by Pablo Neruda
por el invierno más amargo de la tierra, por el invierno
de la sangre en la tierra.
Pero las cosas pasan, y desde el fondo
de la tierra la nueva primavera camina.
Mirad los cañones que florecen en la boca de Prusia.
Mirad las ametralladoras y los tanques que
desembarcan en esta hora en Marsella.
Escuchad el corazón áspero de Yugoeslavia
palpitando otra vez en el pecho desangrado de Europa.
Los ojos españoles miran hacia acá, hacia Mexico
y Chile,
por que esperan el regreso de sus hermanos errantes.
Algo pasa en el mundo, como un soplo que antes
no sentíamos entre las olas de la pólvora.
Éste es el canto de lo que pasa y de lo que será.
Éste es el canto de la lluvia que cayó sobre el campo
como una inmensa lágrima de sangre y plomo.
Hoy que el Ejército Rojo golpea las puertas de Prusia
he querido cantar para vosotros, para toda la tierra,
este canto de palabras oscuras,
para que seamos dignos de la luz que llega.
SONG TO THE RED ARMY ON ITS ARRIVAL
AT THE GATES OF PRUSSIA
This is the song between night and dawn, this is the song
come from the last death rattles as if from the beaten
hide of a bloody drum,
burst forth from the first joys like the flowering
bough in the snow and like the ray of sunlight upon
the flowering bough.
These are the words that clutched the dying
and that syllable by syllable squeezed the tears
like soiled clothes
until they dried up the last bitter drops of sobbing
and made from all the weeping the hardened braid,
the cord, the hard thread that will uphold the dawn.
Brothers, today we can say: daybreak comes,
now we can strike the table with the fist
that until yesterday upheld our tearful brow.
Now we can look at the crystal tower
of our powerful snow-covered range
because in the lofty pride of its snowy wings
shines the stern splendor of a far-off snow
where the invader’s claws are buried.
The Red Army at the gates of Prussia. Listen, listen!
dark, humbled, radiant heroes of fallen crown,
listen! villages destroyed and laid waste and broken,
listen! Ukrainian fields where the grain can be reborn
with pride.
Listen! martyred ones, hanged ones, listen!
dead guerrilla fighters,
rigid beneath the frost with hands still
clutching the gun,
listen! girls, homeless children, listen! sacred ashes
of Pushkin and Tolstoy, of Peter and Suvorov,
listen! on this southern height to the sound
that on the gates of Prussia crashes like thunder.
The Red Army at the gates of Prussia. Where are
the angered assassins, the gravediggers,
where are those who hanged mothers from the fir tree,
where are the tigers with a stench of extermination?
They are behind the walls of their own houses trembling,
waiting for the lightningstroke of punishment, and when all
the walls fall
they will see the fir tree and the virgin come, the guerrilla
fighter and the child,
they will see the dead and the living come to judge them.
Listen, Czechoslovaks, prepare the toughest
tongs and the gallows, and the ashes of Lidice
so that they may be swallowed tomorrow by the hangman,
listen, impatient workers of France, prepare
your immortal rivers
so that the drowned invaders may navigate them.
Prepare the vengeance, Spaniards, behind the mountain range
and close to the coast of the burning south
clean the little rusted carbine because
the day has come.
This is the song of the dawning day and of the ending night.
Listen to it, and from harsh suffering let the confident
voice emerge
that does not forgive, and let the punishing arm not tremble.
Before beginning tomorrow the canticles of human pity
you still have time to know the lands soaked in martyrdom.
Do not raise tomorrow the flag of pardon
over the cursed sons of the wolf and brothers of the serpent,
over those who reached the last edge of the knife
and demolished the rose.
This is the song of the spring hidden
beneath the earth of Russia, beneath the expanse
of the taiga and the snow, this is the word
that mounts to the throat from the buried root.
From the root covered by so much anguish, from the
stalk broken
by the bitterest winter on earth, by the winter
of blood upon the earth.
But things change, and from the depths
of the earth the new spring steps out.
Look at the cannons that flourish in the Prussian mouth.
Look at the machine guns and the tanks that
are landing at this hour in Marseilles.
Listen to the stern heart of Yugoslavia
throbbing again in the blood-drained breast of Europe.
Spanish eyes are looking toward here, toward Mexico
and Chile,
because they wait for the return of their wandering brothers.
Something is happening in the world, like a breath that before
we did not sense among the waves of gunpowder.
This is the song of what is happening and of what will be.
This is the song of the rain that fell upon the field
like an immense tear of blood and lead.
Today when the Red Army beats on the gates of Prussia
I have chosen to sing for you, for all the earth,
this song of dark words,
so that we may be worthy of the coming light.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE (1973)
The prospective reader may wonder at the publication in 1973 of a translation of three volumes of poetry written by a Chilean poet and diplomat between 1925 and 1945. One justification for the undertaking is that no English edition of the whole work is presently available; indeed, this is the first complete English translation ever to have been published.
And Pablo Neruda should be better known to English readers. His poetry, and particularly, Residencia en la tierra, helped shape a whole generation of Spanish-American writers and had a perceptible influence on twentieth-century Spanish poetry. Neruda has been one of the most prolific and most imaginative poets writing in Spanish. When in this century Sartre rejected the offer of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, one of the reasons he gave was that it should have gone to Neruda. That oversight was belatedly rectified when the prize was awarded to Neruda on October 22, 1971.
