This Wednesday is our dramatic reading of Pablo Neruda poetry. All day I walk around the house reciting the poems, stumbling over words in Spanish. I have to say them over and over, first to learn to enunciate each word, then to hear the rhythm of the words together, finally to understand their meaning.
Our performance follows the chronology of Neruda’s life in poems. We start with his early love poems, published in 1923 (when Neruda was only 20 years old!) in a collection called Veinte Poemas de Amor. Many years later, Neruda said this:
Veinte Poemas de Amor make a painful book of pastoral poems filled with my most tormented adolescent passions. It is a book I love because, in spite of its acute melancholy, the joyfulness of being alive is present in it…I wrote in a long, slender-bodied abandoned lifeboat left over from some shipwreck. The sky overhead was the most violent blue I have ever seen. I don’t think I have ever again been so exalted.
Next we cover poems Neruda wrote while serving a series of honorary consulships that took him to East Asia, Europe, and throughout South America. Neruda wrote Solo La Muerte during this time. Of all the poems we’ll be covering on Wednesday, Solo La Muerte is my favorite.
The first time I read it in rehearsal, I couldn’t get the emphasis right on certain syllables in the many words I rarely used. The director told me to practice, to say the poem 17 times out loud if I had to. Now the verses roll out in a deep, ethereal voice. I wonder how could Neruda at such a young age have known death so well? Then I read this quote and everything makes sense.
I had only solitude open to me. That time was the loneliest in my life. Yet I also recall it as the most luminous, as if a lightning flash of extraordinary brightness had stopped at my window to throw light on my destiny. My work progressed very slowly. Distance and a deep silence separated me from my world, and I could not bring myself to enter wholeheartedly into the alien world around me. If the very air he breathes does not enter into the poet, his poem is dead: dead because it has not had a chance to breathe.
I read somewhere recently that Neruda is often thought of as either a poet of love or a poet of politics. I thought I knew him as both, but I realize now I never really knew him. What I know now is his political poems transform me. I nearly spit the names of dictators (“the dictatorship of flies”) he ticks off in his poem La United Fruit Co.:
Trujillo flies, Tacho flies,
Carías flies, Martínez flies,
Ubico flies, damp flies
of humble blood and marmelade,
drunken flies that buzz over the common graves,
circus flies, clever flies
well versed in tyranny.
Neruda’s political fire, it’s said, was started with the Spanish Civil War and the murder of García Lorca. Neruda operated inside and outside the political system. He was elected senator of the Republic, he joined the Communist party of Chile, he protested on behalf of striking miners and for a time lived in exile. I read the following quote and it ignites in me this question: Who are today’s “Pablo Nerudas”?
Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread. Arsonists, warmongers, wolves hunt down the poet to burn, kill, sink their teeth into him. The Spanish Fascists started off the war in Spain by assassinating its greatest poet. But poetry has not died; it has a cat’s nine lives. They harass it, they drag it through the street, they spit on it and make it the butt of their jokes, they try to strangle it, throw it into prison, and it survives every attempt with a clear face and a smile as bright as grains of rice.
As the first bullets ripped into the guitars of Spain, when blood instead of music gushed out of them, my poetry stopped dead like a ghost in the streets. From then on, my road met everyman’s road. And suddenly I saw that from the south of solitude I had moved to the north, which is el pueblo, the people, whose sword, whose handkerchief my humble poetry wants to be, to dry the sweat of its vast sorrows and give it a weapon in the struggle for bread.
I have no answers. I’m touched by this poet in a way I never was before. I don’t pretend to know much about him still. Yet somehow, he’s getting through.
Try it. Pick a poem by someone you know is great but whose greatness, perhaps, you’ve never truly known. Read that poem out loud 17 times. Read it in an empty house. Read it until you shout it, you drone it, you channel it. Read it until it starts to become yours.
Still remember being swayed by those lines from Walking Around.
“I don’t want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief”
Also a few of his early love poems. I forget which poem it was. But there was a line which talked about remembering the lover before she was there. Coming across Neruda’s poems changed my life.
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I wonder if it was this one from Juegas Todos Los Dias (Every Day You Play):
A nadie te pareces desde que yo te amo.
Dejame tenderte entre guirnaldas amarillas.
Quien escribe tu nombre con letras de humo entre las estrellas
del sur?
(Ah), dejame recordarte como eras entonces, cuando aun no
existias.
You are like nobody since I loved you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of
the south?
Oh, let me remember you as you were before you
existed.
