by Pablo Neruda
My last work was a translation of Romeo and Juliet and a long love poem in archaic meter, a poem that was never completed.
Come on, love poem, get up from among the broken glass, the time to sing has come.
Help me, love poem, to make things whole again, to sing in spite of pain.
It’s true that the world does not cleanse itself of wars, does not wash off the blood, does not get over its hate. It’s true.
Yet it is equally true that we are moving toward a realization: the violent ones are reflected in the mirror of the world, and their faces are not pleasant to look at, not even to themselves.
And I go on believing in the possibility of love. I am convinced that there will be mutual understanding among human beings, achieved in spite of all the suffering, the blood, the broken glass.
MATILDE URRUTIA, MY WIFE
My wife is from the provinces, like me. She was born in a southern city, Chillán, fortunately famous for its peasant-made pottery, unfortunately notorious for its disastrous earthquakes.
Speaking to her in my Cien sonetos de amor, I have told her all I feel.
Perhaps these poems make clear how much she means to me. Life and the land brought us together.
It may interest no one else, but we are happy. We share the time we have together in long sojourns on Chile’s lonely coast. Not in summer, when the coast, dried up by the sun, is yellow and desert-like. But in winter, yes; when the rains and the cold dress it up in an extraordinary flowering of green and yellow, blue and purple. Sometimes we go up from the wild and solitary ocean to the nervous city of Santiago, where together we weather the complicated existence of others.
Matilde sings my songs in a powerful voice.
Everything I write and everything I have is dedicated to her. It’s not much, but it makes her happy.
Now I’m watching her sink her tiny shoes into the mud in the garden, and then she also sinks her tiny hands as deep as the plant has gone down.
From the earth—with her feet and hands and eyes and voice—she brought me all the roots, all the flowers, all the sweet-smelling fruits of happiness.
AN INVENTOR OF STARS
A man was asleep in his room in a Paris hotel. Since he was an incurable night owl, don’t be surprised when I tell you it was twelve noon and the man was still sleeping.
He had to wake up. The wall on his left suddenly collapsed, demolished. Then the one in front of him crashed down. It wasn’t a bombing. From the freshly opened pits, moustachioed workers emerged, picks in hand, and taunted the sleeper: “Eh, lève-toi, bourgeois! Have a drink with us!”
The champagne was uncorked. The mayor came in, with a tricolor sash across his chest. Music burst out, the notes of the Marseillaise. What was behind such strange goings-on? Well, two lines of the Paris Métro, then under construction, had met underground, just below the floor of the dreamer’s hotel room.
From the moment that man told me his story, I decided to become his friend, or rather his devotee, his disciple. Since such extraordinary things happened to him, and I didn’t want to miss any of them, I followed him across several countries. Captivated by this phenomenon’s wild imagination, Federico García Lorca adopted a position similar to mine.
Federico and I were sitting in the Correos Café, across from Madrid’s Cibeles Fountain, when the sleeper from Paris burst in upon our tête-à-tête. Though he was strapping and round as a globe, he looked sick. Once again, something words failed to describe had occurred to him. He had been in his truly modest Madrid hideaway, trying to set his music sheets in order. For I have forgotten to mention that our hero was a wonderful composer. And what happened?
“A car pulled up at the door of my hotel. Then I heard footsteps come up the stairs and go into the room next to mine. Later the newcomer began to snore. It started off as a whisper. Then the air shuddered. The closets, the walls moved under the rhythmic impact of the tremendous snores.”
It had to be some wild animal. When the snoring broke into a torrent, our friend no longer had any doubts: it was the Horned Boar. In other countries his uproar had shaken basilicas, blocked highways, stirred up angry seas. What was this planetary menace up to, this abominable monster that threatened the peace of all Europe?
Every day he told new and chilling episodes about the Horned Boar. Federico, I, Rafael Alberti, the sculptor Alberto, Fulgencio Díaz Pastor, and Miguel Hernández—we welcomed him eagerly, and bade him goodbye anxiously.
