produce,
vivo en la sombra que me determina,
duermo y despierto en tu esencial aurora:
dulce como las uvas, y terrible,
conductor del azúcar y el castigo,
empapado en esperma de tu especie,
amamantado en sangre de tu herencia.
America, I do not call your name without hope.
When I hold the sword against the heart,
when I live with the faulty roof in the soul,
when one of your new days
pierces me coming through the windows,
I am and I stand in the light that produces me,
I live in the darkness which makes me what I am,
I sleep and awake in your fundamental sunrise:
as mild as the grapes, and as terrible,
carrier of sugar and the whip,
soaked in the sperm of your species,
nursed on the blood of your inheritance.
Translated by Robert Bly
Patria, mi patria, vuelvo hacia ti la sangre.
Pero te pido, como a la madre el niño
lleno de llanto.
Acoge
esta guitarra ciega
y esta frente perdida.
Salí a encontrarte hijos por la tierra,
salí a cuidar caídos con tu nombre de nieve,
salí a hacer una casa con tu madera pura,
salí a llevar tu estrella a los héroes heridos.
Ahora quiero dormir en tu substancia.
Dame tu clara noche de penetrantes cuerdas,
tu noche de navío, tu estatura estrellada.
Patria mía: quiero mudar de sombra.
Patria mía: quiero cambiar de rosa.
Quiero poner mi brazo en tu cintura exigua
y sentarme en tus piedras por el mar calcinadas,
a detener el trigo y mirarlo por dentro.
Voy a escoger la flora delgada del nitrato,
voy a hilar el estambre glacial de la campaña,
y mirando tu ilustre y solitaria espuma
un ramo litoral tejeré a tu belleza.
Patria, mi patria
toda rodeada de agua combatiente
y nieve combatida,
en ti se junta el águila al azufre,
y en tu antártica mano de armiño y de zafiro
una gota de pura luz humana
brilla encendiendo el enemigo cielo.
Guarda tu luz, oh patria!, mantén
tu dura espiga de esperanza en medio
del ciego aire temible.
En tu remota tierra ha caído toda esta luz difícil,
este destino de los hombres,
que te hace defender una flor misteriosa
sola, en la inmensidad de América dormida.
Country, my country, I turn my blood in your direction.
But I am begging you the way a child begs its mother,
with tears:
take this blind guitar
and these lost features.
I left to find sons for you over the earth,
I left to comfort those fallen with your name made of snow,
I left to build a house with your pure timber,
I left to carry your star to the wounded heroes.
Now I want to fall asleep in your substance.
Give me your clear night of piercing strings,
your night like a ship, your altitude covered with stars.
My country: I want to change my shadow.
My country: I want to have another rose.
I want to put my arm around your narrow waist
and sit down on your stones whitened by the sea
and hold the wheat back and look deep into it.
I am going to pick the thin flower of nitrate,
I am going to feel the icy wool of the field,
and staring at your famous and lonesome sea-foam
I’ll weave with them a wreath on the shore for your beauty.
Country, my country,
entirely surrounded by aggressive water
and fighting snow,
the eagle and the sulphur come together in you,
PART VII, called “Canto General of Chile,” was evidently the seed of the whole book, and contains some of the earliest poems written for the volume. Neruda touches on the geography and history of Chile here in a way he was later to do for all of South America. It is a sort of ode of praise to Chile, a homesick poem. The poem “Ocean,” often translated, is from this section. We have chosen the poem he wrote in 1939, after deciding to go back to Chile following the collapse of the Spanish Republican army, a poem called “Hymn and Return.”
and a drop of pure human light
burns in your antarctic hand of ermine and sapphire,
lighting up the hostile sky.
My country, take care of your light! Hold up
your stiff straw of hope
into the blind and frightening air.
All of this difficult light has fallen on your isolated land,
this future of the race,
that makes you defend a mysterious flower
alone, in the hugeness of an America that lies asleep.
Translated by Robert Bly
The poems in PART VIII are centered about people, usually ordinary or “unknown” Chileans. At times the Chileans themselves talk, telling their stories, at other times Neruda describes their lives. Several of the monologues contain descriptions of torture performed by the police. The poems vary in quality. We have chosen the first poem of the fourteen, about a shoveler Neruda met in the nitrate works.
(Palero-Tocopilla)
Te conocí, Cristóbal, en las lanchas anchas
de la bahía, cuando baja
el salitre, hacia el mar, en la quemante
vestidura de un día de Noviembre.
Recuerdo aquella extática apostura,
los cerros de metal, el agua quieta.
Y sólo el hombre de las lanchas, húmedo
de sudor, moviendo nieve.
Nieve de los nitratos, derramada
sobre los hombros del dolor, cayendo
a la barriga ciega de las naves.
Allí, paleros, héroes de una aurora
carcomida por ácidos, sujeta
a los destinos de la muerte, firmes,
recibiendo el nitrato caudaloso.
Cristóbal, este recuerdo para ti.
Para los camaradas de la pala,
a cuyos pechos entra el ácido
y las emanaciones asesinas,
hinchando como águilas aplastadas
los corazones, hasta que cae el hombre,
hasta que rueda el hombre hacia las calles,
hacia las cruces rotas de la pampa.
