Pablo Neruda

I believe my next post will be about Pablo Neruda, and how he makes poetry seem both easy and impossible.

Until then, here is a rather pleasant translation of one of his early poems, by Stephen Mitchell. Found in the anthology, Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon. I think I would let that fourth stanza do whatever it wanted with me, and then invite the fifth and the sixth over for dinner. Would?

"Walking Around

It so happens that I'm tired of being human.
It so happens that I enter tailor shops and movie theaters
withered, impenetrable, like a swan made of felt
sailing on a lake of origin and ashes.



The smell of barbershops makes me burst into tears.
All I want is a recess of stones or of wool,
all I want is not to see department stores or gardens
or merchandise or eyeglasses or elevators.

It so happens that I am tired of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
It so happens that I'm tired of being human.

Still, it would be delicious
to scare a notary with a cut lily
or kill a nun with one smash of an ear.
It would be wonderful
to run through the streets with a green knife,
shouting, til I froze to death.

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,
vacillating, stretched out, shivering with dreams,
downward, in the moist guts of the earth,
absorbing and thinking, eating each day.

I don't want so much misery.
I don't want to continue as a root and a tomb,
as an underground tunnel, as a vault with dead bodies,
stiff with cold, dying of grief.

That's why Monday burns like petroleum
when it sees me coming with my prison face,
and as it goes by it howls like a wounded wheel,
and at evening its footsteps are filled with hot blood.

And it pushes me into certain corners, into certain moist houses,
into hospitals where the bones jump out of windows,
into shoe stores that smell of vinegar,
into streets as terrifying as chasms.

There are birds the color of sulfur and horrible intestines
hanging from the doors of houses that I hate,
there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that should have wept with shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and poisons, and bellybuttons.

I walk around with calm, with eyes, with shoes,
with fury, with forgetfulness,
I walk, I pass through offices and orthopedic stores,
and courtyards where clothes are hanging from a wire:
underpants, towels and shirts that are weeping
slow dirty tears."

Wow, that's actually a pretty brutal and dark poem. I thought it was funny and lighthearted the first time I read it, but all the little nuances of image selection and juxtaposition and desperate searching and revulsion are much more apparent after having typed it up, word, by, word. Still that notary, that lily, that anvil ear, what green that knife (I took it somewhere between emerald and evergreen, like drying kerry paint).

I can't say I like Mitchell's comma choices, if they are in fact his; but if they are Neruda's, I must have a lot to learn about end stops and commas.

This is not the big Neruda post. That one is still gestating.

New sleeping pills. Make mine a double.

J