![]() In thick raindrops of marmalade and blood, ![]() (And, by the way, “Agua Sexual” did all three.) How do I pick which, among hundreds upon hundreds of fantastic poems, to translate? Hmm… It seems to come to this: The poem either, 1) lifts me off my feet and twirls me about, 2) chokes me up, or 3) makes me so horny I could fuck a tree. There are wonderful translations out there (Stephen Mitchell is a favorite), but invariably I find myself quibbling over some turn of phrase that’s not quite right, or some nuance that surely it helps to have come up in Chile to catch.īut mostly I like translating Neruda because it allows me to sink into his world and his words, and, what a world that is! Of late, I have been spending more and more time reading and wanting to translate his poems into English, which is now my main language. He has the kindest, sparkliest eyes, and we play a game which only allows us to speak in metaphor. Although Neruda died in 1973, when I was just a wee girl, still, I like to think that Neruda and I drank of the same water, breathed the same air. In my dreams we walk down Temuco streets together: I am 8 and he is old and always we are walking. ![]() How do people recover from the devastating conflict of war, especially if their homelands have been ravaged? In "Foundations," the Polish poet Leopold Staff describes how his attempts to "build" have "tumbled down," concluding: "Now when I build, I shall begin / With the smoke from the chimney.I share my hometown (Temuco, Chile) with beloved Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda. We dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined We drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night The poet Paul Celan, who survived the Holocaust, often struggles with describing the events he witnessed and how to escape them, as in his famous poem "Death Fugue":īlack milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown Yusef Komyankaa's book Dien Cai Dau, for example, written from the perspective of an African-American soldier fighting in Vietnam, includes the poem "Tu Do Street," which describes not only the relationship between Vietnamese and American soldiers, but also black and white soldiers:įinally, in the face of irrational and unthinkable destruction, such as genocide, the space of words becomes a problematic one, and language appears to dissipate. Other poets have recognized the ironic blurring of opposing forces that often occurs in wartime. Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,īecause night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.Īnd some of our men just in from the border say (How serious people’s faces have become.) Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion? ![]() The poem describes a citizenry so fully afraid of a barbarian invasion that the society has stopped functioning. Cavafy explored this problem in his allegorical poem " Waiting for the Barbarians," written in 1898. Some poets have focused on another devastating effect of war: the fear engendered when citizens and nations are forced to take sides, to answer the questions, who is "good?" who is "evil?" C. Likewise, in "The Diameter of the Bomb," Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai finds that poetic descriptions can falter and fail in the face of violent tragedy:Īnd I won’t even mention the howl of orphans In Pablo Neruda’s famous poem about the Spanish Civil War, "I Explain a Few Things," he discards metaphor entirely to say: "in the streets the blood of the children / ran simply, like the blood of children." At the end of the poem he implores the reader to look at the devastating results of war: Other poets have concentrated their writing on the horrifying impact of war on civilians. The numerous conflicts of the twentieth century produced poets, including those who served as soldiers in World War I, who turned their pens to documenting the tragic effects of war. But while Homer may have idealized his combatants and revered their triumphant, incessant fighting, the treatment of war in poetry has grown increasingly more complex since then. War has long figured as a theme in poetry-after all, some of the world's oldest surviving poems are about great armies and heroic battles.
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