For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poem by the inimitable Pablo Neruda, translated from the Spanish by Wally Swist. Oscillating between the grand and the mundane, but never stinting on lavish detail, the poet draws an entire world out of his relationship to wood—the elemental matter from which so much of our world, from houses and coffins to ships and railroad ties, is fashioned. Dwelling in particular on the physical scene of trees being felled, Neruda not only pays vivid homage to the labor of woodcutting, but also illustrates the intimate connection between the world of human industry and the natural environment from which it arises—a connection that is more salient than ever, in our current age of ecological collapse. Read on!
Oh, how much I know
and recognize
among all things
wood is
my best friend.
I carry around the world
on my body, on my clothes,
scent of sawmill,
aroma of red boards.
My chest, my senses
feel impregnated
in my childhood
of falling trees,
of great forests
of future construction.
I hear when they whip
the gigantic
larch,
the laurel forty meters high.
The ax and the wedge
of the diminutive logger
pecks into the haughty pillar;
man triumphs and
the aromatic hulk collapses,
the earth shakes, mute
thunder, a black sob
of roots, and then
a wave
of forest odors
flood my senses.
It was in my childhood,
it was about the wet earth,
far away in the jungles
of the South,
in the fragrant green
archipelagoes,
I saw roof beams born,
railroad ties
thick as iron,
boards
slim and resonant.
The saw creaked
singing its love of steel,
howling the sharp thread,
the metallic laments
of the saw cutting
the bread of the forest
like a mother
in childbirth,
who gave birth
in the middle of the light
and the jungle
tearing the entrails
of nature,
calving
wooden castles,
dwellings for man,
schools, coffins,
tables and ax handles.
Everything
there in the forest
sleeps under
the moist leaves
when a man heaves,
twisting
his waist
and raising an ax,
to chip at
the pure solemnity
of the tree,
and this falls off,
thunder and fragrance
drop
so that it is born of them
construction, shape,
building
from the hands of man.
I know you, I love you,
I have seen you born, wood.
That’s why
if I touch you,
you answer me
like a dear body,
you show me your eyes
and your fibers,
your knots and moles,
your veins
like motionless rivers.
I know what they sang,
what they sang
in the voice of the wind,
I’m listening
to the night,
the gallop of the horse
in the jungle,
I touch you
and you open
like a dried rose,
that revived for me,
giving me
the scent and the fire
that only looked dead.
Beneath
the sordid paint
I discern your pores,
drowning you call
and I hear you,
I feel the trees quiver
that astonished
my boyhood,
I see emerging
from you
like an ocean flight
of pigeons and doves,|the wings of books,
tomorrow’s paper
for man,
the pure paper
for the pure man
that will exist tomorrow
and that today
is being born
with a noise
like a saw,
with a tearing
of light,
sound and blood.
It is the sawmill
of time,
the dark jungle
falls,
darkness is born to man,
black leaves fall
and the thunder
oppresses us,
death and life
speak at the same time
like a violin rising
the song or lament
from the mountains
in the forest,
and so it is born
and begins
to travel the wood
of the world,
until I became a silent builder,
cut and pierced by iron,
suffering and protecting.
constructing
the house
where the man, the woman
every day will meet
and live.
Translated from the Spanish by Wally Swist
Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. Neruda became known as a poet when he was just thirteen years old, and wrote in a variety of styles, producing surrealist poems, historical epics, political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924).
Wally Swist’s books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2011 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition, and A Bird Who Seems to Know Me: Poems Regarding Birds and Nature, winner of the 2018 Ex Ophidia Poetry Prize. His essays, poems, and translations have appeared in Asymptote, Chicago Quarterly Review, Commonweal, The Comstock Review, Healing Muse (from the Center for Bioethics & Humanities), La Piccioletta Barca (U.K.), Pensive: A Journal of Global Spirituality & the Arts, Tipton Poetry Review, Poetry London, and Your Impossible Voice. Shanti Arts published his translation of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s L’Allegria in August 2023.
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