Bien, no digamos más, Cristóbal, ahora
este papel que te recuerda, a todos,
a los lancheros de bahía, al hombre
ennegrecido de los barcos, mis ojos
van con vosotros en esta jornada
y mi alma es una pala que levanta
cargando y descargando sangre y nieve,
junto a vosotros, vidas del desierto.
(Shoveler at Tocopilla)
I met you on the broad barges
in the bay, Cristobal, while the sodium nitrate
was coming down, wrapped in a burning
November day, to the sea.
I remember the ecstatic nimbleness,
the hills of metal, the motionless water.
And only the bargemen, soaked
with sweat, moving snow.
Snow of the nitrates, poured
over painful shoulders, dropping
into the blind stomach of the ships.
Shovelers there, heroes of a sunrise
eaten away by acids, and bound
to the destinies of death, standing firm,
taking in the floods of nitrate.
Cristobal, this memento is for you,
for the others shoveling with you,
whose chests are penetrated by the acids
and the lethal gases,
making the heart swell up
like crushed eagles, until the man drops,
rolls toward the streets of town,
toward the broken crosses out in the field.
Enough of that, Cristobal, today
this bit of paper remembers you, each of you,
the bargemen of the bay, the man
turned black in the boats, my eyes
are moving with yours in this daily work
and my soul is a shovel which lifts
loading and unloading blood and snow
next to you, creatures of the desert.
Translated by Robert Bly
Al oeste de Colorado River
hay un sitio que amo.
Acudo allí con todo lo que palpitando
transcurre en mí, con todo
lo que fuí, lo que soy, lo que sostengo.
Hay unas altas piedras rojas, el aire
salvaje de mil manos
las hizo edificadas estructuras:
el escarlata ciego subió desde el abismo
y en ellas se hizo cobre, fuego y fuerza.
América extendida como la piel de búfalo,
aérea y clara noche del galope,
allí hacia las alturas estrelladas,
bebo tu copa de verde rocío.
Sí, por agria Arizona y Wisconsin nudoso,
hasta Milwaukee levantada contra el viento y la nieve
o en los enardecidos pantanos de West Palm,
cerca de los pinares de Tacoma, en el espeso
olor de acero de tus bosques,
anduve pisando tierra madre,
hojas azules, piedras de cascada,
huracanes que temblaban como toda la música,
ríos que rezaban como los monasterios,
ánades y manzanas, tierras y aguas,
infinita quietud para que el trigo nazca.
Allí pude, en mi piedra central, etender al aire
ojos, oídos, manos, hasta oír
libros, locomotoras, nieve, luchas,
fábricas, tumbas, vegetales, pasos,
y de Manhattan la luna en el navío,
el canto de la máquina que hila,
la cuchara de hierro que come tierra,
la perforadora con su golpe de cóndor
y cuanto corta, oprime, corre, cose:
seres y ruedas repitiendo y naciendo.
Amo el pequeño hogar del farmer. Recientes madres duermen
aromadas como el jarabe del tamarindo, las telas
recién planchadas. Arde
el fuego de mil hogares rodeados de cebollas.
(Los hombres cuando cantan cerca del río tienen
una voz ronca como las piedras del fondo:
el tabaco salió de sus anchas hojas
y como un duende del fuego llegó a estos hogares.)
Missouri adentro venid, mirad el queso y la harina,
las tablas olorosas, rojas como violines,
el hombre navegando la cebada,
el potro azul recién montado huele
el aroma del pan y de la alfalfa:
campanas, amapolas, herrerías,
y en los destartalados cinemas silvestres
el amor abre su dentadura
en el sueño nacido de la tierra.
Es tu paz lo que amamos, no tu máscara.
No es hermoso tu rostro de guerrero.
Eres hermosa y ancha Norte América.
Vienes de humilde cuna como una lavandera,
junto a tus ríos, blanca.
Edificada en lo desconocido,
es tu paz de panal lo dulce tuyo.
Amanos tu hombre con las manos rojas
de barro de Oregon, tu niño negro
que te trajo la música nacida
en su comarca de marfil: amamos
tu ciudad, tu substancia,
tu luz, tus mecanismos, la energía
del Oeste, la pacífica
miel, de colmenar y aldea,
el gigante muchacho en el tractor,
la avena que heredaste
de Jefferson, la rueda rumorosa
que mide tu terrestre oceanía,
el humo de una fábrica y el beso
número mil de una colonia nueva:
tu sangre labradora es la que amamos:
tu mano popular llena de aceite.
Bajo la noche de las praderas hace ya tiempo
reposan sobre la piel del búfalo en un grave
silencio las sílabas, el canto
de lo que fuí antes de ser, de lo que fuimos.
Melville es un abeto marino, de sus ramas
nace una curva de carena, un brazo
de madera y navío. Whitman innumerable
como los cereales, Poe en su matemática
tiniebla, Dreiser, Wolfe,
frescas heridas de nuestra propia ausencia,
Lockridge reciente, atados a la profundidad,
cuántos otros atados a la sombra:
sobre ellos la misma aurora del hemisferio arde
y de ellos está hecho lo que somos.
