Source of book: I own this
It has been over a decade since I read my first Neruda collection - a library version translated by Ben Belitt - and nine years since my brother-in-law gifted me this City Lights edition. It is fascinating to make the comparison, since the books are very different.
This particular collection was edited by Mark Eisner (who also translates a few of the poems), but the poems themselves are translated by eight different people, each of who has a unique approach. I’ll mention the introduction as one of the best things I have ever read about the art of translation and the impossibility of ever making the “definitive” version.
The other thing that is odd is just how few of the poems overlap. Gone are most of the food poems I highlighted in the previous post, and instead there are a wide variety of other poems. Even from the same original collections, the editors have selected different poems to feature. I suppose this is evidence of the way that Neruda speaks differently to each of us.
The poems selected range from early ones to posthumous releases, and are in a variety of forms and styles. Eisner has done an admirable job of capturing a broad picture of Neruda’s career and art.
As a person, Neruda has become somewhat controversial, largely because of a passage in his memoirs where he describes a sexual encounter with a maid that sounds at least borderline non-consensual. There is also evidence that, like too many men of his generation (and, sadly, Latino male writers in particular) who were less than admirable in their personal treatment of women.
On the other side, right wingers hate him for his communist politics - he praised Stalin long after other leftists realized he was a brutal thug, although he eventually changed his mind.
Even his death is controversial. It appears he was suffering from prostate cancer, and most likely died of heart issues. However, there is enough evidence to at least raise the suspicion that he was murdered by the fascist Pinochet regime - his body was exhumed years later, although the autopsy results failed to reveal a poisoning. There is no doubt that he was on his way to exile at the time, and Pinochet had every reason to want him dead. (For authoritarians of all stripes, left or right, the arts are seen mostly as an impediment to power.)
The complexity of Neruda’s life and legacy is one that so many great artists share. As a musician, for example, I play the works of a number of artists who were less than stellar in their personal life. Wagner was a womanizer and an antisemite, Richard Strauss was a nazi party member, Verdi starved his peasant workers, and so on.
The same goes for literature, naturally. If you want to get really picky, nearly all white males of a certain era (famous or otherwise) harbored views about women and minorities that are pretty horrifying. While being of a certain time doesn’t excuse toxic views or behaviors, people do need to be evaluated in context, or nearly everyone (including us to future generations) would be discarded for our inevitable flaws.
For writers like Neruda, I try to acknowledge the issues, but evaluate the art on its own terms. Thus, his pro-communist poems have generally tended to be sidelined as less than his best, while his more universal poems have justly been deemed masterpieces.
On that note, let’s start with one of his political poems which has aged well.
The United Fruit Company
When the trumpet sounded, everything
on earth was prepared
and Jehovah distributed the world
to Coca Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other entities;
The Fruit Company Inc.
reserved the juiciest for itself,
the central coast of my land,
the sweet waist of America.
It re-baptized the lands
“Banana Republics”
and on the sleeping dead,
on the restless heroes
who’d conquered greatness,
liberty and flags,
it founded a comic opera:
it alienated free wills,
gave crowns of Caesar as gifts,
unsheathed jealousy, attracted
the dictatorship of the flies,
Trujillo flies, Tachos flies
Carias flies, Martinez flies,
Ubico flies, flies soppy
with humble blood and marmalade,
drunken flies that buzz around common graves,
circus flies, learned flies
adept at tyranny.
The Company disembarks
among the bloodthirsty flies,
brim-filling their boards that slide
with the coffee and fruit treasure
of our submerged lands like trays.
Meanwhile, along the sugared-up
abysms of the ports,
indians fall over, buried
in the morning mist:
a body rolls, a thing
without a name, a fallen number,
a bunch of dead fruit
spills into the pile of rot.
(translated by Jack Hirschman)
In relation to this, I highly recommend Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer. The history of the United States destroying democracy abroad to benefit its corporations is depressing.
Next up is a delicious and erotic love poem, translated by Eisner, who captures the rhythm of the original, even though he doesn’t preserve the rhyme. Neruda’s skill in the unexpected metaphor is on full display in this early poem.
Body of a Woman
Body of woman, white hills, white thighs,
you look like the world in your attitude of giving.
My savage peasant body plows through you
and makes the son surge from the depths of the earth.
I went alone as a tunnel. Birds fled from me,
I was invaded by the power of the night.
To survive myself I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow in my bow, like a stone in my sling.
But the hour of vengeance strikes, and I love you.
Body of skin, of moss, of ardent, constant milk.
Ah the chalices of the breasts! Ah the eyes of absence!
Ah the roses of the pubis! Ah your voice slow and sad!
Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace.
