"On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family and humanity." P.N.
Và bởi tình yêu giằng co trăn trở
không chỉ như tàn tro cháy trên đồng ruộng
mà còn ở trên môi miệng của những chàng trai, cô gái
Anh sẽ chấm dứt bằng cách bỏ mặc
những kẻ ngáng đường cản lối đôi ta
chỉ mang đen tối xấu xa chặn hướng hơi thở em chạm tới ngực anh
Về anh, chẳng điều gì tệ hơn đâu
em yêu ơi, những điều họ nói
chỉ thêm thắt vào những gì anh từng nói cùng em
Anh đã sống giữa đồi núi thảo nguyên
trước khi anh biết em
Anh không chờ đợi tình yêu, nhưng anh
đã nằm mai phục đợi khi được vồ vập tới bên một đóa hồng.
Họ còn có thể nói điều gì nữa với em?
Anh là kẻ chẳng lành hiền, chẳng dữ dằn, mà chỉ là gã đàn ông
mà họ sẽ bóng gió nói tới những nỗi nguy hiểm
trong đời anh, mà em cũng đã biết
và em cũng đã sẻ chia niềm đam mê mãnh liệt cùng anh.
Vậy là, mối hiểm nguy này
là mối hiểm nguy từ tình yêu, một tình yêu trọn vẹn
suốt một đời
cho mọi cuộc đời
Và nếu tình yêu này chỉ mang tới chúng ta
tù ngục và chết chóc
Anh tin chắc đôi mắt em mở to tuyệt đẹp
khi anh hôn lên khe khẽ hàng mi
sẽ khép lại đầy kiêu hãnh,
với niềm kiêu hãnh nhân đôi, em yêu ơi,
bằng cả niềm kiêu hãnh của em và của anh.
Nhưng đôi tai anh sẽ đến kịp trước khi họ
nói những lời kéo đổ và dập vùi tòa tháp
của yêu thương ngọt ngào và cay đắng đã gắn kết đôi ta,
Họ sẽ nói: "Cô nàng
mà anh yêu thương
đâu phải là người phụ nữ cho anh
Sao anh lại yêu cô ta nhỉ? Tôi nghĩ
anh có thể tìm được một cô gái khác đẹp hơn,
đoan trang hơn, sâu sắc hơn,
gì cũng hơn hẳn, anh hiểu chứ, hãy nhìn cô ta nhạt nhòa
và mái đầu bướng bỉnh
và hãy nhìn cách cô ta ăn mặc
vân vân và vân".
Và đáp lại những lời này anh nói:
Em yêu ơi, anh muốn em cứ như vậy đấy
Em yêu ơi, anh yêu em đúng như vậy đấy
Như váy áo em mặc
và như khi em hất mái tóc lên
Và như khi miệng em nhoẻn nụ cười hiền
trong trẻo như làn nước
của mùa xuân trên những viên đá tinh khôi
Em yêu dấu, anh yêu em như vậy đấy!
Với bánh mì, anh đâu cần chỉ dẫn điều gì
chỉ mong sao không bị thiếu thốn hương bánh từ thường nhật đời sống đôi ta.
Anh không biết về ánh sáng
ánh sáng đến từ đâu hay đi tới đâu
Anh chỉ muốn thắp bừng lên tia sáng
Anh không đòi hỏi từ đêm tối
một lời giải thích
Anh chờ đợi cho đến khi ánh sáng cuốn lấy anh
Và em, bánh mỳ và ánh sáng
và bóng đêm là một.
Em đến bên đời anh
với bao điều em mang tới
làm bởi ánh sáng, bánh mì và bóng đêm anh chờ đợi
Và anh cần em như vậy đấy,
Anh yêu em như vậy đấy,
Với những kẻ muốn nghe anh nói về tương lai
anh sẽ không nói gì với họ, hãy để họ đọc những dòng này
và để hôm nay họ tự biết lùi lại bởi vì còn quá sớm
để đôi co.
Ngày mai, chúng ta sẽ chỉ đưa cho họ
một chiếc lá trên cây tình yêu của đôi ta, một chiếc lá
sẽ rơi xuống mặt đất
như thể được kết hình từ làn môi của đôi ta
như nụ hôn rớt vào lòng đất
từ độ cao chất ngất
để tỏa sáng ngọn lửa mãnh liệt và trìu mến dịu hiền
từ một tình yêu chân thành.
Em yêu dấu, trước khi anh yêu em, chẳng có gì thuộc về anh đâu
Anh bơ vơ bước lang thang qua bao ngõ phố, qua bao sự vật
Muôn sự vô thường, vạn vật vô danh
Thế giới chỉ là khoảng không đầy những chờ mong
Anh biết những căn phòng ngập chìm tro bụi
những đường hầm thâm sâu cho mặt trăng ẩn trú
những nhà kho trống không gầm gào lời chia ly tàn nhẫn
lời vấn nghi chiết chì in lên cát sỏi
Tất cả đều trống rỗng, chết chóc, lặng câm
rớt rơi, ruồng rẫy, rã rời
Xa xôi đầy lạc lõng, tất cả
đã thuộc về ai khác và chẳng thuộc về ai
cho tới khi em tới cùng nhan sắc và nỗi cơ hàn
phủ đầy mùa thu trơ trọi bằng bao món quà
He was Pablo Neruda's friend for four decades and a fellow Communist member. Chilean Volodia Teitelboim (2002 National Award for Journalism), author of Neruda, speaks about his Mend Pablo Neruda and the women in his life. On the centennial celebration of Neruda's birth, this interview with Teitelboim gives us a small window into Neruda's most intimate world, allowing us to explore through the eyes of a friend, the soul of the poet and the man.
Their friendship was a long and close one. Today, the writer says with a certain sadness, "His death interrupted our dialogue, our ongoing conversation. He was sick and death awaited him, but that was one thing we never talked about."
According to Teitelboim, Neruda always had a special way with women. Women are "our better half," he says, "but never predictable just because it's the other half." He adds with irony that "one of Neruda's regrets was not to have been able to love all two billion women who existed in his time, though he tried to do it through his poetry."
Neruda spent most of his life with two particularly significant women the Argentine painter Delia del Carril and the Chilean singer Matilde Urrutia. Delia was so constantly active that she had been nicknamed la hormiga, or the ant. Later, the poet would give her another name, "the neighbor." What we know is that she burst into Neruda's life and precipitated the end of his marriage with Maria Antonieta Agenaar Vogelzanz of Holland. Delia and Pablo began to live together, and in 1943 they were married in Mexico. (The marriage was not recognized by Chilean law.) in his book, Teitelboim says of her. "Deep down, she felt like she had to protect Many years alter they separated she continued to say that Pablo was a child ... She had to educate the adult child. Their conversation was primarily political. She opened his eyes."
Matilde Urrutia and the poet had a brief romance in 1946. They met at an outdoor concert in the Forest Park of Santiago. Mutual Mends introduced them. Teitelboim says: "Neruda planned to have a fling with this singer who had such impetuous laughter. And he had one. It didn't last long, though. He had too much work to do. The woman with laughter like birdsong drifted away." Three years later they met again in Mexico. There she had founded a school of music, and Neruda had become bedridden with thrombophlebitis. His friends came to see him and, of course, many women did as well. One of them was Matilde, and though he didn't recognize her at first, she took care of him, gave him his medicines, and fluffed his pillows. Their secret affair began in this state. Always a lever of pseudonyms, Neruda christened her "Rosario." Their relationship was established more openly in 1949 and it lasted twenty-four years, until Neruda's death in September of 1973.
Delia and Matilde--Teitelboim concludes--"were different kinds of muses, each one for a period of twenty years. They are a central part of Neruda's intimate history. Delia was an exquisite queen of literary salons and painting workshops; Matilde was the queen of the kitchen, which her predecessor never visited. But in or outside of the house, some woman always stirred up his hormones. I couldn't say who he loved most. I think he loved them all intensely, one after another. Let each reader come up with his or her own response to this. But the poet said not only 'I will live,' but also 'I will go on loving.' And he will--as long as there is still one man who appropriates his verses to whisper them in the ear of his beloved."
Some women did turn him down, especially in his adolescence and early youth. Neruda himself said that the other guys always got the blondes.
In Neruda, Teitelboim maintains that the poet was loyal to his women, but not faithful. The distinction is not a small one. He explains: "His loyalty was unfailing, but he refrained from promising faithfulness, knowing as he said in 'Farewell,' one his first poems of love and disaffection that 'love can be eternal, it can be fleeting.' So he allowed himself the right to that freedom. He liked women who were mature, like ripe fruit."
Neruda made the best of every liaison, says the author, and he "was enriched humanly and literarily by each one of his women friends, even in the brief encounters. Some of the women found a place in his poems and, so, in history. Both psychiatrists and non-psychiatrists who observed his life concluded that he sought in them the mother he had lost at birth.
Neruda loved intensely. Was he also loved in the same way? Voledia, his friend, doesn't hesitate to say that "he was intense about everything; in life, in poetry, and in action. Being famous does give a sense of erotic power, real or unreal Neruda was the number one poet of love. But like all mortals, he did some things right and he made some mistakes. Painful experiences he pushed inside. He didn't publicize them."
Neruda's relationship with Delia fell into crisis because he had fallen in love with "Rosario." Teitelboim recalls, "I heard him say that he didn't want to divorce Delia. He proposed that they stay married formally, but that proud Basque woman'--that was the expression he used--told him she would never accept such an insulting agreement. The man always sought out vibrant and combative sexual experience, and he fed a large part of his biography that way. There is no lack of poems whose romantic history would be interesting to unveil some day."
Magnet, Odette Translated by Kathy Ogle
Odette Magnet, a Chilean journalist residing in Washington, D.C., is former press attache of the Embassy of Chile. Photograph courtesy Luis Poirot, renowned photographer of Neruda and currently cultural attache of Chile in Brussels, Belgium
COPYRIGHT 2004 Organization of American States
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
The poetry of Pablo Neruda conveys intense emotions through the four elements.
Pablo Neruda wrote poetry as a cry against the lonely condition of humanity—isolated from nature. His desire to connect with the essence of the natural world, which represents a great and spiritual force, manifests itself through nature metaphors. In Neruda’s writing, earth, air, water and fire permeate the sadness ironically – the elements that represent wholesomeness ultimately become symbols of loneliness.
Earth Imagery in the Poetry of Pablo Neruda
Earth, the all-encompassing symbol of nature, represents unattainable purity in the poetry of Neruda. In "Alturas de Macchu Picchu," Neruda uses an extensive earth metaphor, to demonstrate how he longs to penetrate purity:
beneath all those leaves the color of hoarse sulfur:
and deeper still, into geologic gold
like a sword sheathed in meteors,
I plunged my turbulent and tender hand
into the most genital of earthly places.
Neruda combines nature with human passion throughout the poem and conveys a feeling of desperate separation from the earth. Neruda seeks connection with nature so intensely that every phrase of this stanza contains a powerful, almost violent, sensuality.
Neruda wants to become a part of the beautiful deep interior of the earth, of “the most genital.” Neruda’s ardent effort to connect fails; he concludes the poem with the line “the exhausted springtime of humanity.” The “human spring,” like the Garden of Eden, has wasted away. Neruda presents sensual earth metaphors, but concludes that human life cannot fuse with the earth. Neruda cannot penetrate the life-giving earth—except, perhaps, through death.
Air Imagery in the Poetry of Pablo Neruda
Like earth, air has an expansive nature that can convey wholeness, but remains impenetrable. Neruda’s "Alturas de Macchu Picchu" begins with the line “Del aire al aire;” he drags this phrase along, the same way the narrator meanders through the air in search of meaning. Air has an emptiness that speaks like the silent openness of Neruda’s solitude; the all-encompassing meaninglessness of the air pervades the poem.
As Neruda’s poem "Barcarola" progresses, wind shows how his sense of despondency increases: “soplaras en mi corazón de miedo frio” (blow into my heart of cold fear) Neruda’s cold heart craves the touch of soft wind; the wind, perhaps, of a woman. Neruda writes that with touch his heart “llamaría como un tubo lleno de viento o llanto” (would call like a pipe full of wind or crying). The wind carries the pure force of passion and pain. Towards the end he repeats his desperate hope: “alguien vendria, sopla con furia” (someone might come, and blow with fury). Neruda longs for “someone” to blow forcefully into his solitude—but he continues to use the conditional “vendria” and his loneliness remains impermeable in the still air.
Water Imagery in the Poetry of Pablo Neruda
Water has the same dual emotional significance as air: it has an all-encompassing potential to create connection, but it can (and ultimately does) represent an impossible emptiness. The symbol of water, like earth and air, has no fixed meaning, but is fluid and carries emotional weight. In "Barcarola," Neruda places the imagined possibility of connection “cerca del mar” (around the sea) and references the “aguas vacilantes” (empty waters) of the sea. The ocean represents a beautiful and powerful spirit, like the woman Neruda calls to.
The violent side of water begins to swell towards the end of the poem, when Neruda refers to “aguas rojas” (red waters) and “la espuma y la sangre” (the foam and the blood). His feelings are as violent as red water, floating amid the surf and blood. Water is a symbolic life force that moves through the poem from hope to pain. He is unable to connect with his lover or nature – his longing is both physical and spiritual. Neruda ends on the image of the “océano solo” (lone ocean) The water is like the solitude of the lonely man—and Neruda reflects onto it, unable to connect.
Fire Imagery in the Poetry of Pablo Neruda
Neruda uses fire symbols to convey the burning force of loneliness and the strength of passion. In "Barcarola," “un ruido de llamas húmedas quemando el cielo” (a noise of humid flames burns the sky). The moist flames are powerful and passionate, but also noisy and fleeting. Flame burns truth, however painful, into the poetry.
The Four Elements in the Poetry of Pablo Neruda
By using the four elements as metaphors, Neruda intensifies the sadness of separation from nature, yet also moves closer to the so-called primordial essence of being—through words. Neruda recognizes the intrinsic value of nature and strives sensually towards wholeness through poetry. Earth, air, fire and water are the basis of our sensual existence—they are passionate and powerful, yet these sames strengths are the source of suffering because humanity is divided from them.
Neruda translates the elements of the earth into ironic words of wholeness and loneliness, of passion and pain, hope and despondency. His poetic language conveys a perception of life based on primitive images and sensations—our melancholy separation from nature stimulates creative thought.
Copyright Clarissa Caldwell. Contact the author to obtain permission for republication.
