Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems Read online

  BEACON PRESS

  25 Beacon Street

  Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892

  Beacon Press books

  are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

  Copyright © 1971, 1993 by Robert Bly

  Copyright © 1962, 1967 by the Sixties Press

  Spanish texts copyright 1924, 1933, 1935, 1936, 1938, 1943, 1945, 1947, 1949, 1950, 1954, 1956, 1958 by Pablo Neruda

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following magazines in which some of these translations have appeared: The London Magazine, The Nation, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Sixties, The University of Michigan Quarterly, Tri-Quarterly, Dragonfly, The Greenfield Review, Transpacific, Modern Occasions, and Crazy Horse.

  The translators would like to thank Hardie St. Martin for his generous criticism of these translations in manuscript.

  The drawings of Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo were done specially for the original Sixties Press editions by the Spanish artist Zamorano.

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  08 07 06 13 12 11 10

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Neruda and Vallejo : selected poems / edited and a new preface by

  Robert Bly ; translations by Robert Bly, John Knoepfle, and James Wright.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-8070-6489-0 eISBN 978-0-8070-9679-6

  1. Neruda, Pablo, 1904–1973—Translations into English.

  2. Vallejo, César, 1892–1938—Translations into English. I. Bly,

  Robert. II. Knoepfle, John. III. Wright, James Arlington, 1927–

  IV. Neruda, Pablo, 1904–1973. Poems. English & Spanish.

  Selections. 1993. V. Vallejo, César, 1892–1938. Selections.

  English & Spanish. 1993.

  PQ8097.N4A6 1993

  861—dc20 93–10400

  CONTENTS

  READING NERUDA AND VALLEJO IN THE 1990S

  Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda

  REFUSING TO BE THEOCRITUS

  From VEINTE POEMAS DE AMOR Y UNA CANCIÓN DESESPERADA

  “Cuerpo de mujer, blancas colinas, muslos blancos”

  “Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs”

  “Te recuerdo como eras en el último otoño”

  “I remember you as you were that final autumn”

  From RESIDENCIA EN LA TIERRA I AND II

  Solo la muerte

  Nothing but Death

  Walking Around

  Walking Around

  Arte Poética

  The Art of Poetry

  Entierro en el este

  Funeral in the East

  Caballero solo

  Gentleman Without Company

  Sonata y destrucciones

  Sonata and Destructions

  La calle destruida

  The Ruined Street

  Melancolía en las familias

  Melancholy Inside Families

  Agua sexual

  Sexual Water

  No hay olvido (Sonata)

  There Is No Forgetfulness (Sonata)

  From TERCERA RESIDENCIA

  Bruselas

  Brussels

  From CANTO GENERAL

  Algunas bestias

  Some Beasts

  Alturas de Macchu Picchu, III

  The Heights of Macchu Picchu, III

  La Cabeza en el palo

  The Head on the Pole

  Las agonías

  Anguish of Death

  Descubridores de Chile

  Discoverers of Chile

  Toussaint L’Ouverture

  Toussaint L’Ouverture

  La United Fruit Co.

  The United Fruit Co.

  Hambre en el sur

  Hunger in the South

  Juventud

  Youth

  Los dictadores

  The Dictators

  América, no invoco tu nombre en vano

  America, I Do Not Call Your Name Without Hope

  Hymno y regreso

  Hymn and Return

  Cristóbal Miranda

  Cristobal Miranda

  Que despierte el leñador

  I Wish the Woodcutter Would Wake Up

  “Era el otoño de las uvas”

  “It was the grape’s autumn”

  La huelga

  The Strike

  Carta a Miguel Otero Silva, en Caracas

  Letter to Miguel Otero Silva, in Caracas

  Reciben órdenes contra Chile

  They Receive Instructions Against Chile

  Los enigmas

  Enigmas

  Compañeros de viaje

  Friends on the Road

  From ODAS ELEMENTALES

  Oda a los calcetines

  Ode to My Socks

  Oda a la sandía

  Ode to the Watermelon

  Oda a la sal

  Ode to Salt

  THE LAMB AND THE PINE CONE

  (An Interview with Pablo Neruda by Robert Bly)

  Selected Poems of César Vallejo

  WHAT IF AFTER SO MANY WINGS OF BIRDS

  THOUGHTS ON CESAR VALLEJO

  From LOS HERALDOS NEGROS

  Los heraldos negros

  The Black Riders

  La araña

  The Spider

  Romería

  Pilgrimage

  Babel

  Babble

  Deshojación sagrada

  A Divine Falling of Leaves

  La copa negra

  The Black Cup

  Heces

  Down to the Dregs

  Medialuz

  Twilight

  Ágape

  Agape

  Rosa Blanca

  White Rose

  El pan nuestro

  Our Daily Bread

  Pagana

  Pagan Woman

  Los dados eternos

  The Eternal Dice

  Los anillos fatigados

  The Weary Circles

  Dios

  God

  Los arrieros

  The Mule Drivers

  Los pasos lejanos

  The Distant Footsteps

  A mi hermano Miguel

  To My Brother Miguel

  Espergesia

  Have You Anything to Say in Your Defense?

