Residence on Earth (New Directions Paperbook) (30 page)

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

T
HE
C
APTAIN’S
V
ERSES
(BILINGUAL)

L
OVE
P
OEMS (BILINGUAL)

R
ESIDENCE ON
E
ARTH (BILINGUAL)

S
PAIN IN
O
UR HEARTS (BILINGUAL)