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Unknown: [Music] Morton Marcus: His name was Pablo Neruda, and he said: I am watching, hearing with half my soul on sea and half my soul on land. And with both halves of my soul, I look at the world.

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Pablo Neruda was born on July 12th, 1904, in Parral, Chile. He is one of the great and most influential poets of the 19th century. And tonight, we are going to celebrate his birthday with a program dedicated to his poetry throughout his career.

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Pablo Neruda is the pen name of Neftali Reyes Basoalto. He was born in Parral, Chile in 1904, as I said, in fact, July 12th, 1904, and moved to Santiago, Chile in 1921 and lived there until 1927. He published his first volume of poems, "The Song

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of the Festival," in 1921. It won him a municipal poetry prize, the first of many honors in his long poetic career. Like his compatriot, Gabriela Mistral, and many other South American poets, Neruda was given a series of consular and

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diplomatic assignments by the Chilean government, which took him to Ceylon, Burma, Singapore, Rangoon, and Buenos Aires. In fact, he was Counsel General to the Spanish Republic from 1934 to 1936, during which time he became friends with many of the

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great young Spanish poets including friend, Federico Garcia Lorca, Aleixandre, and many, many others. In fact, he discovered several of the poets who have since been considered great Spanish poets while he was there. He was recalled to Chile

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when the Spanish Republic fell, and was soon sent to France to help the Spanish refugees get to America. From 1940 and 1943, he served the Chilean Consulate General in Mexico. He returned to Chile in 1943, became active in politics, and was elected

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senator in 1945, the year he joined the Communist Party. When it was outlawed in 1949, Neruda became a Political exile in Mexico and other countries. He returned to Chile in 1953 to devote himself to writing. In 1971, he was named Chilean

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ambassador to France, that was just a few years before his death. He died a week after Allende and the first legal communist government in the world was destroyed by a right wing coup, which was, as many of you know, inspired by the CIA.

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And it was thought for a long time that Neruda had actually been murdered. He was a very good friend of Salvador Allende's. He won the Nobel Prize in 1962. And how- was allowed into this country, finally, in 1966, though there

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was even some trouble then, and I had the joy of seeing him on this first tour of the United States. In fact, I was in Berkeley at the University of California -- in the audience, I did not go to the University of California, Berkeley -- and

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remembered this electric moment, there were many, many famous poets in the audience, including Allen Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti. It was overflow, it was just one of those electric evenings. And Neruda came and read in Spanish, though he did speak some English

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and translated from English to Spanish. He chose to read his poems in Spanish and have an English translator translate his work. I immediately seized the pen right before the reading was a third old, and I scribbled a poem which I later reduced, but

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I would like to read it as an introduction to him and to what he looked like that night, and the effects of that night, and it's called: SERENADE TO PABLO NERUDA, and it goes like this.

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He approaches the lectern in a dark blue suit, like an emperor penguin. His legs are stubby and his black shoes tentatively stab out like cautious dogs. His tie, a slice of sky from warm latitudes, and from his breast pocket the snowbound peak of

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Everest. Sideburns and the black hair slicked against the edges of his skull are islands on a wide horizon while far below the cordelière of his nose curves to a volcanic mouth and jowls like a desert of slumping dunes beneath his jaw prevent him from

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looking straight down at the red leather book and the guilted pages of his poem. And his voice, his voice is a smooth plate worked by peasant hands where the glaze is wearing away and shows the bare clay in patches. His voice is a wind

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that rises at times, and wets a rusty knife on a corner of stone. This is the voice that speaks for cats, controls the troubles of fleas- consoles the troubles of fleas, sobs with widows and old men, whispers with dust and midnight houses

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and extends the patience of trees. The same voice that traces the sweat on working backs and shakes a rain into the forests. It can perform the pantomime of spiders or imitate mountains clearing their throats. In one syllable, this

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voice hollows crystal caverns of salt, and pressures into diamond the green lights asleep in an underground fern. For the moment of its speech, this voice dissolves barriers between sea and sky, man and man, between the cloth and its design, the

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burro(?) and the snake, between ancestors and jellies of unreleased sperm. This voice makes the donkey understand Spanish and the cow speak it. And displacing the iron heart of a mountain, it discovers the dwarf of stone who sleeps

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inside. And when the voice stops and the small man in the dark suit stands in the weird ovation that surrounds him like a jungle, there is a strange quiet in his eyes, which slowly departs like the pages of a closing book, like a rainstorm

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on another hill, like the botanical night, and the stars, he will enter alone. And I hope that captures some of the real different and incredible variety and powers of this wonderful poet. Neruda's

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first book that really got him enormous acclaim was called, "Twenty Poets of Love-" "Twenty Poems of Love," which has been beautifully translated by W.S. Merwin. And they're very erotic, they're very wonderful poems. I just really want to read one of

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them. You can get the book, it's still in print, a very small book of twenty short poems, translated by Merwin and also the Delacorte edition of the Selected Poems of Neruda, I have around ten of them, again, by Merwin. And this is the last

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one, "Number Twenty." And it's much more elegiac than the others which are very erotic. It goes like this and again, these are translations, we are missing the powerful Spanish of Neruda. From, "Twenty Poems of Love," NUMBER TWENTY

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Tonight I can write the saddest lines. 'The night is shattered and the blue stars shiver in the distance.' Tonight I can write the saddest lines. I loved her, and

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sometimes she loved me too. Through nights like this one I held her in my arms. I kissed her again and again under the endless sky. could one not have loved her great still eyes. Tonight I can

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write the saddest lines. To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her. To hear the immense night, still more immense without her. And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture. What does it matter that my love could not

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keep her. The night is shattered and she is not with me. This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance. My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her. My sight searches for her as though to go to her. My heart

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looks for her, and she is not with me. whitening the same trees. We, of that time, are no longer the same. I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her. My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

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Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before. Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes. I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long. Because through nights like this

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one I held her in my arms my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her. suffer and these the last verses that I write for her. Neruda then went on those counselor jobs that I talked

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about, he went to Southeast Asia, Ceylon, Rangoon, all of those different places. And he wrote a series of volumes called, "Residences On Earth," or, "Living On Earth," that were three separate volumes, the first came out in 1933, the

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second came out in 1935, and then the third came in 1947, sometimes after it was written, and what you have in these volumes, which really are the volumes that made him one of the two or three giants of Spanish literature, Spanish language

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literature, certainly he and Cesar Vallejo were the giants of South American literature. In these books, "Residencias," is a sense of tremendous isolation, there's a sense of tremendous disgust at the middle class material world around him. And

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what is so interesting about these poems is that they're really about his isolation in Asia. And yet they speak to a much larger sense of isolation in this middle class materialist world of the 1920s and 1930s. No better example of this is a poem

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called, "Caballero Sueno," which I have translated, and which I will read now and I must warn the audience that some of this language is rather blatant and blunt. But it is a wonderful picture of life of quiet desperation and, "Caballero

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Sueno," can be translated as, "Man Alone," or, "Single At His Bachelor Gentlemen," and it really shows his disgust with this world. And here it is: SINGLE GENTLEMAN

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The homosexual young man and the amorous girls, and the long widows who suffer from delirious insomnia, and the young wives, thirty hours pregnant. And the raucous cats that cross my garden in the dark, they surround my solitary house, like

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a necklace of throbbing sexual oysters, like enemies established against my soul, like conspirators in pajamas who exchanged long, thick kisses on signal. The radiant summer leads the lovers in uniform, melancholy regiments, made of

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fat and skinny and happy and sad couples. Beneath the elegant coconut trees, near the ocean and the moon, there is a continuous life of trousers and skirts, a murmur of caressed silk stockings and feminine breasts that shine like eyes.

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The petty employee after a long time, after the weekly tedium and the novels read in bed at night, has definitely seduced his neighbor and takes her to miserable movies, where the heroes are colts or passionate princesses, and he strokes her

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legs covered with a soft down and his hot, moist hands that smell of cigarettes. The twilights of the seducer and the nights of the married couples unite like two bed sheets burying me. And the hours after lunch when the young men

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students and the young women students and the priests masturbate, and the animals openly fuck, and the bees smell of blood, and the flies buzz angrily, and the boy cousins play strangely with the girl cousins, and the doctors look

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furiously at the husband of the young patient, and the morning hours when the professor absent mindedly fulfills his conjugal duty and has breakfast. And still more, the adulterers who love each other with true love, on beds as high and long as

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ocean liners. Surely, eternally, I am surrounded by this great breathing and entangled forest with huge flowers, like mouths and teeth, and black roots shaped like fingernails and shoes.

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Well, that perfectly captures this sense of quiet desperation, of misery in the midst of this sexual morass that he is buried in. But as I said, it's not just Asia, it could be happening anywhere. What you may wonder about Neruda is what he is known

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for. And I think in this last poem, you can definitely latch on to what makes Neruda such an electric poet for so many people and that is his amazing vocabulary, and imagination for metaphors, metaphors that are essentially surrealistic, but

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which capture beyond logic or reason a sense of trueness or reality that allows the reader to experience what he's talking about. So when he talks about all of the widows and the young wives and the raucous cats, they surround his house, but here's

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the image, "Like a necklace of throbbing sexual oysters." And later, there's the incredible image of, "The adulterers who love each other with true love, on beds as high and long as ocean liners." I mean, there's just so many of these images in

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every poem of his that are really unforgettable. At this point, he also fell in love with an insane woman by the name of Josie Bliss and this was in Burma. And she was so jealous of him, she can see this unnatural passion, as they say, but- and

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he loved her but she was so jealous of him that he realized he had to get away from her or he would be killed. I mean that she would just absolutely murder him. And I would like to read at this time -- and I thought I had it here but I see that I don't

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-- W.S. Merwin's incredible translation of this amazing poem, which is called, "The Widower's Tango." Not that he had been married but Neruda felt that he was, now and moving away from Josie Bliss -- which is a strange English name for this

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Burmese girl -- finally saving his life, but he felt he had to write probably for himself. But though this is addressed to her, obviously, you could see how passionately involved he was with her. And he says, "Oh, Maligna," which is oh, malignant

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one. And this is one of my favorite poems by him, it is so direct and so powerful. He talks to her having moved away from her, she cannot find him now, he has gone from Burma and here it is:

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WIDOWER'S TANGO Oh, malignant one, by now you will have found the letter. By now you will have cried with rage and you will have insulted the memory of my mother, called her a rotten bitch and a mother

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of dogs. By now you will have drunk alone all by yourself your afternoon tea with your eyes on my old shoes, which are empty forever. And by now, you will not be able to recall my illnesses, my dreams at night, my meals without cursing me out

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loud, as though I was still there, complaining of the tropics, of the coolies Coringhis, of the poisonous fevers, which did me such harm, and of the horrendous English, whom I hate. Malignant one, the truth of it, oh, how huge the

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night is, how lonely the earth. I have gone back again to single bedrooms, to cold lunches in restaurants, and I dropped my pants and my shirts on the floor as I used to. There are no hangers in my room, and nobody's pictures are on the walls. How

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much of the shadow that is in my soul I would give to have you back. The names of the month sound to me like threats. And the word winter is like the sound of a banging drum. Later on, you will find buried near the coconut tree the knife which

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I hid there for fear you would kill me. And now suddenly, I would be glad to smell it's kitchen steel used to the weight of your hand, the shine of your foot. Under the dampness of the ground, among the deaf roots, in all the languages of men, only

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the poor will know your name. And the dense earth does not understand your name made of impenetrable divine substances. Ah see, it hurts me to think of the clear day of your legs in repose, like waters of the sun made to stay in place, and the

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swallow that lives in your eyes sleeping and flying, and the mad dog that you harbor in your heart. And thus also I see the dead who are between us and will be from now on, and I breathe ash and all the ruin in the air itself. I would give this giant

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sea wind for your sudden breath and the vast solitary space that will be around me forever. I would give this wind off the giant sea for your hoarse breathing, heard in the long nights unmixed with oblivion, becoming part of the atmosphere

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as the whip becomes part of the horse's skin. And to hear you urinate in the darkness at the bottom of the house, as though you were pouring a slow, tremulous, silvery obstinate honey. How many times over would I yield up this choir of shadows

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which I possess and the clash of useless swords which is audible in my soul and the dove of blood alone in my forehead calling to things which have vanished, to beings who have vanished, to substances incomprehensively inseparable and lost.

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That is a real elegiac ode for a loved one, tremendous power. Maybe one of the most anthologized of the poems from, "Residencias," it's from, "Residencia II," which came out two years later, after, "Residencia I," and it's called:

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WALKING AROUND, and actually, its title is in English, and this is H.R. Hayes' translation. It so happens I'm tired of being a man. It so happens that going into tailor shops and movies I am withered, impervious like a

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swan of felt navigating a water of beginnings and ashes. The smell of barbershops makes me weep aloud. All I want is a rest from stones or wool. All I want is not to see establishments or gardens, no merchandise, nor goggles or elevators. So happens

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I'm tired of my feet and my nails and my air and my shadow. So happens I am tired of being a man. It would be delicious to frighten a notary with a cut lily, or do a man to death with a punch on the ear. It would be fine to go through the streets

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with a green knife, letting out yells until I died of cold. I do not want to be- to go on being a root in the darkness, vacillating, spreading out, shivering with sleep, downwards in the drenched bowels of the earth, absorbing and thinking,

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eating every day. I do not want so many afflictions. I do not want to go on being root and tomb, being alone underground, being a vault for a dead man, numb with cold, dying of anguish. That is why Monday blazes like petroleum when it

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sees me coming with my jailbird face, and it howls like a wounded wheel when it passes and takes hot-blooded steps toward night. And it shoves me into certain corners, certain damn houses, into hospitals where bones fly out of the window,

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into certain shoe shops with a stench of vinegar, and to streets as frightful as chasms. There are sulphur-colored birds and horrible intestines hanging from the doors of houses that I hate. There are false teeth forgotten in a coffee pot. There

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are mirrors that ought to have wept for shame and fear. There are umbrellas all over and poisons and navels. I walk with composure, with eyes, with shoes, with fury, with forgetfulness. I pass, I cross by offices and orthopedic shoe

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shops and patios where the washing hangs from wires, underwear, towels and shirts that weep slow filthy tears. We have been listening to Pablo Neruda and we have been reading from his great book, which is titled, "Residencias I, II, and

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III." And we will come back and read one book, one mor- two poems from, "Residencias," and then go on to his wonderful, "Canto General," and odes. So stay tuned to the Poetry Show on this birthday for Pablo Neruda, who was born in 1904 on July the

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12th, that is this is his 88th birthday. Morton Marcus: This is the 20th anniversary for KUSP, and Public Affairs program is covering the arts, and a diversity of issues have always been important to KUSP's broadcast schedule. As we

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celebrate our 20th anniversary, KUSP thanks to the following patrons for their outgoing support: Cottontails in Santa Cruz, Davenport Mill, and Emily's Good Things To Eat in Santa Cruz. This has been an anniversary announcement.