My thirst, my infinite anguish, my indecisive path!
Dark riverbeds where eternal thirst follows,
And fatigue follows, and infinite sorrow.
This poem is part of a collection entitled “Twenty Love Poems.” Another poem from that collection is one of my all-time favorites. This one is also translated by Eisner, although I will give props to M. S. Merwin for another gorgeous translation of this particular poem - which is how I discovered it some time ago.
I can write the saddest verses
I can write the saddest verses tonight.
Write, for example, “The night is full of stars,
twinkling blue, in the distance.”
The night wind spins in the sky and sings.
I can write the saddest verses tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
On nights like this I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times beneath the infinite sky.
She loved me, at times I loved her too.
How not to have loved her great still eyes.
I can write the saddest verses tonight.
To think that I don’t have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the verse falls onto my soul like dew onto grass.
What difference that my love could not keep her.
The night is full of stars, and she is not with me.
That’s all. In the distance, someone sings. In the distance.
My soul is not at peace with having lost her.
As if to bring her closer, my gaze searches for her,
My heart searches for her, and she is not with me.
The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, of then, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, it’s true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched for the wind that would touch her ear.
Another’s. She will be another’s. As before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love here, 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.
Such a beautiful and achingly sad poem.
The next one is more or less a sonnet - even in the original (this version has both English and Spanish), the rhymes aren’t exactly correct, even if the form is otherwise that of a sonnet. The repeated “and” (“y”) are in the original as well.
System of Gloom
From every one of these days black as old iron,
and opened up by the sun like big red oxen,
and barely kept alive by air and by dreams,
and suddenly and irremediably vanished,
nothing has taken the place of my troubled beginnings,
and the unequal measures pumping through my heart
are forged there day and night, all by themselves,
adding up to messy and miserable sums.
So that’s how, like a lookout gone blind and senseless,
incredulous and condemned to a painful watch,
facing the wall where each day’s tem congeals,
my different faces gather and are bound in chains
like large, heavy, faded flowers
stubbornly temporary, dead already.
(translated by Stephen Kessler)
I also liked this one.
There’s No Forgetting (Sonata)
Were you to ask me where I’ve been
I would have to say, “There comes a time.”
I would have to tell how dirt mottles the rocks,
how the river, running, runs out of itself:
I know only what left the birds bereaved,
the sea forsaken, or my sister weeping.
Who so many places, why does one day
cling to another? Why does a night’s blackness
Drain into the mouth? Why the dead?
Were you to ask where I come from, I would have to talk
with shattered things,
with all too bitter tools,
with massive festering beasts, now and then,
and with my grief-bitten heart.
Unremembered are those who crossed over
and the pale dove asleep in oblivion,
only teary faces,
fingers at the throat,
and whatever falls from the leaves:
the darkness of a burnt-out day,
a day flavored with our curdled blood.
Here I have violets, swallows,
we want anything and it appears
in that long train of impressions
that marks the passing of kindness and time.
But let’s go no further than the teeth,
we won’t chew on husks heaped up by silence,
because I don’t know how to answer:
there are so many dead,
and so many levees the red sun has cloven
and so many heads that knock against hulls,
and so many hands that shut up kisses,
and so many things I want to forget.
(translated by Forrest Gander)
This next one is another erotic poem, one from his middle period. It is fascinating to see the difference.
The Potter
Your whole body holds
a goblet of gentle sweetness destined for me.
When I let my hand climb,
in each place I find a dove
that was looking for me, as if
my love, they had made you out of clay
for my very own potter’s hands.
Your knees, your breasts,
your waist
are missing in me, like in the hollow
of a thirsting earth
where they relinquished
a form,
and together
we are complete like one single river,
like one single grain of sand.
(translation by Mark Eisner)
As in the previous post on Neruda, I found myself particularly drawn to selections from Odas elementales. This is one of those collections that had little if any overlap in the two books. I may have to track down just this one, if I can, so I can read them all.
This collection only has four of the odes, and I selected this one as my favorite. (Be sure to read my other Neruda post for more - his odes to vegetables are wonderful.)
Ode to a Chestnut on the Ground
Out of the bristling foliage
you fell
complete:
polished wood,
glistening mahogany,
perfect
as a violin that has just
been born in the treetops
and falls
offering the gifts locked inside it,
its hidden sweetness,
finished in secret among
birds and leaves,
school of form,
lineage of firewood and flour,
oval instrument
that holds its structure
unblemished delight and edible rose.
Up there, you abandoned
the bristling husk
that half-opened its barbs
in the light of the chestnut tree,
through that opening
you saw the world,
birds
filled with syllables
starry
dew,
and down below
the heads of boys
and girls,
grasses that fluttered restlessly,
smoke that rises and rises.
