{"id":276646,"date":"2010-02-18T16:30:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-18T16:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2010\/02\/18\/worlds-end\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:41:04","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:41:04","slug":"worlds-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2010\/02\/18\/worlds-end\/","title":{"rendered":"World's End"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s incredibly difficult to imagine that there is anything new to say about Pablo Neruda. But Neruda, probably the most prolific poet of the twentieth century, provides endless opportunities for his readers, scholars and critics to re-evaluate his oeuvre. World\u2019s End<\/em> (Copper Canyon, 2009) is a treasure-trove of intimate insight, available in its entirety in English for the first time in William O\u2019Daly\u2019s careful and precise translation. In this expansive book-length poem Neruda oscillates between moments of vulnerable reflection on his own life and work (including his controversial early support of Stalin for which he denounces his naivety), bitter condemnation of the violence of the twentieth century, and a prophetic poetic voice.<\/p>\n

World\u2019s End<\/em>, written towards the end of the poet\u2019s life in 1968-69, is in many ways a response to the sometimes naive exuberance of his only other book-length poem Canto General<\/em>, which was written over a much longer period of time from 1938-49. World\u2019s End<\/em> follows in the epic footsteps of Whitman\u2019s Leaves of Grass<\/em>, but instead of the celebratory and ultimately hopeful sense of Canto General<\/em>, in this work Neruda bitterly confronts the century of violence he has participated in as witness and activist. <\/p>\n

Here we have the mature Neruda. A Neruda of silence and of memory—his own, and historical. Of forgetting and the unforgettable. Here is a Neruda at times disillusioned about the power and usefulness of art in the face of so much violence:<\/p>\n

\n

It is our heavy epoch,
\nthe age of iron paws,
\nthe bloody and circular century,
\nand we must recognize
\nthe wheels of the Apocalypse.
\n…
\nAfter all, they did not serve us,
\nthe fragile human towers,
\neverything was soft and breakable,
\nany painting may be riddled with holes,
\na sonata does not defend us,
\nthe books burn and pass on. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

(Death of a Journalist)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Despite this horror, this despair, Neruda (and this is why can forgive him so much) is ultimately certain that his work as a writer is vital: \u201cI do not dedicate myself to the ashes, \/ I go on naming and believing\u201d he writes in an elegy for Oliverio Girondo of the same name. <\/p>\n

In the dizzying vastness of the book, Neruda telescopes from the intimate to the expansive. Encompassing everything, he writes bestiaries and indictments of the U.S.\u2019s war in Vietnam, elegies and love poems. He condemns himself with one breath and defends himself with the next. He laments and he celebrates. It is the contradictions that make this work so important, and so human. It is also this unrestrained breadth that makes this poem seem less like a coherent sequence and more like a collection of individual poems. <\/p>\n

For a patient reader (or more likely, a Neruda scholar), reading it as a sequence reveals subtexts that form the skeleton of the poem. Confronting the recurring violence, the modern mechanisms of war, the technology of destruction that threatens to overwhelm his humanity, there is silence and forgetting. Ultimately, this is a work about the unforgettable. The shared burden of violence and the responsibility of the poet to remember the unalterable truth. And only once that truth has been committed to poetry is it possible to \u201cforget \/ so as to sustain hope\u201d (“The Worship II”). This contradiction—silence as the way to bear witness, and forgetting as the way to remember—rests on the plurality of silences and of forgettings. Neruda writes between \u201cthe truthfulness of silence\u201d (“The Passion”) and the missing who are \u201ccrucified in the silence \/ of this age of agony\u201d (“The Missing”). In a \u201ccentury of communicating \/ failed communications\u201d (“Know It Know It Know It”) \u201cwords will come to an end \/ all language will be burned\u201d (“Bomb I”) because language can\u2019t withstand the abuses of propaganda, cover-ups and official lies. Language must lapse into silence in order to recover the ability to remember truth, and in doing so, allow the poet to unburden himself of that truth.<\/p>\n

Neruda finds this restorative power primarily in his relationship to the natural world. In \u201cThe Idler\u201d he writes:<\/p>\n

\n

May the enemy forgive me
\nif I wasted too much time speaking
\nwith sands and minerals:
\nI had no real reason
\nbut I learned a lot about silence.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Politics and nature depend on one another in this work, and as the cycle nears its end Neruda reclaims his power as a poet connected intimately to his people, his land and his sea. <\/p>\n

\n

But I move forward singing
\nmy song, and the roads tell me
\nof the many they have seen pass
\nin this century of people without a country.
\nAnd the poet keeps on singing
\nso many victories, so much pain
\n…<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

(Exiles)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This book is perhaps most valuable for the insight it provides into Neruda\u2019s political engagement with the major events of the twentieth century, and his contemporary writers. In addition to coming to terms with his role in history, he places himself among (or in opposition to) the great writers, mentioning among others Whitman, Vallejo, Garc\u00eda Marquez, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Zola, Rimbaud and Baudelaire. The personal-historical, the mediation of history through the voice of the poet, is most interesting in this case for what it tells us about the poet. <\/p>\n

And what it tells us about the poet is told in the voice of William O\u2019Daly, the translator of this book, along with the other eight late and posthumous Neruda books published in this series by Copper Canyon. O\u2019Daly re-creates in English the variety of Neruda\u2019s voices within this poem. Surrealism mixes with politics and love poetry, and in the refusal of a distanced poetic voice O\u2019Daly meets the challenge of Neruda\u2019s self-implication in a heterogeneous vocabulary and a multitude of registers and dictions. From the prophetic to the elegiac, the nuanced variation of language is beautifully explored in resonant English. In contrast to the melancholic politics already quoted, take this short poem \u201cPhysics:\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Love, like the resin
\nof a tree filled with blood,
\nhangs out its strange odor of the origin
\nof natural enchantment:
\nthe sea goes to extremes
\nor the devoured night
\nbreaks over your motherland:
\nyour soul breaks inside you,
\ntwo bells of bone sound,
\nand nothing happens but the weight
\nof your body, empty once again.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If Neruda, like Whitman, contains multitudes, then here we come to him in his full multitudinousness. Volumes could (and likely will) be written about the implications of this work in understanding one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. Equally, in reading this book at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we have an unparalleled vantage point from which to reflect on the suffering, the pain, and our implicit share of that guilt of the most violent century in history. The perfection of the technologies of destruction requires the poetics of this book to remember, and to help us forget, the unforgettable. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s incredibly difficult to imagine that there is anything new to say about Pablo Neruda. But Neruda, probably the most prolific poet of the twentieth century, provides endless opportunities for his readers, scholars and critics to re-evaluate his oeuvre. World\u2019s End (Copper Canyon, 2009) is a treasure-trove of intimate insight, available in its entirety in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[14276,28396,30726,10576,6516,30746,30736],"class_list":["post-276646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-copper-canyon","tag-erica-mena","tag-pablo-neruda","tag-poetry","tag-spanish-literature","tag-william-odaly","tag-worlds-end"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276646"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":349506,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276646\/revisions\/349506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}