pablo neruda and translation relations

my lovely roommate and i were discussing the act of academic paper-writing, particularly as relating to our specific circumstances (unpaid undergrads, typical stressful mid-semester research papers). there is always a sense of triumph, we agreed, with finishing a paper, though we wonder to what greater end writing a paper is if no one besides our professors read our thoughts and ideas. i decided, like i have done once before, to post papers as blog posts - since blog posts are, essentially, papers for not-a-class. WHY I THINK THIS IS IMPORTANT: we need to be in dialogue, consistently and holistically, about the things that are shaping us. if it's even the least bit cool that you can read on someone's twitter the sort of burrito they ate for lunch that is affecting their intestinal system, it's even cooler that you can read on someone's blog what sort of learning they're doing that is affecting their entire worldview. i hope this comes across not as me saying "oh wow, i wish all kinds of people would get my blog and read about what i think," because what i really mean is "i really wish that all kinds of people would blog like this more so that i can read about what they think."

so: some thoughts on Pablo Neruda and poetic translation...


Poetry, indeed, cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language. - Samuel Johnson, lexicographer 1709-1784


For my “Dead Poet” project, I snagged a copy of Pablo Neruda’s Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon, a collection of Neruda’s works and their translations by Stephen Mitchell. I am partial to the Latin American poets and writers particularly because I share some heritage with them (proven by my surname: Gutierrez), but generally because I feel that they have a great respect for the natural material world and a very realistic view of the deep pain and sorrows that exist within and among this world’s beauty. Latin writers also, from my experience (mainly with Sandra Cisneros, Isabel Allende, and Roberto Bolano), dare to venture into the world of mysticism without taking their feet off the ground. I have always admired their ability to straddle all these dimensions of the life before them without seeming exasperated. Their tone tends to fall somewhere around exhausted, at the worst, but never exasperated, as English or other races’ poetry and literature might. To me, this boundary of exhaustion represents a willingness to take part in it. What white culture (and sometime, too, black culture) seems to want to escape, the Latin culture simply shrugs and sighs, “Oh, well,” and digs its heels in a little bit harder. Their sense of their cultural roots comes not without a sense of responsibility, and I truly believe that this is what allows them to transcend into the spiritual and mystical without seeming outrageous or obnoxious. They are, almost literally, well grounded, and so it is safe for them to reach up. This same rootedness allows the Latin writers to take part in a rich culture fertile enough for growth of, as in Neruda’s poetry (grapes and onions, for example), the living fruits and products of the earth.

From the title of the collection, Neruda’s poetry might have been the sort of thing that I would be inclined to roll my eyes at. The images are so big and blatant, cliché not in an American-idiom way but cliché in a sense of glorifying the image. Just one glance at the collection’s table of contents and I find myself thinking, “people have written poems about the ocean before… people have written poems about birds before… and spring before… and being naked before (i.e. Walt Whitman).” Neruda’s subject matter is nothing new, at least in terms of the images he picks. Regardless, his poetry is gripping, moving, and fantastic; his words are worthy to be canonized among the names of the greatest poets. Because of this, Neruda convinces me that any poet can do anything so long as they do it very, very well. Sure, I’d say to a budding poet, write a poem about an onion, if you’d like, but if you can’t do it like Neruda can, then don’t bother. Neruda exemplifies what it means to be skilled at a craft, specifically, what it means to be skilled with words.

Neruda is an “imagist” in that he begins with an image. He selects an image, and then he works from it. We might say that the image is his muse. He is not an imagist, in the real meaning of the word, in the actual working of his poetry; his works are characterized by lengthy text, lines enjambed every few words, descriptive relationships between the author and the subject. It is these relationships that he develops from and within his poems that redeem the original flat or cliché image he begins with. By talking to the thing, he personifies it, and it becomes real. A reader or listener of the poem can identify, then, with both the poet and the object in the poem. Neruda provides them with options: Is he talking to me, they might ask, or is this how I would talk to that same book? For example, in “Ode to a Chestnut on the Ground,” Neruda calls, “Up there, you abandoned / the bristling husk / that half-opened its barbs / in the light of the chestnut tree, / through that opening / you saw the world.” Though this is a literal poem (Neruda really is speaking to a Chestnut), because it is written in second person, it causes the reader or listener to place themselves, for a second, as that chestnut. Through this process, through this relationship that Neruda’s tense use establishes with the reader, the poem becomes metaphorical.

