Neruda And Vallejo: Selected Poems Part 34

Edificada en lo desconocido, es tu paz de pa.n.a.l lo dulce tuyo.

Amanos tu hombre con las manos rojas de barro de Oregon, tu nino negro que te trajo la msica nacida en su comarca de marfil: amamos tu ciudad, tu substancia, tu luz, tus mecanismos, la energa del Oeste, la pacfica miel, de colmenar y aldea, el gigante muchacho en el tractor, la avena que heredaste de Jefferson, la rueda rumorosa que mide tu terrestre oceana, el humo de una fbrica y el beso nmero 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 bfalo en un grave silencio las slabas, el canto de lo que fu 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 navo. Whitman innumerable como los cereales, Poe en su matemtica tiniebla, Dreiser, Wolfe, frescas heridas de nuestra propia ausencia, Lockridge reciente, atados a la profundidad, c.u.n.tos otros atados a la sombra: sobre ellos la misma aurora del hemisferio arde y de ellos est hecho lo que somos.

Poderosos infantes, capitanes ciegos, entre acontecimientos y follajes amedrentados a veces, interrumpidos por la alegra y por el duelo, bajo las praderas cruzadas de trfico, c.u.n.tos muertos en las llanuras antes no visitadas: inocentes atormentados, profetas recien impresos, sobre la piel del bfalo 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 Fue 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 estiercol los persiguieron, la mugre y las ratas, y un cansado y desolado corazn que luchaba.

Pero ya han vuelto, los habeis recibid en el ancho es.p.a.cio de las tierras extendidas y se han cerrado (los que han vuelto) como una corola de innumerables petalos annimos 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 Ma.s.ses And Mainstream. Some of the pieces are crude propaganda, others fresh and generous poems.

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 s.p.a.cious.

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 OTOO DE LAS UVAS"

Era el otono de las uvas.

Temblaba el parral numeroso.

Los racimos blancos, velados, escarchaban sus dulces dedos, y las negras uvas llenaban sus pequenas ubres repletas de un secreto ro redondo.

El dueno de casa, artesano de magro rostro, me lea el plido libro terrestre de los das crepusculares.

Su bondad conoca el fruto, la rama troncal y el trabajo de la poda que deja al rbol su desnuda forma de copa.

A los caballos conversaba como a inmensos ninos: seguan detrs de el los cinco gatos y los perros de aquella casa, unos enarcados y lentos, otros corriendo locamente bajo los fros durazneros.

El conoca cada rama, cada cicatriz de los rboles, y su antigua voz me ensenaba 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 cl.u.s.ters, 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

LA HUELGA.

Extrana era la fbrica inactiva.

Un silencio en la planta, una distancia entre mquina y hombre, como un hilo cortado entre planetas, un vaco de las manos del hombre que consumen el tiempo construyendo, y las desnudas estancias sin trabajo y sin sonido.

Cuando el hombre dej las madrigueras de la turbina, cuando desprendi los brazos de la hoguera y decayeron las entranas del horno, cuando sac los ojos de la rueda y la luz vertiginosa se detuvo en su crculo invisible, de todos los poderes poderosos, de los crculos puros de potencia, de la energa sobrecogedora, qued un montn de intiles aceros y en las salas sin hombre, el aire viudo, el solitario aroma del aceite.

Nada exista sin aquel fragmento golpeando, sin Ramrez, sin el hombre de ropa desgarrada.

All estaba la piel de los motores, ac.u.mulada en muerto podero, como negros cetceos en el fondo pestilente de un mar sin oleaje, o montanas 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 s.p.a.ce.

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).

Nicols Guillen me trajo tu carta escrita con palabras invisibles, sobre su traje, en sus ojos.

Que alegre eres, Miguel, que alegres somos!

Ya no queda en un mundo de lceras estucadas sino nosotros, indefinidamente alegres.

Veo pasar al cuervo y no me puede hacer dano.

T observas el escorpin y limpias tu guitarra.

Vivimos entre las fieras, cantando, y cuando tocamos un hombre, la materia de alguien en quien creamos, y este se desmorona como un pastel podrido, t en tu venezolano patrimonio recoges lo que puede salva.r.s.e, mientras que yo defiendo la brasa de la vida.

Que alegra, Miguel!