Poderosos infantes, capitanes ciegos,
entre acontecimientos y follajes amedrentados a veces,
interrumpidos por la alegría y por el duelo,
bajo las praderas cruzadas de tráfico,
cuántos muertos en las llanuras antes no visitadas:
inocentes atormentados, profetas recién impresos,
sobre la piel del búfalo de las praderas.
De Francia, de Okinawa, de los atolones
de Leyte (Norman Mailer lo ha dejado escrito),
del aire enfurecido y de las olas,
han regresado casi todos los muchachos.
Casi todos … Fué verde y amarga la historia
de barro y sudor: no oyeron
bastante el canto de los arrecifes
ni tocaron tal vez sino para morir en las islas, las coronas
de fulgor y fragancia:
sangre y estiércol
los persiguieron, la mugre y las ratas,
y un cansado y desolado corazón que luchaba.
Pero ya han vuelto,
los habéis recibid
en el ancho espacio de las tierras extendidas
y se han cerrado (los que han vuelto) como una corola
de innumerables pétalos anónimos
para renacer y olvidar.
(1948)
PART IX returns to a consideration of the United States. It opens with the vivid poem printed here, and then goes on to ask why it is the United States is always on the dictators’ side, and consistently attempts to destroy risings anywhere in the world. Neruda warns the United States not to invade South America, and wishes that “Abraham Lincoln would wake up.” This entire section, translated as “Let the Rail-splitter Awake” was printed as a pamphlet by Masses And Mainstream. Some of the pieces are crude propaganda, others fresh and generous poems.
West of the Colorado River
there’s a place I love.
I take refuge there with everything alive
in me, with everything
that I have been, that I am, that I believe in.
Some high red rocks are there, the wild
air with its thousand hands
has turned them into human buildings.
The blind scarlet rose from the depths
and changed in these rocks to copper, fire, and energy.
America spread out like a buffalo skin,
light and transparent night of galloping,
near your high places covered with stars
I drink down your cup of green dew.
Yes, through acrid Arizona and Wisconsin full of knots,
as far as Milwaukee, raised to keep back the wind and the snow
or in the burning swamps of West Palm,
near the pine trees of Tacoma, in the thick odor
of your forests which is like steel,
I walked weighing down the mother earth,
blue leaves, waterfalls of stones,
hurricanes vibrating as all music does,
rivers that muttered prayers like monasteries,
geese and apples, territories and waters,
infinite silence in which the wheat could be born.
I was able there, in my deep stony core, to stretch my eyes, ears, hands,
far out into the air until I heard
books, locomotives, snow, battles,
factories, cemeteries, footsteps, plants,
and the moon on a ship from Manhattan,
the song of the machine that is weaving,
the iron spoon that eats the earth,
the drill that strikes like a condor,
and everything that cuts, presses, sews:
creatures and wheels repeating themselves and being born.
I love the farmer’s small house. New mothers are asleep
with a good smell like the sap of the tamarind, clothes
just ironed. Fires are burning in a thousand homes,
with drying onions hanging around the fireplace.
(When they are singing near the river the men’s voices
are deep as the stones at the river bottom ;
and tobacco rose from its wide leaves
and entered these houses like a spirit of the fire.)
Come deeper into Missouri, look at the cheese and the flour,
the boards aromatic and red as violins,
the man moving like a ship among the barley,
the blue-black colt just home from a ride smells
the odor of bread and alfalfa:
bells, poppies, blacksmith shops,
and in the rundown movies in the small towns
love opens its mouth full of teeth
in a dream born of the earth.
What we love is your peace, not your mask.
Your warrior’s face is not handsome.
North America, you are handsome and spacious.
You come, like a washerwoman, from
a simple cradle, near your rivers, pale.
Built up from the unknown,
what is sweet in you is your hivelike peace.
We love the man with his hands red
from the Oregon clay, your Negro boy
who brought you the music born
in his country of tusks: we love
your city, your substance,
your light, your machines, the energy
of the West, the harmless
honey from hives and little towns,
the huge farmboy on his tractor,
the oats which you inherited
from Jefferson, the noisy wheel
that measures your oceanic earth,
the factory smoke and the kiss,
the thousandth, of a new colony:
what we love is your workingman’s blood:
your unpretentious hand covered with oil.
For years now under the prairie night
in a heavy silence on the buffalo skin
syllables have been asleep, poems
about what I was before I was born, what we were.
Melville is a sea fir, the curve of the keel
springs from his branches, an arm
of timber and ship. Whitman impossible to count
as grain, Poe in his mathematical
darkness, Dreiser, Wolfe,
fresh wounds of our own absence,
Lockridge more recently, all bound to the depths,
how many others, bound to the darkness:
over them the same dawn of the hemisphere burns,
and out of them what we are has come.
Powerful foot soldiers, blind captains,
frightened at times among actions and leaves,
checked in their work by joy and by mourning,
under the plains crossed by traffic,
how many dead men in the fields never visited before:
innocent ones tortured, prophets only now published,
on the buffalo skin of the prairies.