The poem, through this process, also becomes more multidimensional in that it allows the reader in – instead of simply watching the relationship between Neruda and the object, the reader becomes part of this relationship through either of those character’s accessibility. Neruda’s poetry had an effect on me most strongly through this way, to the point of personal enrapture with or as the poet or the object or, sometimes, both. Through this process, the materials (that might otherwise run the risk of seeming cliché in terms of simple poetic word choice) become important and meaningful. When it is no longer the chestnut Neruda is writing about but the chestnut Neruda cares about that he is writing about, or, even, you the chestnut that Neruda cares about that he is writing about, the wood and ground and grass that surround the chestnut become the same wood and ground and grass that surround me. In creating this connection between the objects and I, Neruda also creates a connection between his descriptive language and I. He makes his own poetry more accessible. If I didn’t care about the poetry, I wouldn’t care for the “polished wood / glistening mahogany, / perfect / as a violin that has just / been born in the treetops.” However beautiful that language is, I would so easily and too quickly pass over it were it not for the fact that Neruda had addressed some “you” (perhaps, however unintentional, myself?) in the preceding lines. I am convinced that it is not so much the lovely language that Neruda uses that wins his reader’s hearts over, but rather, the relational connections he creates from which this beauty can then spew.

Neruda’s poetry fits within the larger scheme of literary history, fittingly, through his own relationships. Most biographies on Neruda will mention his friendship with Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who was murdered in the Spanish Civil War. Neruda published Espana en el Corazon in 1937, chronicling this event among others of the same political conflict. Lorca’s poetry is no less beautiful than Neruda’s, but noticeably more narrative and single-voiced. Neruda worked as a Chilean consul and developed many political relationships through his position and the accompanying travels. The surrealism developed in his poetry from his years in this position marked his literary breakthrough. We might suggest that his understanding of human relationships, through this position, allowed him to write of even the flattest subjects with the depth of the most round. While Lorca’s poems read somewhat more like distinct anthems, Neruda’s exert their cries through the steady base of the deep relationships within them. The sense of stability and peace in Neruda’s poetry reflects a longing throughout the warring of the Latin nations for a return to natural order. Perhaps this explains why he became known as “the people’s poet” of Chile, his home country. Neruda won three peace prizes in a span of three years (the International Peace Prize in 1950, the Lenin Peace Prize and the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953). In this sense, we might consider Neruda the “hippie of the Latin culture.” In contrast to other “hippies,” or, what we in white culture might consider to be the beat poets, Neruda’s poetry is much more calm. Neruda accomplishes what Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac did, only he didn’t freak out about it quite so much. This seems, ironically, to fit culturally – where white people pitch fits and take drugs in their rants for peace, Latin people just make truly beautiful art (admittedly, I say this with jealous bias).

I’d like to say that the fact that I am a maker of poetry affected how I read this work. Honestly, however, I did not read Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon as a maker of poetry, but rather as a lover of language exhausted from her busy semester whose soul needed an escape and a vacation. Perhaps the fact that I am a maker of poetry affects how I am, in hindsight, analyzing my read of this collection. I do not think that I would have written the first few paragraphs of this response in the way that I did were I not a maker of poetry. I might have simply done a literary analysis of the work (including rhetorical devices, structure, etc), but as a maker of poetry, I have brought my own poetic interests into assessing Neruda’s work. Terry Eagleton writes that “poets, like goldfish, are incapable of dissembling,” and the more I think about this phrase, the more I realize that I am a poet – I find it harder and harder to keep myself out of anything I produce. I followed the patterns of relationships in Neruda’s poetry because that is something that I am specifically interested when I write my own poetry, and I hope to learn from those who seem to have done the same sort of thing successfully. Having learned that a poem is a “living, breathing thing,” I am interested in discovering what it is about a poem that makes it a “living, breathing thing.” I am convinced that words alone on the page are not living themselves, but rather, that which created them, that which went into creating them, and that which recreates them each time they are read are living, breathing things. Neruda’s poetry, since it seemed to me especially living and especially breathing, possessed something beyond what it takes any normal person to write a poem. It truly owns this sense of “poet.” And so, as a poet, or maker of poetry, I read or analyzed Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon in hopes to find out what this “something” was. I too, would like to make and be something living and breathing. It’s good to be alive.

My final questions about Neruda’s poetry involve the subject of translation, like we have already discussed somewhat in class surrounding discussions of poets like Ezra Pound or Tomas Transtromer. I wonder about the moral value in translating, and then about the literary value in it, and the personal value in it. From what I have learned about Ezra Pound, it seems that the personal value in translating is what matters most. Pound’s belief is that “literary translation is not simply a reproduction of the original, but an interpretation and criticism of the original and that the mission of the translator is to reconstruct literary tradition and to bring about changes in the contemporary literary scene” (http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI9125773/). This understanding of translation seems to me a challenge to the poetry reader in two ways: for one, it suggest that the only true read of a poet’s original work is in it’s own language (and so to have a true read of that poet’s work, the reader must come to know that language). Secondly, it suggests that to really interpret and criticize the poem with the honor it deserves, a reader is almost obliged to translate the poetry. This opens up a plentitude of directions for readers, and instead of paralyzing them with the question of moral value, provides them with a platform from which to expand their personal knowledge of the poetic process as well as the original poet’s intended meanings. Reading Neruda, overall, has been an encouragement to attempt some translation of my own.