What We Can Learn from Neruda’s Poetry of Resistance

from The Paris Review online, March 26, 2018.

When I first embarked on writing a biography of Pablo Neruda over a decade ago, I wanted to explore the political power of poetry and its capacity to inspire social change. Neruda’s social verse was an integral part of the humanity he expressed; even without pen in hand, he boldly inserted himself into direct action.

I happened to finish the book—Neruda: The Biography of a Poet—at the end of Trump’s first hundred days in office. As a result, the questions that I’d been exploring for years suddenly took on new urgency. As resistance increasingly becomes the operative word in our current political reality, what can one of the most important and iconic resistance poets of the past century offer us? What might he give us as we continue to shape the next chapter in our own cultural story? Some answers, or at least perspectives, can be found in the vivid details of Neruda’s life and work.

Neruda’s legacy was directly shaped by the historical events in which he played a part. In his early youth, during Chile’s revolutionary student movement, he played the role of an activist-writer, the voice of a young generation challenging the country’s controlling aristocracy. In his final years, he vigorously defended Chile against U.S. intervention and, as ambassador to France, represented Salvador Allende’s historic socialist government. His relationship to readers and to his own writing was shaped by these periods of acute political crisis and authoritarianism.

When the Cold War hit Chile in 1947, Gabriel González Videla—the country’s devious, unpredictable president—turned against Neruda and the others who had helped elect him. He enacted oppressive measures against workers and the left: he shut down the communist newspaper, jailed three hundred striking coal miners on an island of Patagonia, and sent labor leaders and other “subversives” to a concentration camp directed by a thirty-three-year-old army captain named Augusto Pinochet. Neruda, a senator at the time, denounced the situation, both through his writings and his actions. He took to the senate floor and raised his voice: “Now even Congress is subject to censorship. You can’t even talk now … There have been murders in the coal-mining region!” González Videla would hear no more. He accused Neruda of treason and ordered his arrest, forcing him into exile.

Neruda responded by developing an aesthetically and conceptually daring new poetic voice, which would narrate his monumental book Canto General. It recasts and reclaims the history of the Americas in a new way, as an epical, lyrical story of resistance. Fifty years later, in 2003, a construction engineer working on Santiago’s metro told me that the importance of Canto General is that it “shows us the history of the Americas … [from] the point of view of the people themselves, not the history told by the conquerors.”

At no time was the relationship between Neruda’s poetry and his experience of social upheaval so directly on display than at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Neruda arrived in Madrid in 1934, as a Chilean consul, just before his thirtieth birthday. The Spanish monarch had finally fallen just three years earlier, and an idealistic, progressive spirit invigorated the writers and intellectuals, especially the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who Neruda had met the year before. Lorca was waiting at the train station for Neruda when he first arrived in Madrid.

Neruda, emerging from the tortuous period of depression and isolation—“luminous solitude,” as he described it—that he underwent while serving in a series of consular posts in East Asia, was thirsty for this fraternity. His poetry became deeply introspective during that period, though he wasn’t just focused on his inner life: while serving his consular posts, and off the written page, he actively participated in denigrating and subjugating women, native people of color, and the poor. Years later, in his memoirs, he even described raping a Tamil servant in Sri Lanka, adding a disturbing layer to his future legacy as an activist on behalf of the oppressed.

When he arrived in Madrid, Neruda’s spirits were invigorated by a thriving, exciting fellowship of activists and artists. But Spain’s social and political situation was tense and complicated. As the historian Gabriel Jackson wrote, Spain in 1930 was “simultaneously a moribund monarchy, a country of very uneven economic development, and a battleground of ardent political and intellectual crosscurrents.” As Hitler and Mussolini gained power nearby, Spanish Fascists asserted themselves more directly and violently. The progressive government struggled to survive. Beginning in March, 1936, members of the Fascist group Falange rode ostentatiously through Madrid in squads of motorcars, wielding machine guns and firing at alleged Reds in working-class neighborhoods. By June, many members of the Communist, Socialist, and Anarchist parties were publicly promoting a revolution, while the right-wing press was instilling in the middle class a fear of a Communist state and promoting the idea that only a military coup could save Spain. Rumors of a Fascist revolution swirled, petrifying Lorca, who was gay and a leftist and had become increasingly outspoken in defense of the republic. He fled to his hometown of Granada, hoping his influential, conservative family would protect him.

On July 17, 1936 the Fascist general Francisco Franco led a military uprising, sparking the Spanish Civil War. Mussolini and Hitler supplied him with planes and weapons. The insurgents, known as the nationalists, advanced quickly toward Madrid, where Neruda and his friends were living. Those friends had recently formed the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals and were determined to wield their intellect and creativity in support of the Republic. They brought popular theater to the people—plays from Cervantes to Lorca that espoused their ideology while invigorating culture in a demoralizing time. The Alliance also published a small magazine, written primarily for Republican soldiers. One member of a unit would read it out loud for those who were illiterate. The list of contributors was extraordinary, including Antonio Machado and Rafael Alberti.