From France, and Okinawa, and the atolls
of Leyte (Norman Mailer has written it out)
and the infuriated air and the waves,
almost all the men have come back now,
almost all … The history of mud and sweat
was green and sour ; they did not hear
the singing of the reefs long enough
and perhaps never touched the islands, those wreaths of
brilliance and perfume,
except to die:
dung and blood
hounded them, the filth and the rats,
and a fatigued and ruined heart that went on fighting.
But they have come back,
you have received them
into the immensity of the open lands
and they have closed (those who came back) like a flower
with thousands of nameless petals
to be reborn and forget.
(1948)
Translated by Robert Bly
Era el otoño de las uvas.
Temblaba el parral numeroso.
Los racimos blancos, velados,
escarchaban sus dulces dedos,
y las negras uvas llenaban
sus pequeñas ubres repletas
de un secreto río redondo.
El dueño de casa, artesano
de magro rostro, me leía
el pálido libro terrestre
de los días crepusculares.
Su bondad conocía el fruto,
la rama troncal y el trabajo
de la poda que deja al árbol
su desnuda forma de copa.
A los caballos conversaba
como a inmensos niños: seguían
detrás de él los cinco gatos
y los perros de aquella casa,
unos enarcados y lentos,
otros corriendo locamente
bajo los fríos durazneros.
El conocía cada rama,
cada cicatriz de los árboles,
y su antigua voz me enseñaba
acariciando a los caballos.
PART X, “The Fugitive” was written during the months Gonzalez Videla’s police were pursuing him. Its thirteen poems describe being led at night through unlit streets, knocking on the door, and living a day or two with families that were risking their lives to take him in. It is a poem of thanks to those who helped him. We chose the second poem, on a host who had horses.
It was the grape’s autumn.
The dense vinefield shivered.
The white clusters, half-hidden,
found their mild fingers cold,
and the black grapes were filling
their tiny stout udders
from a round and secret river.
The man of the house, an artisan
with a hawk’s face, read to me
the pale earth book
about the darkening days.
His kindliness saw deep into the fruit,
the trunk of the vine, and the work
of the pruning knife, which lets the tree keep
its simple goblet shape.
He talked to his horses
as if to immense boys: behind him
the five cats trailed,
and the dogs of that household,
some arched and slow moving,
others running crazily
under the cold peach trees.
He knew each branch,
each scar on his trees,
and his ancient voice taught me
while it was stroking his horses.
Translated by James Wright
and Robert Bly
Extraña era la fábrica inactiva.
Un silencio en la planta, una distancia
entre máquina y hombre, como un hilo
cortado entre planetas, un vacío
de las manos del hombre que consumen
el tiempo construyendo, y las desnudas
estancias sin trabajo y sin sonido.
Cuando el hombre dejó las madrigueras
de la turbina, cuando desprendió
los brazos de la hoguera y decayeron
las entrañas del horno, cuando sacó los ojos
de la rueda y la luz vertiginosa
se detuvo en su círculo invisible,
de todos los poderes poderosos,
de los círculos puros de potencia,
de la energía sobrecogedora,
quedó un montón de inútiles aceros
y en las salas sin hombre, el aire viudo,
el solitario aroma del aceite.
Nada existía sin aquel fragmento
golpeando, sin Ramírez,
sin el hombre de ropa desgarrada.
Allí estaba la piel de los motores,
acumulada en muerto poderío,
como negros cetáceos en el fondo
pestilente de un mar sin oleaje,
o montañas hundidas de repente
bajo la soledad de los planetas.
In PART XI, he describes a visit he made to Punitaqui and its gold mine in 1946, while he was a Senator. It was cactus and boulders and drought; farmers asking him to speak to “the Ministry,” toward possible help for the starving. We have chosen the thirteenth of the fifteen poems, describing the mood in a factory during a long strike he watched there.
The idle factory came to seem strange.
A silence in the plant, a distance
between machine and man, as if a thread had been cut
between two planets, an absence
of human hands that use up time
making things, and the naked
rooms without work and without noise.
When man deserted the lairs
of the turbine, when he tore off
the arms of the fire, so that the inner organs
of the furnace died, and pulled out the eyes
of the wheel, so that the dizzy light
paused in its invisible circle,
the eyes of the great energies,
of the pure circles of force,
of the stupendous power,
what remained was a heap of pointless pieces of steel,
and in the shops without men a widowed air
and the lonesome odor of oil.
Nothing existed without that fragment
hammering, without Ramirez,
without the man in torn overalls.
Nothing was left but the hides of the engines,
heaps of power gone dead,
like black whales in the polluted
depths of a sluggish sea,
or mountain ranges suddenly drowned
under the loneliness of outer space.
Translated by Robert Bly
PART XII is made up of five long poems to friends. All five friends, at great sacrifice to themselves, had fought against business and the right wing. Among the friends are Miguel Hernandez and Rafael Alberti. We have chosen the first, the joyful poem written to the Venezuelan poet, Miguel Otero Silva. Neruda wrote it while still in hiding, and he knows the police will try to deduce from the details in the poem where he is, so he tells Silva many details about seagulls, “useful to the State.” Nicolas Guillen is the Cuban poet, still alive.
