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.
LETTER TO MIGUEL OTERO SILVA, IN CARACAS
(1948)
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.”
RECIBEN ÓRDENES CONTRA 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.
THEY RECEIVE INSTRUCTIONS AGAINST CHILE
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
LOS ENIGMAS
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
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.
ENIGMAS
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,
&nbs
p; 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
COMPAÑEROS DE VIAJE
(1921)
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