Then one day he arrived with his old round-bellied laughter. And he told us: “The terrifying problem has been solved. The German Graf Zeppelin has agreed to transport the Horned Boar. It will drop him in the Brazilian jungle. He will live off the giant trees. There’s no danger that he will drink up the Amazon at one sitting. There he will go on deafening the earth with his thunderous snoring.”
Listening to him, Federico exploded with laughter till he had to shut his eyes. Then our friend mentioned the time he went to send off a telegram and the telegraph operator persuaded him never to send any more telegrams, only letters, because people were scared out of their wits when they received those winged messages, some even died of shock before opening them. He also told us about the time he went to look in on an interesting auction of thoroughbred horses in London. He raised his hand to greet a friend, and the auctioneer gave him, for £10,000, a mare for which the Aga Khan had bid £9,500. “I had to take the mare to my hotel and return it the next day,” he said.
Now the fabulist can’t tell the story of the Horned Boar, or any other story. He died here in Chile. In life, Acario Cotapos was the name of this spherical Chilean, a composer through and through and a prodigal source of unparalleled stories. I had the honor of speaking at the funeral of this man whose memory it was impossible to bury. All I said was: “Today we deliver into the shadows a splendid human being who gave us a star every day.”
ELUARD THE MAGNIFICENT
My comrade Paul Eluard died a short time ago. He was so wholesome, so solid, that I found it painful and difficult to accept his loss. He was a blue and rosy Norman, tough-looking but delicate. The war of 1914, in which he was gassed twice, left him with shaky hands for the rest of his life. Yet Eluard always made me think of a sky-blue color, of deep, still water, of a gentleness aware of its own strength. Paul Eluard’s poetry was so clear, transparent like drops of spring rain against a windowpane, that he may have seemed an apolitical man, a poet who would have nothing to do with politics. He was not. He had strong ties with the people of France, its causes, and its struggles.
Paul Eluard was firm. A kind of French tower with a passionate lucidity that is not the same as passionate stupidity, which is so common.
In Mexico, where we had gone together, I saw him for the first time on the verge of a dark pit—he who always kept a quiet place for sadness, a place as ready as the one reserved for wisdom.
He was worn out. I had convinced him, had dragged him, a Frenchman to the core, to that distant land, and there, the same day we buried José Clemente Orozco, I came down with a dangerous case of phlebitis that tied me to my bed for four months. Paul Eluard felt lonely, lonely and in darkness, as helpless as a blind explorer. He didn’t know anyone, no doors were thrown open to him. The loss of his wife weighed heavily on him; he felt all alone here, without love. He would say to me: “We have to see life together with someone, to share every fragment of life with someone. My solitude is unreal, my solitude is killing me.”
I called up friends and we made him go out. They took him off, grumbling, to ride over Mexico’s roads, and at some bend in one of those roads he came across love again, his last love: Dominique.
* * *
It’s very hard for me to write about Paul Eluard. I shall go on seeing him near me, alive, with the electric blue deepness, that could see so much and so far, burning in his eyes.
He had left French soil, where laurels and roots are woven together in a fragrant heritage. His tall stature was all water and stone, with ancient vines cli
mbing up on it, bearing flowers and flashes of light, nests and transparent songs.
“Transparence,” that’s the word. His poetry was crystal hard as rock, water standing still in its singing stream.
Poet of the highest kind of love, fire pure as noon, in France’s disastrous days he planted his heart in the center of his country and out of it came fire that was decisive in battle.
And so it was natural for him to join the ranks of the Communist Party. Being a Communist, for Eluard, meant reasserting the values of humanity and humanism with his poetry and his life.
Let no one believe that Eluard was less political than poet. His clear-sightedness and his formidable dialectical reasoning often astonished me. Together we examined many things, men and problems of our time, and his lucidity has always been of great help to me.
He did not lose himself in surrealist irrationalism, because he was not an imitator but a creator, and as such he pumped bullets of clarity and intelligence into the dead body of surrealism.
He was my friend in everyday life and now I have lost his affection, which was part of my daily bread. No one will be able to give me what he has taken with him, because his active brotherly spirit was one of my life’s treasured luxuries.
Tower of France, brother! I lean over your closed eyes, they will go on giving me the light and the greatness, the simplicity and the honesty, the goodness and the naturalness you sowed on earth.
PIERRE REVERDY
I would never call Pierre Reverdy’s poetry magical. This word, catchword of an era, is like the hat of a fake magician at a fair: no wild pigeon will emerge from it and fly away.
Reverdy was a physical poet, he named and touched numberless aspects of earth and sky. He named the things and the splendor of the world.
His own poetry was like a vein of quartz, subterranean but filled with light, inexhaustible. Sometimes it threw off a hard glitter, like the sheen of some black mineral torn with difficulty from its thick covering of earth. Suddenly it flew out like a spark from a match, or hid in the gallery of its mine, far from the light of day, but faithful to its own truth. Perhaps this truth, which identified the substance of his poetry with nature, this Reverdian tranquility, this unflagging honesty, gradually paved his way to oblivion. He was eventually taken for granted by others, like a natural phenomenon, a house, a river, or a familiar street that would never change its outward appearance or its place.
Now that he has gone away, now that a tremendous silence, greater than his own noble and proud silence, has carried him off, we realize that he is no longer here, that this unique light is gone, buried in earth and sky.
I say that someday his name, like an angel coming back to life, will knock down the unjust doors of oblivion.
Without trumpets, with the lyrical silence of his magnificent and enduring poetry around him like a halo, we shall see him at the last judgment, at the Essential Judgment, dazzling us with the simple timelessness of his work.
JERZY BOREJSZA
Jerzy Borejsza is no longer waiting for me in Poland. Fate reserved for this old émigré the chance to rebuild his country. When he went back to it as a soldier, after being away for many years, Warsaw was just a pile of rubble. There were no streets, no trees. No one was waiting for him. Borejsza, a dynamic wonder, worked with his people. Colossal plans sprang from his head, and then a tremendous initiative: the House of the Printed Word. One by one its stories were built; the biggest rotary printing presses in the world arrived; and now thousands upon thousands of books and magazines are printed there. Borejsza was a tireless, down-to-earth man who converted dreams into action. His daring plans materialized, like the castles in dreams, in the new Poland with its incredible vitality.
I hadn’t met him. I went to see him at the vacation camp where he was waiting for me, in northern Poland, in the Masurian Lakes region.
When I got out of the car, I saw an ungainly man in need of a shave, wearing only a pair of nondescript shorts. With the energy of a wild man, in a Spanish learned from books, he shouted: “Pablo, non habras fatiga. Debes tomar reposo.” (Which in English would sound something like this: “Pablo, no have tired. You must take repose.”) As a matter of fact, he did not let me “take repose” at all. His conversation was profuse, multiform, surprising, and punctuated by exclamation points. He described seven different construction plans to me in the same breath, with an analysis of several books that contributed new interpretations of history and life thrown in for good measure. “The true hero was Sancho Panza, not Don Quixote, Pablo.” For him, Sancho was the voice of popular realism, the true center of his world and his time. “When Sancho runs things, he does it well, because it is the people running things.”
He used to pull me out of bed early, always shouting at me: “You must take repose,” and he would lead me through fir and pine forests to show me the convent of a religious sect that had migrated from Russia a hundred years before and still clung to its old rites. The nuns received him with a blessing. Borejsza was all tact and respect with those religious women.