(1948)
Nicolás Guillen me trajo tu carta escrita
con palabras invisibles, sobre su traje, en sus ojos.
Qué alegre eres, Miguel, qué alegres somos!
Ya no queda en un mundo de úlceras estucadas
sino nosotros, indefinidamente alegres.
Veo pasar al cuervo y no me puede hacer daño.
Tú observas el escorpión y limpias tu guitarra.
Vivimos entre las fieras, cantando, y cuando tocamos
un hombre, la materia de alguien en quien creíamos,
y éste se desmorona como un pastel podrido,
tú en tu venezolano patrimonio recoges
lo que puede salvarse, mientras que yo defiendo
la brasa de la vida.
Qué alegría, Miguel!
Tú me preguntas dónde estoy? Te contaré
—dando sólo detalles útiles al Gobierno—
que en esta costa llena de piedras salvajes
se unen el mar y el campo, olas y pinos,
águilas y petreles, espumas y praderas.
Has visto desde muy cerca y todo el día
cómo vuelan los páj aros del mar? Parece
que llevaran las cartas del mundo a sus destinos.
Pasan los alcatraces como barcos del viento,
otras aves que vuelan como flechas y traen
los mensajes de reyes difuntos, de los príncipes
enterrados con hilos de turquesa en las costas andinas,
y las gaviotas hechas de blandura redonda,
que olvidan continuamente sus mensajes.
Qué azul es la vida, Miguel, cuando hemos puesto en ella
amor y lucha, palabras que son el pan y el vino,
palabras que ellos no pueden deshonrar todavía,
porque nosotros salimos a la calle con escopeta y cantos.
Están perdidos con nosotros, Miguel.
Qué pueden hacer sino matarnos y aun así
les resulta un mal negocio, sólo pueden
tratar de alquilar un piso frente a nosotros y seguirnos
para aprender a reír y a llorar como nosotros.
Cuando yo escribía versos de amor, que me brotaban
por todas partes, y me moría de tristeza,
errante, abandonado, royendo el alfabeto,
me decían: “Qué grande eres, oh Teocrito!”
Yo no soy Teócrito: tomé a la vida,
me puse frente a ella, la besé hasta vencerla,
y luego me fuí por los calle jones de las minas
a ver cómo vivían otros hombres.
Y cuando salí con las manos teñidas de basura y dolores,
las levanté mostrándolas en las cuerdas de oro,
y dije: “Yo no comparto el crimen”.
Tosieron, se disgustaron mucho, me quitaron el saludo,
me dejaron de llamar Teocrito, y terminaron
por insultarme y mandar toda la policía a encarcelarme,
porque no seguía preocupado exclusivamente de asuntos metafísicos.
Pero yo había conquistado la alegría.
Desde entonces me levanté leyendo las cartas
que traen las aves del mar desde tan lejos,
cartas que vienen mojadas, mensajes que poco a poco
voy traduciendo con lentitud y seguridad: soy meticuloso
como un ingeniero en este extraño oficio.
Y salgo de repente a la ventana. Es un cuadrado
de transparencia, es pura la distancia
de hierbas y peñascos, y así voy trabajando
entre las cosas que amo: olas, piedras, avispas,
con una embriagadora felicidad marina.
Pero a nadie le gusta que estemos alegres, a ti te asignaron
un papel bonachón: “Pero no exagere, no se preocupe”,
y a mí me quisieron clavar en un insectario, entre las lágrimas,
para que éstas me ahogaran y ellos pudieron decir sus
discursos en mi tumba.
Yo recuerdo un día en la pampa arenosa
del salitre, había quinientos hombres
en huelga. Era la tarde abrasadora
de Tarapacá. Y cuando los rostros habían recogido
toda la arena y el desangrado sol seco del desierto,
yo vi llegar a mi corazón, como una copa que odio,
la vieja melancolía. Aquella hora de crisis,
en la desolación de los salares, en ese minuto débil de
la lucha, en que podríamos haber sido vencidos,
una niña pequeñita y pálida venida de las minas
dijo con una voz valiente en que se juntaban el cristal y el acero
un poema tuyo, un viejo poema tuyo que rueda entre los ojos arrugados
de todos los obreros y labradores de mi patria, de América.
Y aquel trozo de canto tuyo refulgió de repente
en mi boca como una flor purpúrea
y bajó hacia mi sangre, llenándola de nuevo
con una alegría desbordante nacida de tu canto.
Y yo pensé no sólo en ti, sino en tu Venezuela amarga.
Hace años, vi un estudiante que tenía en los tobillos
la señal de las cadenas que un general le había impuesto,
y me contó cómo los encadenados trabajaban en los caminos
y los calabozos donde la gente se perdía. Porque así ha sido nuestra América:
una llanura con ríos devorantes y constelaciones
de mariposas (en algunos sitios, las esmeraldas son espesas como manzanas),
pero siempre a lo largo de la noche y de los ríos
hay tobillos que sangran, antes cerca del petróleo,
hoy cerca del nitrato, en Pisagua, donde un déspota sucio
ha enterrado la flor de mi patria para que muera, y él pueda comerciar con los huesos.