A month into the war, nationalists arrested Lorca. When asked what crime Lorca committed, the officer in charge answered, “He’s done more damage with a pen than others have with a pistol.” Three days later, Lorca and three other prisoners were shot beside a stand of olive trees.

The news shook Neruda to the core. Beyond the horror of a friend’s assassination, Lorca’s death represented something more: Lorca was the embodiment of poetry; it was as if the Fascists had assassinated poetry itself. Neruda had reached a moment from which there was no turning back. His poetry had to shift outwardly; it had to act. No more melancholic verse, love poems dotted with red poppies, or metaphysical writing, all of which ignored the realities of rising Fascism. Bold, repeated words and clear, vivid images now served his purpose: to convey his pounding heart and to communicate the realities he was experiencing in a way that could be understood immediately by a wide audience.

This is nowhere better exemplified than in his poem “I Explain Some Things.” The title alone conveys the poem’s urgency to be heard and understood, as was evidenced when, on Martin Luther King Day this year, the writer Kwame Alexander read the poem on NPR:

You will ask: And where are the lilacs?

And the metaphysics laced with poppies?
And the rain that often beat
his words filling them with holes and birds?
I’ll tell you everything that’s happening with me.
of Madrid, with church bells,
with clocks, with trees.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
the house of flowers, because everywhere
geraniums were exploding: it was
a beautiful house
with dogs and little kids.
from under the earth,
do you remember my house with balconies on which
the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
Hermano, hermano!

And one morning everything was burning
gunpowder ever since,
and ever since then blood
Bandits with airplanes and with Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars making blessings,
… kept coming from the sky to kill children,
and through the streets the blood of the children
ran simply, like children’s blood.
doesn’t speak to us of dreams, of the leaves,
of the great volcanoes of his native land?
come and see
the blood in the streets,
come and see the blood
in the streets!

I lived in a neighborhood

My house was called

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Federico, you remember,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

and ever since then fire,

You will ask why his poetry

Come and see the blood in the streets,

Neruda went on to write a total of twenty-one poems in reaction to the war, contained in his book España en el corazón (Spain in the Heart), which would form part of The Third Residence. This poetry was meant to reach outside the cultured, intellectual readership of his prior, more hermetic books. Now, Neruda’s poetry was printed by frontline soldiers who used old clothing and, supposedly, an enemy flag to make the pulp. Republican soldiers set the type, printed the finished copies, and delivered them to those fighting. Poetry, in other words, was fuel for the resistance, and Neruda was only one part of a sweeping movement: so many poets had such deep impact on the Spanish Civil War that it has been called the “Poets’ War.”

As the Fascists’ bombs fell over Madrid, Neruda moved to Paris, where he helped organize a monumental gathering of writers to express solidarity for the Republic. Ernest Hemingway and Langston Hughes were among the participants. Neruda also embarked on a number of activist publishing ventures in support of the Republican cause. Along with the British activist Nancy Cunard, he published The Poets of the World Defend the Spanish People. Cunard had a printing press in her house; Neruda helped set the type. The money from the sale of the magazine went to support the Republican soldiers battling Franco’s troops. The funds raised were not significant, but the dedicated, unabashed support from contributors spoke volumes.

Meanwhile, Chile’s foreign minister said he “disapproved” of Neruda’s partisan activities in France. The poet was ordered home; he returned in October, 1937. Franco declared victory on April 1, 1939. His final offensives to capture Barcelona and all of Catalonia had forced over half a million Spanish refugees to flee across the Pyrenees into France, where they languished in camps, subject to starvation and disease. Neruda’s friends in Paris wrote him of the situation, begging him to do something. The poet sought help from the newly elected leftist Chilean president, who appointed him as consul to Paris.

In Paris, Neruda secured an old cargo ship, the Winnipeg, and organized an immensely ambitious transport of over two thousand refugees to freedom in Chile. The feat was lauded in headlines across the world. As recently as February 2018, Ariel Dorfman, alarmed by the strong anti-immigration sentiment behind Sebastián Piñera’s victory in Chile’s presidential election, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times on Neruda’s legacy. While rising xenophobia and nativism isn’t unique to Chile, Dorfman noted that its history holds a model of “how to act when we are confronted with strangers seeking sanctuary.” He recounted the experience of the Winnipeg and ended the piece asking, “Where are the Nerudas of today?”