Isn’t it so true? How we remember our lovers before we really know them?
I read that poem alternating stanzas with a male reader; it makes me blush, it’s so lush and lascivious.
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Whoa . . . I’ve been busy since I woke up, and just rewarded myself by sitting down and digesting this post. Neruda, three days in a row! And you roped us in . . . you start off with a seemingly “light” Neruda quote about eating words. Then I wake up to the poem on death. And now this. I had always associated Neruda with just those luscious love poems and now I learn just how “political” (I wish there was a better term than this; like “social justice” or something because every time I see “political,” I think Presidential campaigns) Neruda was.
I’m all juiced up thinking about today’s Pablo Neruda’s. Certainly Adrienne Rich is one, don’t you think? And 1996 Nobel Prize winner, Wislawa Saymborska. And have you read, Dreaming the End of War by Benjamin Alire Saenz, a suite of 12 dream poems, emanating from the borderland between Mexico and the United States, tracing humanity’s addiction to violence and killing? Check out these lines from, “The Second Dream: Killing and Memory and War”:
I understand loss and how a bullet
cuts through a family and how that bullet
becomes the air we live and breathe.
I understand these shadows, and how
these shadows become a politics
and how that politics becomes a flag
and how that flag becomes the only house
we live in.
ybonesey — I love your “I nearly spit” remark. I think Neruda would be pleased if you spit out those names. Let Red Ravine know how your reading went. Wish you could record and post it.
Following is the poem I’m going to say out loud 17 times. Thanks for the inspiration.
END AND BEGINNING
Wislawa Szymborska
After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won’t pick
themselves up, after all.
Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.
Someone has to trudge
through sludge and ashes,
through the sofa springs,
the shards of glass,
the bloody rags.
Someone has to lug the post
to prop the wall,
someone has to glaze the window,
set the door in its frame.
No sound bites, no photo opportunities,
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.
The bridges need to be rebuilt,
the railroad stations, too.
Shirtsleeves will be rolled
to shreds.
Someone, broom in hand,
still remembers how it was.
Someone else listens, nodding
his unshattered head.
But others are bound to be bustling nearby
who’ll find all that
a little boring.
From time to time someone still must
dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.
Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little.
And less than that.
And at last nothing less than nothing.
Someone has to lie there
in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at clouds.
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I love the idea of reading a poem 17 times. I’m going to try that with Auden, a poet I’ve always found hard to understand.
Are you presenting a play in Spanish? Or is it a poetry reading? Sounds wonderful.
The images the young Neruda presents are amazing, because he was so alive, so young, yet very wise, an unusual combination.
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ybonesy: I, too, love your question:
“Who are today’s Pablo Nerudas?”
Maybe, Thich Nhat Hanh is one. I am going to read his poem, “Please Call Me by My True Names” seventeen times out loud. It says, in part:
“Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.”
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Sharonimo, no, I hadn’t read Dreaming the end of the war, but wow, just those lines are enough to send me to get the book. I love how contemporary they are, how relevant to things we know in our lives if we at all awake to what’s around us.
And the poem you picked, too, is so palpable and rhythmic: this one jolts and exclaims: shirt-sleeves-will-be-rolled-to-shreds! Not just, we’ll roll up our sleeves, but we will roll them to shreds, because we have been shredded, don’t you see??
I’ll let you know how the performance goes tomorrow. I have to say, this was just what I needed to spur me on. (mariacristina: it’s a performance of sorts, a reading with drama and passion. Seven bilingual readers. I’m reading a total of nine poems, most shared with another reader. Only one I read by myself. About half I take on the Spanish part, half the English translation. First time I’ve ever done this, and I’m hooked.
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ybonesy, I’ve just had the time to digest this post and the comments. It’s full of life. And the way death lives in loneliness and solitude. There are so many layers.
I will be thinking of you tonight as you read. I, too, wish you could post a video of it here. And I wish I could be there. It does my heart good and energizes me to see the passion you have for the poet and his work.
For my poem to read 17 times, I think I’m going to choose one by Galway Kinnell; maybe The Quick and the Dead or Ode and Elegy. In Kinnell’s poetry, death sits at the back door of nature and the politics are more subtle. Yet, they rise whole, from the ground up.
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[…] Our Poetry & Meditation Group began meeting again in January. We celebrated new beginnings with the poetry of Ruth Stone (the poet mentioned in Carolyn Flynn’s piece An Evening With Elizabeth Gilbert & Anne Lamott). This Friday we’ll read the work of Pablo Neruda. […]
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