Por eso cantas, por eso, para que América deshonrada y herida
haga temblar sus mariposas y recoja sus esmeraldas
sin la espantosa sangre del castigo, coagulada
en las manos de los verdugos y de los mercaderes.
Yo comprendí qué alegre estarías, cerca del Orinoco, cantando,
seguramente, o bien comprando vino para tu casa,
ocupando tu puesto en la lucha y en la alegría,
ancho de hombros, como son los poetas de este tiempo
—con trajes claros y zapatos de camino—.
Desde entonces, he ido pensando que alguna vez te escribiría,
y cuando Guillén llegó, todo lleno de historias tuyas
que se le desprendían de todo el traje
y que bajo los castaños de mi casa se derramaron,
me dije: “Ahora”, y tampoco comencé a escribirte.
Pero hoy ha sido demasiado: pasó por mi ventana
no sólo un ave del mar, sino millares,
y recogí las cartas que nadie lee y que ellas llevan
por las orillas del mundo, hasta perderlas.
Y entonces, en cada una leía palabras tuyas
y eran como las que yo escribo y sueño y canto,
y entonces decidí enviarte esta carta, que termino aquí
para mirar por la ventana el mundo que nos pertenece.
Nicolas Guillen brought me your letter, written
invisibly, on his clothes, in his eyes.
How happy you are, Miguel, both of us are!
In a world that festering plaster almost covers
there is no one left aimlessly happy but us.
I see the crow go by ; there’s nothing he can do to harm me.
You watch the scorpion, and polish your guitar.
Writing poetry, we live among the wild beasts, and when we touch
a man, the stuff of someone in whom we believed,
and he goes to pieces like a rotten pie,
you in the Venezuela you inherited gather together
whatever can be salvaged, while I cup my hands
around the live coal of life.
What happiness, Miguel!
Are you going to ask where I am? I’ll tell you—
giving only details useful to the State—
that on this coast scattered with wild rocks
the sea and the fields come together, the waves and the pines,
petrels and eagles, meadows and foam.
Have you ever spent a whole day close to sea birds,
watching how they fly? They seem
to be carrying the letters of the world to their destinations.
The pelicans go by like ships of the wind,
other birds go by like arrows, carrying
messages from dead kings, viceroys,
buried with strands of turquoise on the Andean coasts,
and seagulls, so magnificently white,
they are constantly forgetting what their messages are.
Life is like the sky, Miguel, when we put
loving and fighting in it, words that are bread and wine,
words they have not been able to degrade even now,
because we walk out in the street with poems and guns.
They don’t know what to do with us, Miguel.
What can they do but kill us ; and even that
wouldn’t be a good bargain—nothing they can do
but rent a room across the street, and tail us
so they can learn to laugh and cry like us.
When I was writing my love poems, which sprouted out from me
on all sides, and I was dying of depression,
nomadic, abandoned, gnawing on the alphabet,
they said to me: “What a great man you are, Theocritus!”
I am not Theocritus: I took life,
and I faced her and kissed her,
and then went through the tunnels of the mines
to see how other men live.
And when I came out, my hands stained with garbage and sadness,
I held my hands up and showed them to the generals,
and said: “I am not a part of this crime.”
They started to cough, showed disgust, left off saying hello,
gave up calling me Theocritus, and ended by insulting me
and assigning the entire police force to arrest me
because I didn’t continue to be occupied exclusively with metaphysical subjects.
But I had brought joy over to my side.
From then on I started getting up to read the letters
the sea birds bring from so far away,
letters that arrive moist, messages I translate
phrase by phrase, slowly and confidently: I am punctilious
as an engineer in this strange duty.
All at once I go to the window. It is a square
of pure light, there is a clear horizon
of grasses and crags, and I go on working here
among the things I love: waves, rocks, wasps,
with an oceanic and drunken happiness.
But no one likes our being happy, and they cast you
in a genial role: “Now don’t exaggerate, don’t worry,”
and they wanted to lock me in a cricket cage, where there would be tears,
and I would drown, and they could deliver elegies over my grave.
I remember one day in the sandy acres
of the nitrate flats ; there were five hundred men
on strike. It was a scorching afternoon
in Tarapaca. And after the faces had absorbed
all the sand and the bloodless dry sun of the desert,
I saw coming into me, like a cup that I hate,
my old depression. At this time of crisis,
in the desolation of the salt flats, in that weak moment
of the fight, when we could have been beaten,
a little pale girl who had come from the mines
spoke a poem of yours in a brave voice that had glass in it and steel,
an old poem of yours that wanders among the wrinkled eyes
of all the workers of my country, of America.
And that small piece of your poetry blazed suddenly
like a purple blossom in my mouth,
and went down to my blood, filling it once more
with a luxuriant joy born from your poem.
I thought of you, but also of your bitter Venezuela.
Years ago I saw a student who had marks on his ankles
from chains ordered on him by a general,
and he told me of the chain gangs that work on the roads
and the jails where people disappeared forever. Because that is what our America has been:
long stretches with destructive rivers and constellations
of butterflies (in some places the emeralds are heavy as apples).
But along the whole length of the night and the rivers
there are always bleeding ankles, at one time near the oil wells,
now near the nitrate, in Pisagua, where a rotten leader
has put the best men of my country under the earth to die, so he can sell their bones.