  From TRILCE

  III “Las personas mayores”

  “What time are the big people”

  XV “En el rincón aquel, donde dormimos juntos”

  “In that corner, where we slept together”

  XXIV “Al borde de un sepulcro florecido”

  “At the border of a flowering grave”

  XLV “Me desvinculo del mar”

  “I am freed from the burdens of the sea”

  LXXVII “Graniza tanto, como para que yo recuerde”

  “So much hail that I remember”

  From CODIGO CIVIL and POEMAS HUMANOS

  El buen sentido

  The Right Meaning

  Voy a hablar de la esperanza

  I Am Going To Talk About Hope

  “Quédeme a calentar la tinta en que me ahogo”

  “I stayed here, warming the ink in which I drown”

  Poema para ser leido y cantado

  Poem To Be Read and Sung

  Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca

  Black Stone Lying on a White Stone

  Nomina de huesos

  The Rollcall of Bones

  “En el momento en que el tenista lanza magistralmente”

  “The tennis player, in the instant he majestically”

  “Un pilar soportando consuelos”

  “One
pillar holding up consolations”

  “Y no me digan nada”

  “And don’t bother telling me anything”

  “¿Y bien? ¿Te sana el metaloide pálido?”

  “And so? The pale metalloid heals you?”

  “Tengo un miedo terrible de ser un animal”

  “I have a terrible fear of being an animal”

  “¡Y si después de tantas palabras”

  “And what if after so many words”

  “La cólera que quiebra al hombre en niños”

  “The anger that breaks a man down into boys”

  From ESPAÑA, APARTA DE MÍ ESTE CÁLIZ

  Masa

  Masses

  READING NERUDA AND VALLEJO IN THE 1990S

  Why is it important to read Pablo Neruda now? Because after twelve years of Reagan and Bush we find in him a well of compassion. His mother’s death, his father’s death, the rain, broke open his heart. We look in and see compassion for adolescents, for workers, for schoolteachers, for the loneliness of salt.

  Competent, chill-hearted, respectable workshop poems flood North American bookstores; but opening Pablo Neruda’s poems, readers bite into sea-potatoes, Chilean lions made of sugar, drops of marmalade and blood, a hurricane of gelatin, a tail of harsh horsehair, elephants that fall from the sky. As Neruda says:

  a tongue of rotten dust is moving forward

  over the cities …

  movie posters in which the panther

  is wrestling with thunder.

  His love of life never falters. His love of women never falters. He loves them, the more unpredictable the better; he remembers Josie Bliss, who was so wild and nearly killed him twice with her knife; but when she went outside at night to piss, the sound was like honey. We know he sits morning after morning at a wobbly table near the sea, writing images blown in from the farthest reaches of his brain, with a discipline fitting for a Mayan weaver woman or a copper craftsman in a North African market. He wrote the greatest long poem so far created on American ground, that is Canto General. Its 450 poems include careful nature observation, geology, accounts of European invasion, North American meddling, and rage.

  Neruda worked all his adult life to keep Chile from returning to right-wing control. Finally, in 1973, after his friend Salvador Allende was killed and Allende’s government was overthrown, Neruda died. He had been hospitalized with prostate cancer and his condition was stable when the news of Pinochet’s victory arrived. The Chilean doctors were afraid, not sure how to respond; they suspended treatment, and Neruda died a short while later. His wife, Mathilde, has written of this night. After his death, Pinochet’s soldiers and supporters ransacked Neruda’s Isla Negra house, broke desks and furniture, burned his letters and unpublished poems. That destruction was disgusting; even the Minneapolis Tribune had an editorial against it. It showed how angry the right wing had become over poetry. It remains a delight to read this wild poet, the spiritual child of Gabriela Mistral, of Whitman, and of the Spanish satirical poet Quevedo.

  Many Spanish-speaking readers consider César Vallejo (d. 1938) to be even greater than Neruda. Vallejo has much American Indian blood, and there is in his work an “Indian element.” Neruda, who knew Vallejo, remarked: “In Vallejo it shows itself as a subtle way of thought, a way of expression that is not direct, but oblique. I don’t have it.” As a young man Vallejo experienced the injustice dealt to those who protest working conditions in the tungsten mines of Peru; and later he experienced the abuse that the Parisians dealt to South American writers, and the Europeans to Marxists. His political writing belongs with Bertolt Brecht’s and Nazim Hikmet’s, and he is a more imaginative poet than either of them:

  There are blows in life so violent—I can’t answer!

  Blows as if from the hatred of God …

  His poetry, without defenses, infinitely human, justly angry, looks more and more solid every year, more irreplaceable, incomparable, heart-breaking, classic.

