Spring 2015
In “El Poeta”, published 25 years later, Neruda portrays himself as the young poet who sheds
his narcissism to acknowledge the nightmare of his times. The closing image of death slithering in
the walls belongs to the surrealism and horror shared with Cocteau, Buñuel, and Dali. Neruda
gently mocks his sentimentalism; the poem -- save for the shock at the end -- recalls Matthew Arnold’s
“The Buried Life”, and its antique moralizing.
El Poeta
Antes anduve por la vida, en medio
de un amor doloroso: antes retuve
una pequeña página de cuarzo
clavándome los ojos en la vida.
Compré bondad, estuve en el mercado
de la codicia, respiré las aguas
más sordas de la envidia, la inhumana
hostilidad de máscaras y seres.
Viví un mundo de ciénaga marina
en que la flor de pronto, la azucena
me devoraba en su temblor de espuma,
y donde puse el pie resbaló mi alma
hacia las dentaduras del abismo.
Así nació mi poesía, apenas
rescatada de ortigas, empuñada
sobre la soledad como un castigo,
o apartó en el jardín de la impudicia
Once I went through life consumed
by love’s sweet pain: once I cherished
my little quartz-bound notebook
and fixed my eyes on life’s misfortunes.
I shopped for generosity, bargained
in the market-place of greed, breathed deep
the sordid fumes of envy, the inhuman
clash of appearance and reality.
I lived a world of bog and marshes
where the sudden flower, the madonna lily
devoured me in her trembling foam,
and wherever I set my foot, my soul slipped
into the rasping jaws of the abyss.
So my poetry was born – scarcely
rescued from nettles, torn
from solitude like a punishment,
or set apart in the garden of lewdness,
The Linnet's Wings