That is why you write your songs, so that someday the disgraced and wounded America
can let its butterflies tremble and collect its emeralds
without the terrifying blood of beatings, coagulated
on the hands of the executioners and the businessmen.
I guessed how full of joy you would be, by the Orinoco, singing
probably, or perhaps buying wine for your house,
taking your part in the fight and the exaltation,
with broad shoulders, like the poets of our age—
with light clothes and walking shoes.
Ever since that time, I have been thinking of writing to you,
and when Guillen arrived, running over with stories of you,
which were coming loose everywhere out of his clothes
—they poured out under the chestnuts of my house—
I said to myself: “Now!” and even then I didn’t start a letter to you.
But today has been too much for me: not only one sea bird,
but thousands have gone past my window,
and I have picked up the letters no one reads, letters they take along
to all the shores of the world until they lose them.
Then in each of those letters I read words of yours,
and they resembled the words I write, and dream of, and put in poems,
and so I decided to send this letter to you, which I end here,
so I can watch through the window the world that is ours.
Translated by Robert Bly
PART XIII is a New Year’s greeting to Chile, for January 1, 1949, written after Neruda had succeeded in getting over the Andes, and to Europe. He talks of the many South American countries still under dictatorship, “dancing with the sharpened teeth of the night-time alligators.” The United States support of these dictators he considers part of a general foreign policy, policy of an “empire,” which destroys client countries. We chose “They Receive Orders Against Chile.”
Pero detrás de todos ellos hay que buscar, hay algo
detrás de los traidores y las ratas que roen,
hay un imperio que pone la mesa,
que sirve las comidas y las balas.
Quieren hacer de ti lo que logran en Grecia.
Los señoritos griegos en el banquete, y balas
al pueblo en las montañas: hay que extirpar el vuelo
de la nueva Victoria de Samotracia, hay que ahorcar,
matar, perder, hundir el cuchillo aesino
empuñado en New York, hay que romper con fuego
el orgullo del hombre que asomaba
por todas partes como si naciera
de la tierra regada por la sangre.
Hay que armar a Chiang y al ínfimo Videla,
hay que darles dinero para cárceles, alas
para que bombardeen compatriotas, hay que darles
un mendrugo, unos dólares, ellos hacen el resto,
ellos mienten, corrompen, bailan sobre los muertos
y sus esposas lucen los “visones” más caros.
No importa la agonía del pueblo, este martirio
necesitan los amos dueños del cobre: hay hechos:
los generales dejan el ejército y sirven
de asistentes al Staff en Chuquicamata,
y en el salitre el general “chileno”
manda con su charrasca cuánto deben pedir
como alza de salario los hijos de la pampa.
Así mandan de arriba, de la bolsa con dólares,
así recibe la orden el enano traidor,
así los generales hacen de policías,
así se pudre el tronco del árbol de la patria.
But we have to see behind all them, there is something
behind the traitors and the gnawing rats,
an empire which sets the table,
and serves up the nourishment and the bullets.
They want to repeat in you their great success in Greece.
Greek playboys at the banquet, and bullets
for the people in the mountains: we’ll have to destroy the flight
of the new Victory of Samothrace, we’ll have to hang,
kill, lose men, sink the murderous knife
held to us from New York, we’ll have to use fire
to break the spirit of the man who was emerging
in all countries as if born
from the earth that had been splashed with blood.
We have to arm Chiang and the vicious Videla,
give them money for prisons, wings
so they can bomb their own populations, give them
a handout, a few dollars, and they do the rest,
they lie, bribe, dance on the dead bodies
and their first ladies wear the most expensive minks.
The suffering of the people does not matter: copper
executives need this sacrifice: facts are facts:
the generals retire from the army and serve
as vice-presidents of the Chuquicamata Copper Firm,
and in the nitrate works the “Chilean” general
decides with his trailing sword how much the natives
may mention when they ask for a raise in wages.
In this way they decide from above, from the roll of dollars,
in this way the dwarf traitor receives his instructions,
and the generals act as the police force,
and the trunk of the tree of the country rots.
Translated by Robert Bly
and James Wright
Me habéis preguntado qué hila el crustaceo entre sus patas de oro
y os respondo: El mar lo sabe.
Me decís qué espera la ascidia en su campana transparente? Qué espera?
Yo os digo, espera como vosotros el tiempo.
Me preguntáis a quién alcanza el abrazo del alga Macrocustis?
Indagadlo, indagadlo a cierta hora, en cierto mar que conozco.
Sin duda me preguntaréis por el marfil maldito del narwhal, para que yo os conteste
de qué modo el unicornio marino agoniza arponeado.
Me preguntáis tal vez por las plumas alcionarias que tiemblan
en los puros orígenes de la marea austral?
Y sobre la construcción cristalina del pólipo habéis barajado, sin duda
una pregunta más, desgranándola ahora?
Queréis saber la eléctrica materia de las púas del fondo?
La armada estalactita que camina quebrándose?
El anzuelo del pez pescador, la música extendida
en la profundidad como un hilo en el agua?