As we face our own era of rising authoritarianism and new sets of complexities and injustices to resist, the question remains: Does poetry have the power to effect change? We can write “drop poetry not bombs” on fliers, but the hard truth is that one poem alone cannot protect dreamers from being deported or restrain an unfit president. And yet, Neruda illuminates how poetry’s poignant nature—its unique power of distillation—can create change through a cumulative, collective effort: one by one, like gathering drops, each time a poem comes into contact with a person’s consciousness—whether read by a 1930’s Spanish Republican soldier or heard on the radio or penned afresh—it incites the possibility for a shift in perspective or an urge toward action. Poetry can energize, inform, and inspire. This alone won’t stop bombs, but when taken together with all the direct actions of a social movement—marches, relentless grassroots organizing, seven thousand shoes placed on the U.S. Capitol lawn—Neruda has shown us how poetry can be an emotionally potent ingredient in the greater transformative efforts of resistance.

The effectiveness of Neruda’s poetry is proven by its endurance, how often people reach for and evoke his works as a tool to galvanize, to awaken, to sustain. In San Francisco, during the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Neruda’s words were draped on banners over the streets: “Tyranny cuts off the head that sings, but the voice at the bottom of the well returns to the secret springs of the earth and out of the darkness rises up through the mouth of the people.” Nearly a decade later, the Egyptian art historian Bahia Shehab spray-painted Neruda’s words on the streets of Cairo during the Arab Spring: “You can cut all the flowers, but you can’t stop spring.” Five years later, during the January 2017 Women’s March, those same words of Neruda that had appeared in Cairo would grace posters bearing the original Spanish:“Podrán cortar todas las flores, pero no podrá detener la primavera.”

Instances of social injustice, war, and the los of liberal democracy call us off the sidelines and into action. Neruda drastically adapted his poetry in response to crisis. At the start of the Spanish Civil War, he abandoned his desolate, introverted experimental poetry in favor of a decisive style, one that would compel others into action.

Whether we’re poets, teachers, readers, activists, or ordinary citizens who care about the world, we, too, can transform the way we express ourselves. In the era of social media, we don’t need to make pulp out of flags to transmit our message to the troops of resistance. We can all speak. We can all be part of the dialogue. And poetry can be part of the collective way we, in Neruda’s words, “explain some things.” From Neruda and others we can see how the act of expressing ourselves, and the act of hearing, are core components of resistance—and of poetry’s unique, enduring power.

Translations from The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda. Copyright (c) 2004 by City Lights Publishers.  

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We are thrilled to announce that Mark Eisner, a member of Red Poppy's leadership team, has just been nominated as a semi-finalist for the 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, for his book on Pablo Neruda: NERUDA: The Poet's Calling (The Biography of a Poet). PEN Prizes are not only considered a "major" award, but from an organization whose work we believe in wholeheartedly:

PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible.

We've taken a little break from this blog but we felt that this would be a great opportunity to jump back in, as there is a lot of synchronicity between the book and Red Poppy's documentary-in-progress. Mark was involved with the first version of the documentary, and conducted all of the interviews. Below is an excerpt from the book that includes where he talks about the importance of the interviews. We will be starting to post those interviews on this blog.

For more information on the book, including reviews, cool photos from awesome events, tv interviews of Mark in the States, Mexico, and Chile, please click here.

For now, that excerpt ((c) Ecco/HarperCollins 2018):


....[When] I was asked to write this book. At first I thought, Why another book? So much had already been written on Neruda, including many works I admired. What would mine bring that others hadn’t? 

     I came to see a valid need for another approach, one that aims to bring Neruda’s gripping story to life in a new way. This volume is neither unbiased nor hagiographic; rather, it aims to offer a compelling narrative version of Neruda’s life and work, undergirded by exhaustive research, designed to bring this towering literary figure to a broader audience. My goal is to present the nuances of this complex, seemingly larger-than-life figure, to show all his vastness, to show both the redeeming and the cruel sides of his personal life, to show both the inspirational and the deeply troublesome sides of his political life. 

      In addition, I felt it was vital to unite, in a single volume, the three inseparable strands of Neruda’s legacy: his personal history, the entire canon of his poetry, and his social activism and politics both on and off the page. Each of these components depends on the other two. Each is shaped by the other two. No single thread can be understood fully without understanding the others. This book aims to deeply explore each of these three aspects of his life, while also highlighting the phenomenon behind their interrelationship. Without examining each of them extensively, the true expanse of Neruda’s story can’t be told. 

