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Pablo Neruda




Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was born in Parral, Chile, the son of a railroad worker. Shortly after leaving college, he joined the Chilean foreign service to begin a distinguished career as consul and ambassador at a variety of posts around the world, including Burma, Ceylon, Indonesia, Siam, Cambodia, Spain, France, and Mexico. He was elected to the Chilean senate as a communist. But when he published letters attacking the policies of Videla, the President of Chile, he was forced into exile. He returned to Chile after the victory of anti-Videla forces, and rejoined the foreign service.
His vast literary output won many prizes and honors, although American readers found it difficult to separate his poetry from his politics, he was, at his prime, generally considered to be the greatest poet writing in Spanish. One critic pointed out that Neruda "never bothered his head about the state of poetry. He has just gone on exuding it as he draws breath." In an essay on impure poetry, Neruda wrote: "Let [this] be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we love by, inside the law or beyond it. A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts, affirmation and taxes." Five Decades, a Selection: Poems, 1925-1970 appeared in 1974. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971. Pablo Neruda died in 1973.

TRIANGLES


Three triangles of birds crossed
Over the enormous ocean which extended
In winter like a green beast.
Everything just lay there, the silence,
The unfolding gray, the heavy light
Of space, some land now and then.
Over everything there was passing
A flight
And another flight
Of dark birds, winter bodies
Trembling triangles
Whose wings,
Frantically flapping, hardly
Can carry the gray cold, the desolate days
From one place to another
Along the coast of Chile.

I am here while from one sky to another
The trembling of the migratory birds
Leaves me sunk inside myself, inside my own matter
Like an everlasting well
Dug by an immovable spiral.
Now they have disappeared
Black feathers of the sea
Iron birds
From steep slopes and rock piles
Now at noon
I am in front of emptiness. It's a winter
Space stretched out
And the sea has put
Over its blue face
A bitter mask.

THE OLD WOMEN OF THE OCEAN


To the solemn sea the old women come
With their shawls knotted around their necks
With their fragile feet cracking.


They sit down alone on the shore
Without moving their eyes or their hands
Without changing the clouds or the silence.

The obscene sea breaks and claws
Rushes downhill trumpeting
Shakes its bull's beard.

The gentle old ladies seated
As if in a transparent boat
They look at the terrorist waves.

Where will they go and where have they been?
They come from every corner
They come from our own lives.

Now they have the ocean
The cold and burning emptiness
The solitude full of flames.

They come from all the pasts
From houses which were fragrant
From burnt-up evenings.

They look, or don't look, at the sea
With their walking sticks they draw signs in the sand
And the sea erases their calligraphy.
The old women get up and go away
With their fragile bird feet
While the waves flood in
Traveling naked in the wind.


Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks


All those men were there inside,
when she came in totally naked.
They had been drinking: they began to spit.
Newly come from the river, she knew nothing.
She was a mermaid who had lost her way.
The insults flowed down her gleaming flesh.
Obscenities drowned her golden breasts.
Not knowing tears, she did not weep tears.
Not knowing clothes, she did not have clothes.
They blackened her with burnt corks and cigarette stubs,
and rolled around laughing on the tavern floor.
She did not speak because she had no speech.
Her eyes were the colour of distant love,
her twin arms were made of white topaz.
Her lips moved, silent, in a coral light,
and suddenly she went out by that door.
Entering the river she was cleaned,
shining like a white stone in the rain,
and without looking back she swam again
swam towards emptiness, swam towards death.