Pablo Neruda is the pen name of Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He was born in Parral, Chile, in 1904, moved to Santiago in 1921, and lived there until 1927. He published his first volume of poems, La canción de la fiesta (“The Song of the Festival”), in 1921. It won him a municipal poetry prize, the first of many honors in his long poetic career. Like his compatriot Gabriela Mistral, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945, Neruda was given a series of consular and diplomatic assignments in Ceylon, Burma, Singapore, Rangoon, and Buenos Aires. He was consul general to the Spanish Republic from 1934 to 1936. Recalled to Chile when the Republic fell, he was soon sent to France to help the Spanish refugees get to America. From 1940 to 1943 he served as Chilean consul general in Mexico.
/> Neruda returned to Chile in 1943, became active in politics, was elected senator in 1945, and joined the Communist party. When it was oudawed in 1949, Neruda became a political exile in Mexico and other countries. He returned to Chile in 1953 to devote himself to writing. In 1971 he was named Chilean ambassador to France, a post he relinquished two years later because of ill health. He died in Santiago on September 23, 1973.
Along with most poets writing in Spanish America in the 1920s, Neruda was influenced by Modernism, but he very early freed himself from this influence with Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, 1924), which made him the outstanding young poet of Spanish America. He created his own style, not precisely a poetic school, but a new tendency in poetry. Neruda’s work is virile, romantic, original, exciting, and earthy. He sees people and things directly and clearly, and he delights in them. He is technically expert and deeply human. His imagery is striking, some of it surrealistic, but his language is very simple. In an “Ode to Ironing” in Plenos poderes (Fully Empowered, 1962) he wrote:
La poesía es blanca:
sale del agua envuelta en gotas,
se arruga, y se amontona,
hay que extender la piel de este planeta,
hay que planchar el mar de su blancura
y van y van las manos,
se alisan las sagradas superficies
y así se hacen las cosas:
las manos hacen cada día el mundo,
se une el fuego al acero,
llegan el lino, el lienzo y el tocuyo
del combate de las lavanderías
y nace de la luz una paloma:
la castidad regresa de la espuma.
Poetry is white:
it comes from the water wrapped in drops,
it wrinkles, and it piles up,
the skin of this planet must be stretched,
the sea of its whiteness must be ironed
and the hands go and go,
the sacred surfaces are smoothed
and that’s the way things are made:
hands make the world each day,
fire joins steel,
linen, canvas, and cotton arrive
from the laundry combat
and from the light is born a dove:
chastity returns from the foam.
The three volumes of Residencia en la tierra were published in 1933, 1935, and 1947. Many of the poems in the first two were written when Neruda was on consular duty in the Far East, and his sense of alienation and isolation is evident in the hermetic and surrealistic images in some of the pieces. Residencia, which many critics consider the poet’s most important work, was written at the height of his creative powers. Commenting on this work, his most perceptive critic, Amado Alonso, said: “Instead of the traditional procedure, which describes a reality and suggests its poetic sense between the lines, poets like Neruda describe the poetic sense and nebulously suggest to which reality it refers.”
The third volume, Tercera residencia, published twelve years after the second, shows a poet deeply affected by the Spanish Civil War and the murder of his fellow poet Federico Garcia Lorca. Neruda writes with a deep sense of involvement in social justice and in political decency. España en el corazón, which was brought out separately in 1937 and is now part of this volume, is the noblest poem to come out of that war.
The translator’s double responsibility is to find out what the author has said in his language, and then to say this in the translator’s own language with as much fidelity to the author's words and intent as is permitted by the differences between the two languages. He must, in short, make the language curtain as transparent as possible, letting the author speak for himself in a new tongue. It is a modest but demanding task. I hope that I have performed it acceptably.*
Madison, Connecticut / 1973
D.D.W.
* * *
*Eighteen of the poems in Residencia en la tierra were published in 1961 by Grove Press in a bilingual edition with English translations by Ben Belitt.The poems are: “Caballo de los sueños, “ Sabor, ” “Fantasma, ” “Colección nocturna, ” “Arte poética,” “Comunicaciones desmentidas,” “Entierro en el este,” “Caballero solo,” “Ritual de mis piernas, ” “Significa sombras,” “Walking Around,” “Oda con un lamento, ” “Apogeo del apio,” “Alberto Rojas Jimenez viene volando, ” “No hay olvido (Sonata),” “Las fiarias y las penas,” “Explico algunas cosas, ” “Cómo era España.” “Ode to Ironing” was originally translated by Alastair Reid and published by Grove Press in A New Decade (Poems 1958-1967). Permission to publish these poems with new translations is hereby gratefully acknowledged.
by Pablo Neruda
Available from New Directions
THE CAPTAIN’S VERSES (BILINGUAL)
LOVE POEMS (BILINGUAL)
RESIDENCE ON EARTH (BILINGUAL)
SPAIN IN OUR HEARTS (BILINGUAL)
Copyright © Editorial Losada, S.A., Buenos Aires, 1958, 1961, 1962
Copyright © 1973 by Pablo Neruda and Donald D.Walsh
Copyright © 1973 by New Directions Publishing Corporation
Copyright © 2004 by Jim Harrison
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
In 1946, New Directions first published Residence on Earth and Other Poems, which included parts of the first two volumes of Residencia en la tierra, with translations by Angel Flores. The complete edition of Residence on Earth, translated by Donald D. Walsh, was published clothbound and as New Directions Paperbook 340 in 1973. This edition, with a new introduction by Jim Harrison, is now reissued as NDP992 in 2004.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Neruda, Pablo, 1904–1973.
[Residencia en la tierra. English & Spanish]
Residence on Earth / Pablo Neruda ; introduction by Jim Harrison; translated by Donald D. Walsh.
p. cm. — (New Directions Paperbook 992)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-8112-1581-7
ISBN 978-0-8112-2426-0 (e-book)
I. Walsh, Donald Devenish, 1903–1980 II.Title.
PQ8097.N4R413 2004
861’.62—dc22
2003028143
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10011