by Jeannette LaFors
Pablo Neruda (1904 – 1973)
During our honeymoon in Chile (December 2000) Matt and I read many of Neruda’s love poems and toured two of his houses: “La Chascona” [tangled hair woman] in Santiago, and “La Sebastiana” in Valparaíso. We brought back a beautiful stained glass momento with his twelfth love poem from the collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924), and we’ve treasured it ever since. Here it is:
“Para Mi Corazón”
Para mi corazón basta tu pecho,
para tu libertad bastan mis alas.
Desde mi boca llegará hasta el cielo
lo que estaba dormido sobre tu alma.
Es en ti la ilusión de cada día.
Llegas como el rocío a las corolas.
Socavas el horizonte con tu ausencia.
Eternamente en fuga como la ola.
He dicho que cantabas en el viento
como los pinos y como los mástiles.
Como ellos eres alta y taciturna.
Y entristeces de pronto, como un viaje.
Acogedora como un viejo camino.
Te pueblan ecos y voces nostálgicas.
Yo desperté y a veces emigran y huyen
pájaros que dormían en tu alma.
–Pablo Neruda
“For My Heart”
Your bosom is enough for my heart,
For your freedom my wings are enough.
From my mouth to heaven will arrive
What was asleep on your soul.
In you is the excitement of each day.
You arrive like dew on petals of the flowers.
You undermine the horizon with your absence.
You are eternally receding like a wave.
I have said that you sang in the wind
like the pines and like the masts.
Like them you are tall and taciturn.
And you are sad, all at once, like a voyage.
Cozy like an old road.
You are inhabited by nostalgic voices and echoes.
I awoke and sometimes birds migrate and flee
birds that slept in your soul.
–Pablo Neruda (translated)
So you can imagine that boarding a metro car on our first family excursion in Santiago and seeing the first stanza of this poem featured on the ceiling of our car gave me goosebumps and validated all the effort we’d made to move here.
In 1971, Neruda described that poetry must “achieve a balance between solitude and solidarity, between feeling and action, between intimacy of one’s self, the intimacy of mankind, and the revelation of nature.” His powerful and passionate work certainly does that.
“Your Laughter” (1972) is another favorite of mine. It starts with, “Take bread away from me, if you wish/ take air away, but/ do not take from me your laughter.” Through beautiful metaphors, Neruda conveys a man’s deep reliance on his beloved’s laugh and how his life is not complete without it. It could also be interpreted more politically – the defiant laughter of Neruda’s fellow citizens in the face of oppression sustains him through dark and oppressive times. Neruda died in 1973, just twelve days after the coup d’état.
Gabriela Mistral (1889 – 1957)
Dylan, Adela and I recently attended their school’s annual “Recital de Lírica” featuring both students and faculty performing an array of poems and monologues, songs and dramatic sketches. We sat at a table with the family of one of Dylan’s classmates and ordered tea and dessert from a student waiter – literary café style.
One of my favorite pieces from the recital chronicled the life of Gabriela Mistral – an advocate for children, women, and the poor; and the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1945). She was a teacher and school administrator in many places throughout Chile known also for organizing evening classes for adults who lacked formal education and promoting education for girls, “Instrúyase a la mujer, no hay nada en ella que la haga ser colocada en un lugar más bajo que el hombre. (Let women be educated, nothing in them requires that they be set in a place lower than men).” In addition to being a prolific poet and writer, she also helped Mexico with education reform in the 1920s and co-founded UNICEF. Her poetry themes include children, women, indigenous people, death, and despair; but she also wrote about the landscape and character of her native Chile.
“Dame La Mano”
Dame la mano y danzaremos;
dame la mano y me amarás.
Come una sola flor seremos,
come una flor, y nada más…
El mismo verso cantaremos,
al mismo paso bailarás.
Como una espiga ondularemos,
como una espiga, y nada más.
Te llama Rosa y yo Esperanza:
pero tu nombre olvidarás,
porque seremos una danza
en la colina, y nada más. . .
–Gabriela Mistral
“Give Me Your Hand”
Give me your hand and give me your love,
give me your hand and dance with me.
A single flower, and nothing more,
a single flower is all we’ll be.
Keeping time in the dance together,
you’ll be singing the song with me.
Grass in the wind, and nothing more,
grass in the wind is all we’ll be.
I’m called Hope and you’re called Rose:
but losing our names we’ll both go free,
a dance on the hills, and nothing more,
a dance on the hills is all we’ll be.
–Gabriela Mistral [Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin]
“Bosque Del Pino”
Ahora entremos el bosque.
Los árboles pasarán por su cara,
y les pararé y ofreceré,
pero no pueden doblarse abajo.
Los relojes de la noche sobre sus criaturas,
a excepción de los árboles del pino que nunca cambian:
los viejos resortes heridos que sueltan
bendijeron la goma, tardes eternas.
