I Explain a Few Things Read online

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Authors

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on Pablo Neruda, click here.

  For email updates on Ilan Stavans, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Preface

  “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I never found in books any formula for writing poetry; and I, in turn, do not intend to leave in print a word of advice, a method, or a style that will allow young poets to receive from me some drop of supposed wisdom.” Thus spoke Pablo Neruda on December 13, 1971, upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature. He had become by then the Latin American poet par excellence, a Walt Whitman of the Spanish language. The Stockholm committee acknowledged Neruda “for a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent’s destiny and dreams.” That continent was known—maybe still is—for being trapped in a hundred-year labyrinth of solitude. But Neruda added: “There is no unassailable solitude. All roads lead to the same point: to the communication of who we are. And we must travel across lonely and rugged terrain, through isolation and silence, to reach the magic zone where we can dance an awkward dance.”

  It was clear at Neruda’s centennial, celebrated in 2004, that his journey has never been more tangible. He is the emblem of the engaged poet, an artist whose heart, always with the people, is consumed by passion. That passion is defined by politics. Gabriel García Márquez called him “the best poet of the twentieth century—in any language.” The blurb might be overinflated. There is already little doubt, though, that Neruda is among the most lasting voices of that most tumultuous (in his own words, “the saddest”) century. He is surely one of the most popular poets of all time; his books, from his romantic Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair to his masterpiece The Heights of Macchu Picchu, and his memorable and endlessly mutating poems about Isla Negra sell millions of copies in dozens of countries.

  Even before his death in 1973, at the age of sixty-nine, Neruda was an icon of the young: at once eternally idealistic and impossibly hyperkinetic. Among his own idols was Walt Whitman, whom he called an “essential brother.” Whitman personified for Neruda the crossroads where poetry and politics meet—or don’t—and the commitment to use the pen as a calibrator of one’s age. After a self-centered start, he published Canto general, the endeavor that made him dutifully famous, written over a decade (1938–49) that spanned the atrocities and war crimes of World War II. Canto general offered a CinemaScope portrait of the Americas, the United States included, that still is unprecedented. Everything is included: its mineral structure, its flora and fauna, the tribal struggles of its pre-Columbian past, the sweeping swords of the conquistadors and liberators, and a picture of average workers in factories at midcentury, anonymous in their jobs or on strikes to improve their miserable labor conditions. Though Borges and Neruda are polar opposites, there is something almost Borgesian in Neruda’s task: yes, as the Nobel announcement had it, he attempted to reduce the universe—or at least a universe—into a single book. Poetry today appears to have lost that ambition, supplanting it with an endless need to emphasize the autobiographical. Creative writing workshops do little but manufacture inane poems by consent. In spite of his refusal to leave us a manual of style, Neruda’s oeuvre displays a clear pedagogy: it puts poetry and history side by side.

  This isn’t to say that Neruda is foolproof. The evidence points to the contrary. His best poems feel as if created by one who is not as temperate as one is likely to imagine. He also left us an overdose of bad poetry. How could he not when his five-volume Obras completas, published in Spanish in 1999, totals some six thousand pages? While editing The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, published in 2003, I often thought of Truman Capote’s comment on Jack Kerouac: he didn’t write, Capote said, he simply typed. Neruda’s late oeuvre is passable at best and disheveled at worst. Indeed Alastair Reid, one of Neruda’s most accomplished English translators, told me I was doing a disservice by releasing, in between covers, an excess of six hundred poems by the Chilean laureate, organized so as to show the overall arc of his career. However, an unsmoothed Neruda is better than a censored Neruda, even when that censorship has nothing to do with politics and all to do with aesthetics. To fully appreciate the sublime, it helps to meddle with the unworthy.

  The most attractive yet delicate aspect of Neruda’s posterity has to do with his ideological odyssey. He was simultaneously a witness and a chronicler of most of the decisive events of the twentieth century. From the remoteness of his childhood he heard the bangs of the Great War, was a published poet in Spain in the 1930s (he befriended Federico García Lorca), traveled through the Soviet Union, saw the rise and demise of Hitler, made it to Cuba after 1959, opposed the U.S. invasion of Vietnam and Cambodia, and was in Chile when General Augusto Pinochet orchestrated a coup—on the other 9/11—against the elected Socialist president Salvador Allende. In fact, Neruda often posed as a politician: he was a senator in Chile and also a presidential hopeful; and at various moments and different geographies he was a diplomat.

  None of which managed to dissipate his naïveté. In a poem he imagines Franco in hell: “May you be alone and accursed, / alone and awake among all the dead, / and let blood fall upon you like rain, / and let a dying river of severed eyes / slide and flow over you staring at you endlessly.” He was a staunch supporter of Stalin, which prompted him to write cheap red propaganda. He imprudently embraces Fidel Castro: “Fidel, Fidel, the people are grateful / for word in action and deeds that sing, / that is why I bring from far / a cup of my country’s wine.” And in the early 1970s he wrote a book called, embarrassingly, Incitación al Nixonicidio—in English, “Invitation to the Nixonicide.”

  Still, Neruda is a torch-bearer. On campus in the 1970s he was a favorite. The beatniks made him a role model. But then the neoliberals of the 1980s turned him into an archaism. In 1995 came Michael Radford’s film Il Postino, based on a novella by Neruda’s compatriot Antonio Skármeta. Since then he has enjoyed a renewed appeal, intensified by the festivities surrounding his centennial. Students embrace him because he sought fairness and didn’t shy away from resistance. The Communism that Neruda so fervently championed has lost its gravitas, but another larger-than-life conflict has taken hold. How would he react to the current atmosphere where civil liberties are under threat in our country, which prides itself on being fundamentally democratic? And what would his take be on the misconstrued War on Terror? In his Nobel speech he said he had no manual to offer to the next generation. His poetry is anything but programmatic: it is fluid, rambunctious, centrifugal.

  His unstoppable commitment to freedom during the Spanish Civil War has enormous currency nowadays. After the terrorist bombings in Madrid in March 2004, the electorate voted José María Aznar out of office in a clear rebuttal of his foreign policy in Iraq. Neruda’s indictment of careless corporate globalism in poems like “United Fruit Co.” has, if anything, become more urgent. And his anger against limitations on press freedom, from Venezuela to Saudi Arabia, North Korea and the United States, feels as if it had been expressed just this morning. I
’m especially drawn to Neruda’s deep if conflicted love toward el coloso del norte, the English-speaking America. Throughout his life he made sure to distinguish between the people of the United States and its government. He honored the honesty and noblesse in the American masses but reacted irritably when that honesty and noblesse were betrayed by politicos. In “I Wish the Woodcutter Would Wake Up,” Neruda states, “What we love is your peace, not your mask.” He stresses the element of peace again, putting it—in Robert Bly’s translation—in a larger context:

  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 …

  Then, of course, there’s the domestic Neruda, whose “elemental odes” are, well, elemental; they celebrate with Buddhist concentration the mundane, insignificant objects surrounding us: a stamp album, an artichoke, a hare-boy, a watermelon, a bee, a village movie theater … What do they say about us? And what do we, their enablers, say about them? I presume it’s my trade, but the ones I never stop rereading are the odes to the book (“A book ripens and falls / like all fruits, / it has light / and shadow”), the ode to the dictionary (“you are not a / tomb, sepulcher, grave, / tumulus, mausoleum, / but guard and keeper, / hidden fire”), and the two odes to criticism (“With a single life / I will not learn enough. / With the light of other lives, / many lives will live in my song”). These are items always at our side, yet somehow Neruda makes us see them anew.

  Over time, I’ve learned to understand an aspect in Neruda that I had failed to spot and that my students recurrently point to: his humor. This aspect on occasion appears connected to religion, which, needless to say, was not his dish du jour, a factor that highlights one of Neruda’s limitations in reaching readers today. He ignored God and dismissed faith as irrelevant. After reading dozens of his poems compressed into a single semester, a student of mine said, a bit pompously, “A life experienced only through the heart is nothing but tragedy; one approached solely through the mind is comedy; and one seen through Neruda’s eyes is sheer drama—poignant and droll.” What mesmerized the student was that the Chilean bard had resisted, to the extent that is possible, the traps of cynicism. He took human behavior seriously and knew how to laugh.

  As death approached him, perhaps he did become sarcastic. In “The Great Urinator,” a poem he wrote while suffering from prostate cancer and that he left unpublished (it is part of the posthumous Selected Failings), he portrays God peeing bronze-colored, dense liquid rain from above. The urine falls on factories, cemeteries, and gardens, as well as churches. It flows inexhaustibly underneath doors and in avenues, backing up drains, disintegrating marble floors, carpets, and staircases. It is a scene taken out of a Hollywood disaster movie: How do people react? Neruda’s answer is hilarious: Everyone is frightened, but oops, there are no umbrellas. And “from on high the great urinator,” the poem states (in John Felstiner’s rendition), “was silent.” What does all this mean? True to form, Neruda doesn’t sort out the imbroglio. Again, he has no wisdom to dispense. Or has he? The last stanzas read:

  I am a pale and artless poet

  not here to work out riddles

  or recommend special umbrellas.

  Hasta la vista! I greet you and go off

  to a country where they won’t ask me questions.

  The more than fifty poems I’ve collected in this bilingual anthology are representative of Neruda’s diverse, multitudinous career, ranging from the intimate to the denunciatory. My objective has been to distill the poet’s exuberance to its most essential while producing a book affordable to young people. At almost one thousand pages and with a tag of $40 on its hardcover edition, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda was my source. Still, I’ve departed from it in that I Explain a Few Things includes some new translations, as well as a handful of previously unavailable poems in English such as “Ode to the Eye.” The translator’s name appears at the end of each English version. The material is organized chronologically by the poem’s original book source: “I Ask for Silence,” for instance, appears as part of Extravagaria. The years listed in parentheses in the table of contents refer not to dated publication but to the period in which Neruda wrote a particular book.

  The title comes from a defining poem in Neruda’s book Third Residence, usually incorporated into the more ambitious Residence on Earth. A benchmark in the Chilean’s oeuvre, it is a manifesto renouncing the romantic tonalities of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair and an embrace of the type of ideological poetry with which he would be identified for the rest of his life. In it Neruda is at his most domestic—it has a house as its leitmotif—while also striving to confront the impact of the Spanish Civil War on him and his entire generation. The personal and the universal are juxtaposed in just the exact way. It is, undoubtedly, one of my own favorite poems. The title also encompasses Neruda’s humble approach to art, making it heartfelt and confessional, a journey of self-discovery. Plus, it articulates his moral dilemma in appropriate fashion: how does one make art out of tragedy?

  –I.S.

  FROM

  Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada

  (1923–24)

  FROM

  Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

  (1923–24)

  XV ME GUSTAS CUANDO CALLAS

  Me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente,

  y me oyes desde lejos, y mi voz no te toca.

  Parece que los ojos se te hubieran volado

  y parece que un beso te cerrara la boca.

  Como todas las cosas están llenas de mi alma

  emerges de las cosas, llena del alma mía.

  Mariposa de sueño, te pareces a mi alma,

  y te pareces a la palabra melancolía.

  Me gustas cuando callas y estás como distante.

  Y estás como quejándote, mariposa en arrullo.

  Y me oyes desde lejos, y mi voz no te alcanza:

  déjame que me calle con el silencio tuyo.

  Déjame que te hable también con tu silencio

  claro como una lámpara, simple como un anillo.

  Eres como la noche, callada y constelada.

  Tu silencio es de estrella, tan lejano y sencillo.

  Me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente.

  Distante y dolorosa como si hubieras muerto.

  Una palabra entonces, una sonrisa bastan.

  Y estoy alegre, alegre de que no sea cierto.

  XV I LIKE FOR YOU TO BE STILL

  I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent,

  and you hear me from far away and my voice does not touch you.

  It seems as though your eyes had flown away

  and it seems that a kiss had sealed your mouth.

  As all things are filled with my soul

  you emerge from the things, filled with my soul.

  You are like my soul, a butterfly of dream,

  and you are like the word Melancholy.

  I like for you to be still, and you seem far away.

  It sounds as though you were lamenting, a butterfly cooing like a dove.

  And you hear me from far away, and my voice does not reach you:

  Let me come to be still in your silence.

  And let me talk to you with your silence

  that is bright as a lamp, simple as a ring.

  You are like the night, with its stillness and constellations.

  Your silence is that of a star, as remote and candid.

  I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent,

  distant and full of sorrow as though you had died.

  One wo
rd then, one smile, is enough.

  And I am happy, happy that it’s not true.

  W. S. MERWIN

  XX PUEDO ESCRIBIR

  Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.

  Escribir, por ejemplo: «La noche está estrellada,

  y tiritan, azules, los astros, a lo lejos».

  El viento de la noche gira en el cielo y canta.

  Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.

  Yo la quise, y a veces ella también me quiso.

  En las noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos.

  La besé tantas veces bajo el cielo infinito.

  Ella me quiso, a veces yo también la quería.

  Cómo no haber amado sus grandes ojos fijos.

  Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.

  Pensar que no la tengo. Sentir que la he perdido.

  Oír la noche inmensa, más inmensa sin ella.

  Y el verso cae al alma como al pasto el rocío.

  Qué importa que mi amor no pudiera guardarla.

  La noche está estrellada y ella no está conmigo.

  Eso es todo. A lo lejos alguien canta. A lo lejos.

  Mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.

  Como para acercarla mi mirada la busca.

  Mi corazón la busca, y ella no está conmigo.

  La misma noche que hace blanquear los mismos árboles.

  Nosotros, los de entonces, ya no somos los mismos.

  Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero cuánto la quise.

  Mi voz buscaba el viento para tocar su oído.

  De otro. Será de otro. Como antes de mis besos.

  Su voz, su cuerpo claro. Sus ojos infinitos.

  Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero.

  Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.

  Porque en noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos,