Toward a poetry and poetics of the Americas (8)
Pablo Neruda, 'Ode to Walt Whitman'
Translation from Spanish by Martín Espada
I don’t know
at what age,
or where,
in the great wet South
or on the fearsome coast
beneath the brief
scream of the seagulls,
I touched a hand and it was
the hand of Walt Whitman:
I stepped on the earth
with bare feet
and walked across the grasslands,
across the firm dew
of Walt Whitman.
Through
all my early
years
that hand came with me,
that dew,
his solid fatherly pine,
his expanse of prairie,
his mission of circulating peace.
Without
disdain
for the gifts
of the earth,
the capital’s
abundant curves,
or the purple
initial
of wisdom,
you
taught me
to be an American,
you lifted my eyes
to books,
toward
the treasure
of the grain:
broad poet,
across the
clarity
of the plains,
you made me see
the high mountain
as my guardian.
Out of the subterranean
echo
you collected
everything
for me,
everything that grew,
you gathered the harvest
galloping through the alfalfa,
cut the poppies for me,
followed the rivers
to arrive in the kitchen
by afternoon.
But your shovel
brought more
than earth
to light;
you unearthed
humanity,
and the humiliated
slave
walked
with you, balancing
the black dignity of his stature,
conquering
joy.
You sent
a basket
of strawberries
to the stoker
down
in the boiler,
your verse
paid a visit
to every corner of your city
and that verse
was like a fragment
of your clean body,
like your own fisherman’s beard
or your legs of acacia in solemn stride.
Your shadow
of bard and nurse
moved among the soldiers,
the nocturnal caretaker
who knew
the sound
of dying breath
and waited with the dawn
for the absolutely silent
return
of life.
Good baker!
Elder first cousin
of my roots,
turret
of Chilean pine,
for
a
hundred
years
the wind has passed
over your growing grasslands
without
eroding your eyes.
These are new
and cruel years in your land:
persecution,
tears,
prison,
venomous weapons
and wrathful wars
have not crushed
the grass of your book,
the pulsing spring
of your fresh waters.
And oh!
those
who murdered
Lincoln
now
lie in his bed,
toppling
his chair
of fragrant wood
to raise a throne
spattered with blood and misfortune
But
your voice
sings
in the train stations
on the edge of town,
your words
splash
like
dark water
across
the
loading docks
at night,
and your people,
white
and black,
poor
people,
simple
as all people
are simple,
do not forget
your bell:
they congregate singing
beneath
the magnitude
of your spacious life:
they walk among people
with your love
nurturing the pure evolution
of fraternidad across the earth.
[NOTE. As part of the transnational anthology that Heriberto Yépez and I are now composing, I’m posting on today’s Poems and Poetics Neruda’s “Ode to Whitman,” a masterful bringing together of the two (and more) Americas by one of the Americas’ greatest poets. In this translation, Martín Espada, himself a poet of considerable force & means, gets all of the stops right, and his version, built with sharp, short words, takes up the work, lest we forget, of linking arms & minds across the barriers of languages & borders. So, when Neruda writes from his different place in the Americas: “you / taught me / to be an American,” it redeems the idea of America as such from its long-held northern dominance & stands as a directive for our project as a whole & for the troubled days through which we’re living now. More to be said of course but this as a beginning. (J.R.)]
Poems and poetics