Yo os quiero decir que esto lo sabe el mar, que la vida en sus arcas
es ancha como la arena, innumerable y pura
y entre las uvas sanguinarias el tiempo ha pulido
la dureza de un pétalo, la luz de la medusa
y ha desgranado el ramo de sus hebras corales
desde una cornucopia de nácar infinito.
Yo no soy sino la red vacía que adelanta
ojos humanos, muertos en aquellas tinieblas,
dedos acostumbrados al triángulo, medidas
de un tímido hemisferio de naranja.
Anduve como vosotros escarbando
la estrella interminable,
y en mi red, en la noche, me desperté desnudo,
única presa, pez encerrado en el viento.
PART XIV, called “The Immense Ocean,” is a great poem to the Pacific Ocean, its islands and creatures. Many of the poems have a richness like the Residencia poems. “Enigmas” is the seventeenth of the twenty-four poems in this section.
You’ve asked me what the lobster is weaving there with his golden feet?
I reply, the ocean knows this.
You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent bell? What is it waiting for?
I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.
You ask me whom the Macrocystis alga hugs in its arms?
Study, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.
You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal, and I reply by describing
how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.
You enquire about the kingfisher’s feathers,
which tremble in the pure springs of the southern tides?
Or you’ve found in the cards a new question touching on the crystal architecture
of the sea anemone, and you’ll deal that to me now?
You want to understand the electric nature of the ocean spines?
The armored stalactite that breaks as it walks?
The hook of the angler fish, the music stretched out
in the deep places like a thread in the water?
I want to tell you the ocean knows this, that life in its jewel boxes
is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure,
and among the blood-colored grapes time has made the petal
hard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of light
and untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall
from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.
I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead
of human eyes, dead in those darknesses,
of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes
on the timid globe of an orange.
I walked around as you do, investigating
the endless star,
and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked,
the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.
Translated by Robert Bly
Luego llegué a la capital, vagamente impregnado
de niebla y lluvia. Qué calles eran ésas?
Los trajes de 1921 pululaban
en un olor atroz de gas, café y ladrillos.
Entre los estudiantes pasé sin comprender,
reconcentrando en mí las paredes, buscando
cada tarde en mi pobre poesía las ramas,
las gotas y la luna que se habían perdido.
Acudí al fondo de ella, sumergiéndome
cada tarde en sus aguas, agarrando impalpables
estímulos, gaviotas de un mar abandonado,
hasta cerrar los ojos y naufragar en medio
de mi propia substancia.
Fueron tinieblas, fueron
sólo escondidas, húmedas hojas del subsuelo?
De qué materia herida se desgranó la muerte
hasta tocar mis miembros, conducir mi sonrisa
y cavar en las calles un pozo desdichado?
Salí a vivir: crecí y endurecido
fuí por los callejones miserables,
sin compasión, cantando en las fronteras
del delirio. Los muros se llenaron de rostros:
ojos que no miraban la luz, aguas torcidas
que iluminaba un crimen, patrimonios
de solitario orgullo, cavidades
llenas de corazones arrasados.
Con ellos fuí: sólo en su coro
mi voz reconoció las soledades
donde nació.
Entré a ser hombre
cantando entre las llamas, acogido
por compañeros de condición nocturna
que cantaron conmigo en los mesones,
y que me dieron más de una ternura,
más de una primavera defendida
por sus hostiles manos,
único fuego, planta verdadera
de los desmoronados arrabales.
PART XV, the final section, is called “I Am.” It contains thirty-eight autobiographical poems, of which we have chosen the fourth, describing his school days in Santiago when he was seventeen. The first poem of the section touches on the frontier in the year he was born, and the last records the day, February 5, 1949, when Canto General was finished, “a few months before the forty-fifth year of my age.”
Then I arrived at the capital, vaguely saturated
with fog and rain. What streets were those?
The garments of 1921 were breeding
in an ugly smell of gas, coffee, and bricks.
I walked among the students without understanding,
pulling the walls inside me, searching
each day into my poor poetry for the branches,
the drops of rain, and the moon, that had been lost.
I went deep into it for help, sinking
each evening into its waters, grasping
energies I could not touch, the seagulls of a deserted sea,
until I closed my eyes and was shipwrecked in the middle
of my own body.
Were these things dark shadows,
were they only hidden damp leaves stirred up from the soil?
What was the wounded substance from which death was pouring out
until it touched my arms and legs, controlled my smile,
and dug a well of pain in the streets?
I went out into life: I grew and was hardened,
I walked through the hideous back alleys
without compassion, singing out on the frontiers
of delirium. The walls filled with faces:
eyes that did not look at light, twisted waters
lit up by a crime, legacies
of solitary pride, holes
filled with hearts that had been condemned and torn down.
I walked with them: it was only in that chorus
that my voice refound the solitudes
where it was born.
I finally became a man
singing among the flames, accepted
by friends who find their place in the night,
who sang with me in the taverns,
and who gave me more than a single kindness,
something they had defended with their fighting hands,
which was more than a spring,
a fire unknown elsewhere, the natural foliage
of the places slowly falling down at the city’s edge.
Translated by Robert Bly
and James Wright