  I have a terrible fear of being an animal of white snow, who has kept his father and mother alive with his solitary circulation through the veins …

  His poem “The Right Meaning,” in which he imagines returning home to Peru to tell his mother about his life in Paris, is the greatest poem I’ve ever read on the secrecies and joys between mothers and sons. Just to be able to translate his poems is a privilege.

  Robert Bly

  “Un pilar soportando consuelos”

  “One pillar holding up consolations”

  254–255

  “Y no me digan nada“

  “And don’t bother telling me anything”

  256–257

  “¿Y bien? ¿Te sana el metaloide pálido?”

  “And so? The pale metalloid heals you?”

  258–259

  “Tengo un miedo terrible de ser un animal“

  “I have a terrible fear of being an animal”

  260–261

  “¡Y si después de tantas palabras“

  “And what if after so many words”

  262–263

  “La cólera que quiebra al hombre en niños“

  “The anger that breaks a man down into boys”

  264–265

  From ESPAÑA, APARTA DE MÍ ESTE CÁLIZ

  Masa

  Masses

  268–269

  Selected Poems of

  PABLO NERUDA

  REFUSING TO BE THEOCRITUS

  Poets like St. John of the Cross and Juan Ramón Jiménez describe the single light shining at the center of all things. Neruda does not describe that light, and perhaps he does not see it. He describes instead the dense planets orbiting around it. As we open a Neruda book, we suddenly see going around us, in circles, like herds of mad buffalo or distracted horses, all sorts of created things; balconies, glacial rocks, lost address books, pipe organs, fingernails, notary publics, pumas, tongues of horses, shoes of dead people. His book, Residencia En La Tierra (Living On Earth—the Spanish title suggests being at home on the earth), contains an astounding variety of earthly things, that swim in a sort of murky water. The fifty-six poems in Residencia I and II were written over a period of ten years—roughly from the time Neruda was twenty-one until he was thirty-one, and they are the greatest surrealist poems yet written in a Western language. French surrealist poems appear drab and squeaky beside them. The French poets drove themselves by force into the unconscious because they hated establishment academicism and the rationalistic European culture. But Neruda has a gift, comparable to the fortune-teller’s gift for living momentarily in the future, for living briefly in what we might call the unconscious present. Aragon and Breton are poets of reason, who occasionally throw themselves backward into the unconscious, but Neruda, like a deep-sea crab, all claws and shell, is able to breathe in the heavy substances that lie beneath the daylight consciousness. He stays on the bottom for hours, and moves around calmly and without hysteria.

  The surrealist images in the Residencia poems arrange themselves so as to embody curious and cunning ideas. In “La Calle Destruida,” for example, he calls up injustice, architecture exploding, massive buildings weighing us down, exhausted religions, horses of pointless European armies—all of these things, he says, are acting so as to eat life for us, to destroy it, to disgust us so we will throw life away like old clothes. The poems give a sense of the ferocity and density of modern life.

  Neruda’s poetic master in the Residencia poems is not a European poet but the American, Walt Whitman. He looked deeply into Whitman. Whitman wrote:

  I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny, I see martyrs and prisoners,

  I observe a famine at sea, I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d to preserve the lives of the rest,

  I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like …

  I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals,

  I
hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,

  I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following …

  I hear the violoncello (‘tis a young man’s heart’s complaint),

  Hear the Key’d cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,

  It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.

  Neruda writes:

  I look at ships,

  I look at trees of bone marrow

  bristling like mad cats,

  I look at blood, daggers and women’s stockings,

  and men’s hair,

  I look at beds, I look at corridors where a virgin is sobbing,

  I look at blankets and organs and hotels.

  I look at secretive dreams,

  I let the straggling days come in,

  and the beginning also, and memories also,

  like an eyelid held open hideously

  I am watching.

  And then this sound comes:

  a red noise of bones,

  a sticking together of flesh

  and legs yellow as wheatheads meeting.

  I am listening among the explosion of the kisses,

  I am listening, shaken among breathings and sobs.

  I am here, watching, listening,

  with half of my soul at sea and half of my soul on land,

  and with both halves of my soul I watch the world.

  And even if I close my eyes and cover my heart over entirely,

  I see the monotonous water falling

  in big monotonous drops.

  It is like a hurricane of gelatin,

  like a waterfall of sperm and sea anemones.

  I see a clouded rainbow hurrying.

  I see its water moving over my bones.

  He shows what it is like, not to be a poet, but to be alive. The Residencia poems, however, differ from Song of Myself in one fundamental way. The Residencia poems are weighed down by harshness, despair, loneliness, death, constant anxiety, loss. Whitman also wrote magnificently of the black emotions, but when Neruda in Residencia looks at the suicides, the drowning seamen, the bloodstained hair of the murdered girl, the scenes are not lightened by any sense of brotherhood. On the contrary, the animals and people on all sides isolate him still further, pull him down into his own body, where he struggles as though drowning in the stomach and the intestines.