      From this, I also want to explore the multifaceted ways a reader can interpret Neruda as a figure in history. He was a man who gained celebrity status assuming the role of the “people’s poet,” while also acting as what some call a “Champagne Communist.” The contradictions are inherent within his multitudes, to paraphrase his hero Whitman. As Alastair Reid, Neruda’s favorite English-language translator, said to me, “Neruda is seven different poets, if not nine”: there is a Neruda for everyone. His legacy can be appreciated in different ways, but it is best understood in the context of the startling historical events in which he took part and the intense complexities of his life—from the shockingly shameful to the inspiringly heroic—while still absorbing the beauty and innovation of his poetry. Within the examination of those three strands—poetry, personality, and politics—is an exploration of the nature of political poetry’s power and effectiveness, and how Neruda’s role as a people’s poet, a political poet, connects to the shifting political climates of this new millennium. Because Neruda was so linked, so involved with major phenomena of the twentieth century, this book takes the reader through major historical events, including the South American student, labor, and anarchist movements of the 1910s, which tied into similar ones in Europe; the Spanish Civil War; the Battle of Stalingrad; Fidel Castro, the cult of Che Guevara, and the Cuban Revolution; and Richard Nixon’s interventions in Chile and Vietnam.

* * * 

      There was another impetus, inspiration, and source for this book: in celebration of the centennial of Neruda’s birth in 2004, not only did The Essential Neruda come out, but I also premiered a documentary film on him that I had produced. That initial version has led to a more ambitious feature-length documentary film that is currently in production. Work on the film has produced brilliant, unique gems for this biography, this text nourished by interviews and conversations with a diverse array of characters.

       Unfortunately, some of the subjects have passed since I first talked to them. Neruda was born in 1904, so many of those who knew him for most of his life are no longer with us. One of these people was Sergio Insunza, minister of justice under Allende. Insunza was in his twenties when he first met Neruda, when the Chilean Communist Party brought the poet-senator to hide out in his apartment—then-president Gabriel González Videla had ordered Neruda’s arrest for speaking out against his antidemocratic, oppressive measures on the Senate floor. Another interviewee, Juvenal Flores, was ninety-two when I spoke to him. He worked on a ranch in southern Chile and helped guide the fugitive Neruda on horseback across a snowcapped peak in the Andes, safely into exile. 

      Then there was an afternoon I spent at one of Santiago’s main produce markets. When I asked an effusive woman in front of a vegetable stand about Neruda’s love poetry, she spontaneously burst out, “I like it when you’re quiet. It’s as if you were absent”—the iconic first lines of Neruda’s Poem XV in Twenty Love Poems. And then, with the biggest smile and half-laughing, she said, “That’s as far as I get, but it’s a beautiful book!” She told me that although she had read the poem as a young girl, in school, it gained a heightened significance for her six years before, when, at thirty-two, she had fallen in love with a Bolivian doctor. He eventually left Chile, giving her a copy of Twenty Love Poems as a departing gift. 

       I turned to Mario Fernández Núñez and asked him what he thought of Neruda. The whole time we had been talking, he had been preparing bundles of cilantro for his market stand. His hands did not pause in their work when he answered, “Well, he’s our national poet. He won the Nobel Prize.”
      “And what does that mean to you?” I asked. 

       “Well, first, it’s pride, an honor. And secondly, for us, Pablo Neruda, beyond all the poetry, was a very good person. Remember that he was practically the ambassador—he brought the Spanish over here when Spain was in a dictatorship.” 

       These experiences provided breathing insight that could not be found on the printed pages of the books I found at the Stanford Library, the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, the Library of Congress, or Neruda’s own archives, or in so many key sources I’ve been grateful for in between.
--from NERUDA: The Poet's Calling/The Biography of a Poet  by Mark Eisner  

(c) Ecco/HarperCollins 2018

some of the interviews are pretty serious, talking about historic events, describing the nuances of Neruda and relationships, to start with, though, and as its mentioned about: a more light hearted clip from one of those interviews that shows the wonderful humanity behind it all.  Enjoy! 

Why Red Poppy

The first time I really connected to Pablo Neruda's poetry was the summer before my junior year of college. Reeling after a bad breakup, I was going through the Spanish section of the library when I came across a black book with gold lettering on the front - Residencia en la Tierra. At this point I was familiar with Neruda's poetry but just barely. The poems I knew were the ones that, if there was a billboard chart for poetry, would be considered Top 40 material, the types of poems that are anthologized in the intermediate level Spanish lit readers. Don't get me wrong, these are great poems, iconic poems like “Poema XX.” But they only show the side of Neruda that most people are familiar with - his romantic poems. And while, say, “Poema XX,” with its heart on its sleeve, with its “another’s. She will be another's,” may seem like the perfect break up elegy, I shortly found out that the poems in Residencia express a whole other level of anguish. For example. The heartbroken man in “Poema XX” can sing the saddest verses on this night. Whereas the man who is tired of being a man in “Walking Around” in Residencia finds the atomic film separating his skin from the horrible space around him melts away, leaving him wide open to the onslaught of reality. Poema XX is a lyrical sublimation of heartache. Walking Around is a howl at the moon. And sometimes a howl at the moon is what you need.

When I first looked over Red Poppy’s Neruda documentary footage something clicked when one of the interviewees said that Neruda himself was going through a break up when he wrote the Residencias, (as well as feeling estranged, depressed, lost in solitude). I didn't know this beforehand but it made perfect sense. While the poems are not overtly about a long gone lover, the undercurrent of loss is there, a loss of human contact, and what more is a break up than losing your closest human contact you have? Neruda gives voice to that loss. And that voice, that articulation, is exactly the answer I have started to give to my friends working as engineers and lab techs when they ask me, Why Poetry? or its sister question, that resilient New York Times Op-Ed impetus, Why the Humanities? Poetry can be a great many things and defies definition. It can be puzzle to unlock with another person. It can be an epic story. It can be a historical testament. But to me, most of all, poetry is just a human voice that refuses to fade away.

Red Poppy’s important work focuses on collecting these outspoken voices. At present the nonprofit is engaged with projects including a documentary on Pablo Neruda's poetic activism, and an anthology entitled Poetry in Resistance that challenges readers to consider art as a vehicle for demanding social justice. Every day we can read about the civil war in Syria, about turmoil in the Ukraine, about genocide in the Sudan, about Pussy Riot being shipped to the gulag, about mortgage holders illegally foreclosed upon and every single person oppressed by these forces needs a voice beyond the sterilized sentences of The News. That is where poetry comes into play. Poetry can bridge contexts and cultural divides because emotions are universal. Neruda's poem indicting the United Fruit Company, for example, is just as much an indictment of subprime lenders, because the cannibalistic effects of unregulated capitalism endure, and so does our outrage. Similarly, the poets featured in Poetry in Resistance voice dissent against oppressive and authoritarian forces which still persist to this day. And one day we hope to listen to the Syrians voice their own laments over the conflict. Because that should be the project of poetry. Understanding human conflict, and fighting for social justice. That's Why Poetry. And that's also Why Red Poppy.

by David Shames

For the Futaleufú: Neruda's "The Rivers Emerge, Los Ríos Acuden"

The Futaleufú river, at the top of Chile's Patagonia, is one of the most captivating in the world. The valley it runs through is stunning and majestic, a special, sacred place, surrounded by snow-capped mountains, dense forests, glaciated lakes and other roaring rivers. However, as is so often the case in pristine areas such as this, the watershed faces many threats, from hydroelectric interests wanting to dam the wild rivers to the potential construction of contaminating mines, as well as unsustainable development and the entrance of invasive species. 

Fortunately, many locals and concerned individuals and groups from Chile and around the world are working to defend it. The Fundación Futaleufú Riverkeeper is a Chilean foundation leading the fight to protect the watershed and its communities. For their inaugural digital newsletter, they asked me to translate parts of Pablo Neruda's poem, "The Rivers Emerge". It is from Canto General, his epic reinterpretation of the history of the Americas. As a construction worker told me once in Chile, as I was interviewing him for our Neruda documentary,  "The importance of Canto General is that it shows us the history of the Americas from a different point of view, from the point of view of the people themselves, not the history told by the conquerors. Yes, we could call it the “history told by the conquered.” (For more on the documentary featuring that worker please see www.pablonerudafilm.com. He, the poem, and much more on Canto General and all that is discussed here in Mark Eisner's new biography, Neruda: The Poet's Calling) 

The poem "The Rivers Emerge" comes at the beginning of the book, part of Neruda's pre-Colombian Genesis tale, where all is pure and man himself is the earth. Following his mythological vision of the creation of North and South America, this poem tells how the rivers emerged onto the surface of the earth, how intrinsically they and the land are bound together....

Coming of the Rivers

Beloved of rivers, assailed by

blue water and transparent drops,

apparition like a tree of veins,

a dark goddess biting into apples:

then, when you awoke naked,

you were tattooed by rivers,

and on the wet summits your head

filled the world with new-found dew.

Water trembled about your waist.

You were fashioned out of streams

and lakes shimmered on your forehead.

From your dense mists, Mother, you

gathered water as if it were vital tears,

and dragged sources to the sands

across the planetary night,

traversing sharp massive rocks,

crushing in your pathway

all the salt of geology,

felling compact walls of forest,

splitting the muscles of quartz.

Los ríos acuden

Amada de los ríos, combatida

por agua azul y gotas transparentes,

como un árbol de venas es tu espectro

de diosa oscura que muerde manzanas:

al despertar desnuda entonces,

eras tatuada por los ríos,

y en la altura mojada tu cabeza

llenaba el mundo con nuevos rocíos.

Te trepidaba el agua en la cintura

y te brillaban lagos en la frente.

De tu espesura madre recogías

el agua como láfrimas vitales,

y arrastrabas los cuaces a la arena

a través de la noche planetaria,

cruzando ásperas piedras dilitadas,

rompiendo en el camino

todo la sal de la geología,

cortando bosques de compactos muros,

apartando los músculos del cuarzo.      

Translation from the Spanish by Waldeen, as published in Asymptoe Journal's blog


**New decade Jan 5, 2020 edit/update: the original 2013 post featured a translation I rendered somewhat on the fly to get it out for Futaleufú Riverkeepers and others after Leonardo DiCaprio's social media post about the 2016 victories in  Patagonia's wild rivers. I believe I conveyed the meaning well enough, but I did it in haste. Recently, though, I read Jonathan Cohen's excellent piece on the writer and dancer Waldeen von Falkenstein, one of Neruda's first important English language translators. Published in Asymptote, not only does he feature her translation of the poem above, but points out the flaws in my rushed rendition.

Jonathan is a poet-translator and scholar I respect greatly. I also cherish his New Directions collection of William Carlos Williams' translations of Spanish and Latin American verse.

Unfortunately, the translation of mine that he read was hastily written and posted on the blog we had (maybe will still have going at) redpoppy.net and in this graphic by Futaleufú Riverkeeper as we were trying to quickly build on Leonardo DiCaprio's shout out about the 2016 victories defending Patagonia's wild rivers. I believe I conveyed the meaning well enough, but by not having the time, and failing more so to go back later to correct it--forgetting how what's posted on the web can stay forever. He was correct, and so I have replaced it, with the link to his article in Asymptote Journal with her translation that he has recovered. 
He is correct in writing that, "Unlike Waldeen’s translation, the other translations, though close to the literal meaning of Neruda, are less than faithful to his work’s poetic quality, becoming prosaic." So I've replaced it, and hope you'll follow this link to Asymptote's exclusive first-ever publication of Waldeen's translation, recovered by Mr. Cohen, along with his rich essay about Waldeen's life and translation work, here.



(In my Neruda: The Biography of a Poet, I actually used Waldeen's translation of Neruda's seminal “Let the Rail-Splitter Awake” as it first appeared in English, in an awesome 1950 Masses & Mainstream volume)


-and alas, hopefully needing no translation, my gratitude again to people like Mr. Cohen selflessly working to recover and defend the richness of the legacy of the verse we have all inherited, along with those working to recover, preserve the wild living poetic powers of the rivers that Neruda sung about, Futaleufú Riverkeeper, Patagonia Sin Represas, Bernardo Reyes (and the NRDC) Patrick J. Lynch, Rocio Gonzalez, among, of course, so many others, and for that resonating shout-out and everything else he does for the earth, Leonardo DiCaprio.

POETRY AS INSURGENT ART

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, legendary Beat poet, literary activist, artist, and dear friend of Red Poppy, recently celebrated his 90th birthday.

A prominent voice of the wide-open poetry movement that began in the 1950s, Lawrence has written poetry, translation, fiction, theater, art criticism, film narration, and essays. Often concerned with politics and social issues, Ferlinghetti’s poetry countered the literary elite's definition of art and the artist's role in the world.

In 1953, with Peter D. Martin, he founded City Lights Bookstore, the first all-paperback bookshop in the country, and by 1955 he had launched the City Lights publishing house.

The bookstore has served for half a century as a meeting place for writers, artists, and intellectuals. City Lights Publishers began with the Pocket Poets Series, through which Ferlinghetti aimed to create an international, dissident ferment. His publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl & Other Poems in 1956 led to his arrest on obscenity charges, and the trial that followed drew national attention to the San Francisco Renaissance and Beat movement writers. (He was overwhelmingly supported by prestigious literary and academic figures, and was acquitted.) This landmark First Amendment case established a legal precedent for the publication of controversial work with redeeming social importance. (taken from www.citylights.com)

In 2004, City Lights published The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems, which I edited, and includes translations from such great poets as Robert Hass and Forrest Gander. Lawrence wrote the preface.

From the groundbreaking (and bestselling) A Coney Island of the Mind in 1958 to the "personal epic" of Americus, Book I in 2003, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has, in more than thirty books, been the poetic conscience of America. Now in Poetry As Insurgent Art, he offers, in prose, his primer of what poetry is, could be, should be. The result is by turns tender and furious, personal and political. If you are a reader of poetry, find out what is missing from the usual fare you are served; if you are a poet, read at your own risk—you will never again look at your role in the same way.

Lawrence has given us permission to quote from his long title poem from the book, which is lyrical literary activism, using the power of poetry towards social change:

I am signaling you through the flames.

The North Pole is not where it used to be.

Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.

Civilization self-destructs.

Nemesis is knocking at the door.

What are poets for, in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?

The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic.

You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words.

If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outerspace, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit.

If you would be a poet, experiment with all manner of poetics, erotic broken grammers, ecstatic religions, heathen outpourings speaking in tongues, bombast public speech, automatic scribblings, surrealist sensings, streams of consciousness, found sounds, rants and raves--to create your own underlying voice, your ur voice.

If you call yourself a poet, don't just sit there. Poetry is not a sedentary occupation, not a "take your seat" practice. Stand up and let them have it.

Have wide-angle vision, each look a world glance. Express the vast clarity of the outside world, the sun that sees us all, the moon that stews its shadows on us, quiet garden ponds, willows where the hidden thrush sings, dusk falling along the riverrun, and the great spaces that open out upon the sea . . .high tide and the heron's call. . . . And the people, the people, yes, all around the earth, speaking Babel tongues. Give voice to them all.

You must decide if bird cries are cries of ecstasy or cries of despair, by which you will know if you are a tragic or a lyric poet.

If you would be a poet, discover a new way for mortals to inhabit the earth.

If you would be a poet, invent a new language anyone can understand.

If you would be a poet, speak new truths the world can't deny.

If you would be a great poet, strive to transcribe the consciousness of the race.

Through art, create order out of the chaos of living.

Make it new news.

Write beyond time.

Reinvent the idea of truth.

Reinvent the idea of beauty.

In the first light, wax poetic. In the night, wax tragic.

Listen to the lisp of leaves and the ripple of rain.

(C) Lawrence Ferlinghetti

For the rest of the poem, and the whole book, buy it at Lawrence's City Lights Books. There's also a podcast there of Lawrence reading a series of his thoughts on the book.

A Little More on Pablo

Pablo Neruda is celebrated by Chileans--as a poet—to a degree that is truly rare on this planet. We in the North are not used to poets being such celebrities. Our great poets are revered and respected, but really only a small fraction of our society have read their poems. In Chile, though, everybody knows Neruda, everybody has read Neruda: miners, housewives, bakers, maids, school children. To his beloved Chilean people, to so many Latin Americans, Neruda is still the source of tremendous pride, regardless of one’s political orientation.

And Neruda was such a Chilean, such a Latin American, in how much he cared for his country, continent and its people. They were his cause, his pride and the most important audience for his poetry. Though he constantly traveled, he would always return to Chile (only living abroad while serving diplomatic positions).

Neruda's masterpiece, Canto General, is emblematic of his passion for his continent. The epic poem-- Canto, as in song-- is a class-based Marxist and humanistic interpretation of the history of the Americas, written as Neruda was developing his burgeoning pan-American consciousness and perspective.

“I live, I still live, and I think many of us live inside the world Neruda discovered,” Ariel Dorfman told me on a warm spring day on the Duke campus, where he is a Distinguished Professor of Literature, Latin American Studies and Theater. We had been discussing Canto General, in which, as Dorfman put it, “He basically named Latin America in a new way, and he claimed for Latin America the possibility of being lyrically and epically in a story of resistance. And what was very special about that for me was that he managed to understand that the struggle of the people for their liberation, for their full humanity, was parallel to the struggle of the nature of Latin America to be expressed, to be freed. . . to be shown.”

“From the political aesthetic point of view, Canto General has no equal,” Dorfman, who was exiled from Chile after Pinochet's 1973 coup, continued, “There's not one bad verse in Residencia en la tierra, but Canto General is full of verses I would sort of say, well hey, ‘they’re too propagandistic, bombastic.’ But when he hit the target in the Canto General, what he did was he redefined what America meant. América. Even North America, but particularly Latin America.”

Awesome in scope and simultaneously deeply probing, Canto General is considered by many to be one of the more important books in the whole cannon of the world’s poetry. And it extends well beyond the world of well-versed lovers of literature and academic scholars. In 2003, I went to a construction site on a new line of Santiago’s metro in order to interview workers about their thoughts on Neruda. There, José Corriel told me that Canto General was his favorite book by Neruda because it’s “la parte combativa de Neruda,” the combative side. “The importance of Canto General,” he said, “is that it shows us the Américas’ history from a different point of view.” Canto General, he explained, is told from “the point of view of the people themselves, not the history told by the conquerors. Yes, we could call it the ‘history told by the conquered.’"

The Canto's opening poem is appropriately titled, “Amor América (1400)”


Before the powdered wig and the dress coat,

were the rivers, arterial rivers,

were the cordilleras, on whose worn ripple

the condor or the snow seemed immobile:

there was humidity and thickness, the thunder

still without name, the planetary pampas.


Man was earth, earthen pot, eyelid

of tremulous mud, shape of clay—

he was Caribbean pitcher, chibchan stone,

imperial cup or Araucanian silica.

Tender and bloody he was, but in the hilt

of his moistened crystal weapon

the earth’s initials were

written.

No one could

remember them later: the wind

forgot them, the language of water

was buried, the keys were lost

or inundated by silence or blood.


Life was not lost, pastoral brothers.

But like a wild rose

a red drop fell on the thickness,

and a lamp on earth was extinguished.


I am here to tell the history.

From the peace of the buffalo

to the beaten sands

of the land’s end, in the accumulated

foam of the Antarctic light

….



My land without name, without América,

equinoctial stamen, purple lance,

your aroma climbed to me through my roots

into the goblet that I drank, into the thinnest

word still unborn in my mouth.


He indeed drank deeply from that cup, as Latin America's poetic essence flowed through the book's two hundred and thirty more poems, in which he named so much of both America's integrities and its external evils.

Canto General's literary roots are the lyrics of his hero Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Mayan’s Popul Vuh and, as seen in “Amor América (1400),” the literature of the Bible. “Amor América (1400)” lays out Neruda’s idea of the American Genesis, a pre-Columbian Eden, before the arrival of the Spanish Conquistadores and the subsequent “imperialistic” foreign powers' injustices. In this Eden, as Neruda described it, all was pure, so natural that “Man was earth, earthen vase.”

The Europeans extinguished the ancient "lamp on earth," according to Neruda's thinking. He portrays the Spanish Conquest as a tragic injustice forced on “his” people, despite his European heritage. The Europeans, to him, were barbarous and ruthless. “Like a wild rose, a red drop fell on the thickness”--so ended America’s Edenic first phase of history. (The poet doesn't mention, though, the barberry that many pre-Columbian societies had ruthlessly enacted on others within the continent: the blood let by the Inca’s imperialism, the Aztec love of war, the Mayans` human sacrifices, the violence of Apache warriors. . . For he is not just invoking the peaceful indigenous of his land which would be called Chile, he is talking all of the Americas, “from the peace of the buffalo / to the beaten sands of the land’s end.”)

Neruda identifies himself with the indigenous people. “I searched for you, my father, young warrior of darkness and copper,” he writes in “Amor América (1400)”. In the poem, all indigenous people, peaceful and belligerent alike, are his “fathers”; he is their son. Pablo Neruda, though, was actually born Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, with no native names in his lineage, but rather Spanish family names, with Neftalí, from his mother, suggesting some Semitic roots.

In Canto General, the “pastoral hermanos” are his brothers, presented as the land itself:

My Araucanian fathers had no

crests of luminous plumes,

they did not rest on nuptial flowers,

they did not spin gold for the priest:

they were stone and tree, roots



"Earth and Man Unite"


Neruda is here to tell their story, to give name to that which was “without name, without América,” before the Spanish came.

Canto General attempts to find "the earth's initials," to uncover and display the lost keys to the conquered, to open new doors to justice. He is making a literary effort to give people back their lost voice.

* * *

When the bestselling Chilean novelist Isabel Allende fled her country after Pinochet's coup, she couldn't take much with her, "some clothes, family pictures, a small bag with dirt from my garden, and two books: Eduardo Galleano’s seminal Open Veins of Latin America, and an old edition of Pablo Neruda’s poetry. Like the bag of earth, with Neruda’s words I was taking a part of Chile with me, for Neruda was such a part of my country, such a part of the political dreams destroyed that day."

Neruda is one of history’s greatest examples of a soul rebel who used his pen as his sword in his constant fight for a better world. At his political core was a populism based on his fundamental belief that the common man, the worker, the poor, deserved a seat at the table as much as anybody else:


…Let us sit down soon to eat

with all those who haven’t eaten;

let us spread great tablecloths,

put salt in the lakes of the world,

set up planetary bakeries,

tables with strawberries in snow,

and a plate like the moon itself

from which we can all eat.


For now I ask no more

than the justice of eating.


(translated by and (C) the late great Alastair Reid, from "Extravagario", Farrar, Strauss & Giroux)


Neruda's communism was not based on egalitarianism, but rather the equality of possibility.

Even as a teenager, witnessing the injustices against the indigenous and working class to which he was exposed, Neruda felt the poet’s calling-- el deber del poeta: an obligation, a duty, a debt he owed to give voice to the people through his poetry. He promised a commitment to humanitarianism, using literature to enrich, empower and engage in the pursuit of progressive social change.

To dive deep into Neruda's life and poetry, may we suggest Mark Eisner's award-winning Neruda: The Biography of a Poet

"Reads like a beautifully written novel: attentive to scene, momentum, and rich with evocative details.”
— Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban