by Unknown
I WISH THE WOODCUTTER WOULD WAKE UP
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”
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”
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.<
br />
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
LA HUELGA
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 STRIKE
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.
CARTA A MIGUEL OTERO SILVA, EN CARACAS
(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),