You made up your mind,
chestnut,
and you leapt down to earth,
burnished and prepared,
firm and smooth
as a small breast
in the islands of America.
You fell
hitting
the ground
but
nothing happened,
the grass
went on fluttering, the old
chestnut tree whispered like the mouths
of a hundred treas,
one leaf fell from red autumn,
steadily the hours kept on working
upon the earth.
Because you are
just
a seed:
chestnut tree, autumn, earth,
water, heights, silence
prepared the embryo,
the floury thickness,
the maternal eyelids,
which, buried, will open again
toward the heights
the simple magnificence
of foliage,
the dark, damp network
of new roots,
the ancient and new dimensions
of another chestnut tree in the earth.
(translated by Stephen Mitchell)
I also enjoyed the selections from One Hundred Love Sonnets. Alas, only a handful are in this collection, because I love sonnets in general. I picked two to feature here. Both were translated by Mark Eisner.
XII
Full woman, carnal aple, hot moon,
thick smell of seaweed, crushed mud and light,
what obscure clarity opens between your columns?
What ancient night does man touch with his senses?
Ah, loving is a voyage with water and with stars,
with suffocating air and brusque storms of flour:
loving is a battle of lightning bolts,
and two bodies, overcome by one honey.
Kiss by kiss I travel across your small infinity,
your images, your rivers, your diminutive villages,
and the genital fire transformed into delight
runs through the narrow trails of the blood
until it plunges itself, like a nocturnal carnation,
until it is and is nothing more but a ray in the shadows.
While that one is clearly erotic, the next is more along the lines of the grand intellectual passion of Shakespeare or Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I was familiar with this one before reading this collection, as it is one I have shared with my beloved.
XVII
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose
from the earth lives dimly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.
I am reminded a bit of one of my favorite poems by Yeats with that last line.
This next poem captures a bit of why I write, and why I make music.
Poet’s Obligation
To whomever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whomever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or harsh prison cell:
to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a great fragment of thunder sets in motion
the rumble of the planet and the foam,
the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,
the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,
and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.
So, drawn on by my destiny,
I endlessly must listen to and keep
the sea’s lamenting in my awareness,
I must feel the crash of the hard water
and gather it up in a perpetual cup
so that, wherever those in prison may be,
wherever they suffer the autumn’s castigation,
I may be there with an errant wave,
I may move, passing through windows,
and hearing me, eyes will glance upward
saying: how can I reach the sea?
And I shall broadcast, saying nothing.,
the starry echoes of the wave,
a breaking up of foam and of quicksand,
a rustling of salt withdrawing,
the grey cry of sea-birds on the coast.
So, through me, freedom and the sea
will make their answer to the shuttered heart.
(translated by Alastair Reid)
Speaking of the sea, this short poem is a gem. The alliteration and wordplay can’t be entirely duplicated in translation, although Eisner does a remarkable job.
The Sea
One single being, but there’s no blood.
One single caress, death or rose.
The sea comes and reunites our lives
and attacks and divides and sings alone
in night and day and man and creature.
The essence : fire and cold : movement.
In the original, it is “fuego y frio ; movimiento” which is delicious. But it’s good in English too.
And, speaking as well of poetry, this poem resonated. It could also be about my experience of finding music as a child.
Poetry
And it was at that age . . . poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river
I don’t know how or when,
no, they weren’t voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street it called me,
from the branches of the night,
abruptly from the others
among raging fires
or returning alone,
there it was, without a face,
and it touched me.
I didn’t know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
something kicked in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first, faint line,
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of one who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
the darkness perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the overpowering night, the universe.
And I, tiny being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars.
My heart broke loose with the wind.
And, on that note of being one with the universe, I’ll end with this one.
The Future is Space
The future is space,
earth-colored space,
cloud-colored,
color of water, air,
black space with room for many dreams,
white space with room for all snow,
for all music.
Behind lies despairing love
with no room for a kiss.
There’s a place for everyone in forests,
in streets, in houses;
there’s an underground space, a submarine space,
but what joy to find in the end,
rising,
an empty planet,
great stars clear as vodka,
so uninhabited and so transparent
and arrive there with the first telephone
so that many men can later discuss
all their infirmities.
The important thing is to be so scarcely aware of oneself,
to scream from a rough mountain range
and see on another peak
the feet of a woman newly arrived.
Come on, let’s leave
this suffocating river
in which we swim with other fish
from dawn to shifting night
and now in this discovered space
let’s fly to a pure solitude.
I very much enjoyed this
collection, but it does make me want to find the full volumes it is drawn
from.
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