Si podrían, los árboles le levantarían
y le llevarían del valle al valle,
y usted pasaría del brazo al brazo,
niño que funciona de padre al padre.
–Gabriela Mistral
“Pine Forest”
Let us go now into the forest.
Trees will pass by your face,
and I will stop and offer you to them,
but they cannot bend down.
The night watches over its creatures,
except for the pine trees that never change:
the old wounded springs that spring
blessed gum, eternal afternoons.
If they could, the trees would lift you
and carry you from valley to valley,
and you would pass from arm to arm,
a child running
from father to father.
–Gabriela Mistral [Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin]
Nicanor Parra (1914 – )
While Pablo Neruda was a young student of Gabriela Mistral, Nicanor Parra was a devoted student of Pablo Neruda and a self-proclaimed “anti-poet”. He’s a remarkable human – an accomplished mathematician and physicist and part of the talented Parra family which includes actors, singers, and writers. I’m just getting started with some of Parra’s work, and read his speech honoring Pablo Neruda as he was invited to join the University of Chile in 1962. He starts out, “Hay dos maneras de refutar a Neruda:/ una es no leyéndolo, la otra es leyéndolo/ de mala fe. Yo he practicado ambas,/ pero ninguna me dio resultado.” (There are two ways to refute Neruda:/ one is by not reading him, the other is by reading/ him in bad faith. I have tried both,/ but neither has worked.) Parra’s work is biting and witty – and he insists that “translation is impossible . . .” and that, “the best thing would be for people to learn Spanish – (Lo major sería aprender el español).”
I share links to two Parra poems here (you can toggle between Spanish and English versions):
“Los Professores” (“The Teachers”) de Hojas de Parra (1985)
http://www.nicanorparra.uchile.cl/english/antipoems/teachers.html
“The Teachers” from Antipoems: New and Selected (1985)
“Soliliquio del Individuo” de Poemas y Antipoemas (1954):
http://www.nicanorparra.uchile.cl/antologia/indexpoemas.html
“Soliloquy of the Individual” from Poems and Antipoems (1985)
Isabel Allende (1942 – )
I am currently reading Isabel Allende’s memoir, Mi País Inventado (My Invented Country] (2004) in Spanish. She opens her book quoting Pablo Neruda’s verse from Canto General (1950), an epic poem describing their shared homeland:
Night, snow and sand compose the form
of my slender homeland,
all silence is contained within its length,
all foam issues from its seaswept beard,
all coal fills it with mysterious kisses.
Allende is the Chilean author I’ve known the longest. I read House of Spirits (1982) in high school for the first time, and again in 2000 while traveling in Chile. For our book club a few years ago Matt and I read Daughter of Fortune (1999). And now I am also reading Island Beneath the Sea (2009). Reading Mi País Inventado, I can hear Allende talking to me like she would if we were having coffee. True, I have to ask her to define words or phrases I don’t know – but after a pause we are right back to it. We laugh. We cry. She reveals who she is and I connect different stories from her life with the various characters and stories from her novels. I absorb the way she describes her Chile-U.S. connections, and marvel at her work ethic and writing rituals. Did you know Neruda told her in 1973 that she was a terrible journalist and ought to put her talents to good use in fiction instead?
And so connected are these mighty Chilean poets . . . they all fiercely love their country, and they each critique it — standing up against injustices and uplifting both the mundane and surreal.
I circle back to each of the windows that Neruda, Mistral, Parra, and Allende have opened wide, enjoying the brilliant views of a stunning, complex, healing, and alluring country that I am blessed to get to know.
*****
Adela’s thoughts about literature as a window into Chilean life: At school we did a project on the Mapuche in Chile and the Spanish colonists. We learned a lot about them and Chilean history. I learned so much about the Machupe. For example, I learned about their festivals, and who their gods were, and why they did what they did. I also learned about the punishments they received from the Spanish and how they resisted against the Spanish rule.
Dylan’s thoughts about literature as a window into Chilean life: La Memoria (the museum) gave me a deeper look into Chilean history and culture. And at Literacy Night (an event at our school), I heard many poems and saw a a few performances about what it is like to be Chilean.
Matt’s thoughts on literature as a window into Chilean life: For me, it’s always been Eduardo Galeano (Uruguayan, but pan-Latino in his writing). He’s inspiring: “Each person shines with his or her own light. No two flames are alike. There are big flames and little flames, flames of every color. Some people’s flames are so still they don’t even flicker in the wind, while others have wild flames that fill the air with sparks. Some foolish flames neither burn nor shed light, but others blaze with life so fiercely that you can’t look at them without blinking, and if you approach you shine in the fire.” He’s biting: “El subdesarrollo no es una etapa del desarrollo. Es su consecuencia.” And he pays poetic homage to the beautiful game better than anyone: “And one fine day the goddess of the wind kisses the foot of man, that mistreated, scorned foot, and from that kiss the soccer idol is born. He is born in a straw crib in a tin-roofed shack and he enters the world clinging to a ball.”