He was gentle and active. The war years had been terrible. One day he showed me the revolver used to execute a war criminal, after a summary trial. A notebook had been found where he had painstakingly written down all his crimes. Old people and children strangled by his hands, little girls raped. They had surprised him in the very village where he had committed his atrocities. Witnesses filed past. His incriminating notebook was read to him, and the insolent assassin had only this to say for himself: “I would do it again if I could start all over.” In my hands I had the notebook, and the revolver that had extinguished the life of a heartless criminal.
They catch eels in the Masurian Lakes, which multiply until you lose track of their number. We set out to go fishing very early, and we were soon watching the eels, quivering and wet, like black belts.
I became familiar with those waters, their fishermen, and the scenery around them. From morning till night, my friend got me to go up and come down, to run and to row, to meet people and learn all about trees. All this to the shout of: “Here you must take repose. There is no place like this for resting.”
When I left the Masurian Lakes, he gave me a smoked eel, the longest I have ever seen.
This strange walking stick complicated my life. I wanted to eat it, because I am very partial to smoked eels, and this one, having come straight from its native lake, without a store or any other go-between, was above suspicion. But during that time there was eel on my hotel menu noon and night, and I didn’t have a chance to serve myself my private eel. It started to prey on my mind.
At night I would put it out on the balcony to get some fresh air. Sometimes, in the middle of an absorbing conversation, I remembered that it was noon and my eel was still outdoors, in the full sunlight. Then I would lose all interest in the subject under discussion and would dash out to put my eel in a cool place in my room, in a closet, for instance.
I finally met an eel lover and gave him, not without qualms, the longest, tenderest, and best smoked eel that ever existed.
Now the great Borejsza, a scrawny, dynamic Quixote, an admirer of Sancho Panza like the other Quixote, sensitive and wise, builder and dreamer, is resting for the first time. He rests in the darkness he loved so much. Near his resting place, a world he gave his volcanic energy and his inexhaustible fire to is still being created.
GYÖRGY SOMLYÓ
In Hungary, I love the way life and poetry, history and poetry, time and the poet, intertwine. In other countries this matter is discussed more or less naively or one-sidedly. In Hungary every poet is committed before he is born. Attila József, Endre Ady, Gyulla Illyés are natural products of a great interchange between duty and music, between mother country and darkness, between love and pain.
György Somlyó is a poet I have seen grow in confidence and strength over a span of twenty years. A poet with fine tones that soar like a violin’s, a poet who concerns himself with his own life and with other lives, a Hungarian po
et down to his bone marrow—Hungarian in his generous readiness to share the reality and the dreams of a people. A poet of faithful love and active commitment, his universality bears the unique stamp of the great poetry of his country.
A poet, young but mature, who deserves to be heard by our time. A quiet poetry, transparent and intoxicating like the wine from our golden sands.
QUASIMODO
Italy’s earth holds the voices of its ancient poets deep within itself, where it is purest. Walking on the soil of its fields, passing through parks where the water sparkles, going over the sands of its small blue ocean, I felt as if I were stepping on diamond-like substances, hidden accumulations of crystal, all the luster stored up by the centuries. Italy gave European poetry form, sound, grace, and rapture; she pulled it out of its early formlessness, out of its coarseness dressed up in sackcloth and armor. Italy’s light transformed the rags of the medieval minstrels and the iron trappings of the chansons de geste into an abundant flow of cut diamonds.
For poets like us, recent arrivals to culture from countries where anthologies begin with poets of 1880, it was amazing to find in Italian anthologies poems dating back to the 1230s or 1310 or 1450, and between these dates the dazzling tercets, the passionate artistry, the depth and the gem-like surface of Dante, Cavalcanti, Petrarch, Poliziano.
These names and these men gave their Florentine light to our sweet-toned and powerful Garcilaso de la Vega, to good-natured Boscán; they lighted Góngora’s way and shaded Quevedo’s melancholy with a thrust of their own darkness; they molded the sonnets of England’s Shakespeare and threw light on the essences of France, making the roses of Ronsard and du Bellay burst into bloom.