Author Gabriel Garcia Marquez once called Pablo Neruda “the greatest poet of the twentieth century—in any language.� This July 12th, festivities around the world will mark the 100th anniversary of the Chilean poet’s birth. In the U.S., the Neruda centennial will be celebrated with the publication of a volume of eighty new English translations of his poems, and a documentary about his life and his words narrated by author Isabel Allende.
Neruda first became known for his heart-wrenching love sonnets. When he joined the anti-fascist republican movement in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, his poetry merged with his political activity. Neruda joined the Communist Party of Chile in 1943 and served in the Chilean senate from 1945 until he was exiled for his support for striking miners. While in exile, he wrote his monumental Canto General. He returned to Chile in 1952 and for the next 21 years lived there as a people’s poet. Neruda was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1953, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. He died in 1973.
Neruda’s political poetry, written in the thick of the great struggles that he lived through, recorded both the lies of brutal regimes in Latin America and elsewhere, and the truths expressed through resistance. His retellings of historical events, even the darkest tragedies, reflect the hope and optimism at the heart of the world Communist movement. In ‘Tomorrow Throughout the Caribbean,’ he wrote: “Unsullied youth of this bloody sea, young communists of the day: there will be more of you to clean this territory of tyrannies.�
PABLO NERUDA’S FUNERAL
This narrative was taken from a tape recording of Neruda’s funeral done by Carlos Ortiz Tejada; it was written by Ricardo Garibay, and translated by Mauricio Schoijet. It is reprinted by permission of University Review. Copyright 1973, Entelechy Press Corp.
The funeral procession begins at the poet’s house, where the corpse was lying in state attended by his widow and sisters. The wake is held in the middle of a muddy, flooded room that was once his library. Books and documents are floating in the mud along with furniture. The day before, a stream was diverted into the house by the military who smashed everything in sight with their rifle butts and left the house flooded.
The coffin has been removed and is being carried by some friends of the poet. Only a few people are present accompanying his widow and sisters and the Mexican Ambassador, Martinez Corbala.
Someone inquires and is told, “Pablo Neruda.� “What?� “Yes, sir, Pablo Neruda.� And quietly the word spreads, and the name opens doors and windows, it begins to appear at half-closed shops, it descends from telephone poles with the workers who worked on them, it stops buses and it empties them, brings out people running from distant streets, people who arrive already crying, still hoping it is not true. The name keeps emerging, like a miracle of anger, in hundreds and hundreds of people – men, women, children almost all poor, almost all people of the shantytowns of Santiago – each of them becoming Pablo Neruda.
We hear a grayish noie of ordinary shoes, we smell the infinite dust, we feel on our eyes the strained breathing of thousands of throats that are ready to explode.
Then we hear a sound: shy, half choked, prayed in secret – “Comrade Pablo Neruda� – and we hear an answer of someone who is saying, “Don’t tell that I said it,� here now and forever.
A voice shouts, “Comrade Pablo Neruda!� and there, already in anger, “Here!� – already throwing a hat, stepping firmly and facing the military who are approaching and surrounding the crowd.
And here begins something that we imagined ancient and monumental, something from the realm of great literature, something incredible, necessarily fantastic, because it belonged to pure thought and would never appear in the flesh at a street corner. Some kind of giant litany for who knows how many dead. Who knows how many more murdered people this litany is for? A remote voice, shrill voice, howls in a bestial, heartbreaking way, “Comrade Pablo Neruda!� And a choir watched by millions of assassins, by millions of informers, sings “Here, with us, now and forever!�
There, farther, here, on the right, on the left, at the end of the marching column, a column of three thousand, the Chilean cries rise up, twists of an inexhaustible womb of sadness, twinges of light: “Comrade Pablo Neruda!� “Comrade Pablo Neruda!� “Comrade Pablo Neruda!� “Comrade Salvador Allende!� “Here!� “Here!� “Here, with us, now and forever!� “Chilean people, they are stepping on you, they are assassinating you, they are torturing you!� “Chilean people, don’t give up, the revolution is awaiting us, we’ll fight until we finish with the henchmen!�
Swirls of crying, swearing, threats, wailings, of darkness at noon, of voices choking with anger. Hellish vocabulary, crazy, heavenly words. Three thousand overwhelmingly defeated people are howling.
And suddenly, howling powerfully, a woman begins to sing Neruda’s verses. Her voice grown suddenly alone, “I have been reborn many times, from the depths / of defeated stars . . .� and all shout, all, they shout from their memories “. . . reconstructing the threats / of eternities that I populated with my hands . . .�
An Excerpt from:
Let the Rail Splitter Awake
By Pablo Neruda
V.
Let none of this happen.
Let the Rail Splitter awake.
Let Abe come with his axe
and his wooden plate
to eat with the farmers.
Let his head like tree-bark,
his eyes like those in wooden-planks
and oak-tree boles,
turn to look on the world
rising above the foliage
higher than the sequoias.
Let him buy something in a drugstore
let him take a bus to Tampa
let him bite into a yellow apple
and enter a moviehouse to converse
with all the simple people.
Let the Rail Splitter awake.
Let Abe come, let his aged yeast raise
the green and gold earth of Illinois,
let him lift up his axe in his own town
against the new slaveholders
against the slave-lash
against the poisoned printing-press
against the bloodied merchandise
they want to sell.
Let them march singing and smiling,
the young white, the young Negro,
against the walls of gold
against the manufacturer of their blood,
let them sing, laugh and conquer.
Let the Rail Splitter awake.
Peace for the twilights to come,
peace for the bridge, peace for the wine,
peace for the stanzas which pursue me
and in my blood uprise entangling
my earlier songs with earth and loves,
peace for the city in the morning
when bread wakes up, peace for the Mississippi,
source of rivers,
peace for my brother’s shirt,
peace for books like a seal of air,
peace for the great kolkhoz of Kiev,
peace for the ashes of those dead
and of these other dead, peace for the grimy
iron of Brooklyn, peace for the letter-carrier
who from house to house goes like the day,
peace for the choreographer who shouts
through a funnel to the honeysuckle vine,
peace for my own right hand
that wants to write only Rosario,
peace for the Bolivian, secretive
as a lump of tin, peace
so that you may marry, peace for all
the saw-mills of Bio-Bio,
peace for the torn heart of guerilla Spain,
peace for the little museum in Wyoming
where the most lovely thing
is a pillow embroidered with a heart,
peace for the baker and his loaves,
and peace for the flour, peace
for all the wheat to be born,
for all the love which will seek its tasselled shelter,
peace for all those alive: peace
for all lands and all waters.
Here I say farewell, I return
to my house, in my dreams
I return to Patagonia where
the wind rattles the barns
and the ocean spatters ice.
I am nothing more than a poet: I love all of you,
I wander about the world I love;
in my country they gaol miners
and soldiers give orders to judges.
But I love even the roots
in my small cold country,
if I had to die a thousand times over
it is there I would die,
if I had to be born a thousand times over
it is there I would be born
near the tall wild pines
the tempestuous south wind
the newly purchased bells.
Let none think of me.
Let us think of the entire earth
and pound the table with love.
I don’t want blood again
to saturate bread, beans, music:
I wish they would come with me:
the miner, the little girl,
the lawyer, the seaman,
the doll-maker,
to go into a movie and come out
to drink the reddest wine.
I did not come to solve anything.
I came here to sing
and for you to sing with me.
From somewhere in the Americas, May 1948
(Translated by Waldeen)
From Let the Rail Splitter Awake and Other Poems,
available for $5.95 from
International Publishers
239 W 23 NY NY 10011
www.intpubnyc.com
|
Top level
Dynamic Magazine