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[Cut off] -a birthday show for the great Chilean poet and Nobel Prize winner, Pablo Neruda. We had just read several poems from, "Residence On Earth," and I'd like to read several more, and then go on. We read, "Walking Around," and we read

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some of these extremely depressing poems, if you will. Not all of the poems are like that in, "Residencias On Earth." And I would like to read some of the really magical poems that there are in this book and just again, this is not the happiest

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thing, but it's just a beautiful, beautiful poem. It's called, "Death Alone," and it is my translation and I hope you enjoy it. Again, some of the magical imagery of Pablo Neruda from a period in his life in which he was very, very

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depressed about the world in general, and just feeling very isolated from it. DEATH ALONE There are only cemeteries, graves full of bones without

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sound, the heart passing through a tunnel, dark, dark, dark. Like a shipwreck within toward which we die, as if we drown in the heart, as if we go falling from the skin to the soul. There are cadavers, there are feet of cold, clammy gravestones. There

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is death in the bones like a pure sound, like a bark without a dog coming from certain bells, from certain tombs, swelling in dampness, like a flood of tears or rain. The sea alone, sometimes coffins appear on the water, weighing anchor with pale

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corpses, with women and braided dead hair, with white bakers like angels, with pensive girls married to notaries, coffins rising from the vertical river of death. The purple river, upward, with sails swollen by the noise of death, swollen by

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the silent noise of death. Like a sonorous noise death arrives, like a shoe without a foot, like a suit without a man, arrives to knock with a ring that has no stone and no finger, arrives to shout without mouth, without tongue, without throat.

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Nevertheless, his steps sound, and his clothes sound, silent as a tree. I don't know. I understand little, I hardly see. But I believe his song has the color of damp violets, of violets accustomed to the earth, because the face of death is

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green with a keen dampness of the leaf of a violet and the ponderous color of exasperated winter. But death also goes through the world dressed as a broom, he licks the ground looking for corpses, death is in the broom, it is the tongue of

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death, looking for the dead. It is the needle of death, looking for thread. Death is in cots and sluggish mattresses, stretched out in gloomy blankets, and suddenly he inflates, he blows an obscure noise that swells the sheets. And there are beds

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sailing to a harbor, where he waits dressed as an admiral. And those poems are from, "Residence On Earth I," and, "Residence On Earth II," and they're usually published together, and have come out in a book called, "Residence On Earth

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I, II, and III," together. Finally, in English, a New Direction book, translated by a gentleman by the name of Donald D. Walsh, and a lot of these translations I quarrel with, but at least we have it in hand, plus the Spanish on the opposite

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page. Part Three of this "Residence," though, is a very different book. It is written twelve years after part two, that is in ninteteen- or it's published in 1947. And it is about the Spanish Civil War and the death of the great republic

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of Spain and the takeover of fascism, what many feel was the prelude to World War II. Neruda was even more involved than he should have gotten and that was one of the reasons he was recalled to Chile. And there are many powerful poems in here, but

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none more powerful than a poem, which is called, "Explico Algunas Cosas," or, "I Explain A Few Things." And there are poems here on the death of Federico Garcia Lorca and others, and they're really wonderful. But this poem sort of says it all.

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It is in this poem that you can see the outraged Neruda moving from diplomacy into politics and embracing the Communist Party. It is a wonderful, wonderful poem, though not, again, a happy one:

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I EXPLAIN A FEW THINGS You will ask, and where are the lilacs and the metaphysical blanket of poppies? And the rain that often struck your words, filling them with holes and burns? I'm going to tell you

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what has happened to me. I lived in a quarter of Madrid with bells with clocks with trees. From there, one could see the dry face of Castille like an ocean of leather. My house was called the house of flowers, because it was, it was bursting

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everywhere with geraniums. It was a beautiful house with dogs and children. Well, do you remember? Do you remember Rafael, Federico? Do you remember Federico under the earth, do remember my house with balconies when June lights

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smothered flowers in your mouth? Brother, brother, everything was great voices, the salt of merchandise, heaps of throbbing bread, Marcus of my- markets of my Arguelles quarter with its statue like a pale inkwell among the haddock. The olive oil

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reached toward the labels, a throbbing deep of feet and hands filled the streets, meters and liters, sharp, the essences of life. Fish piled up like a pattern of roofs in a cold sun where the weather vane grows weary. Frenzy, fine ivory of

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potatoes, tomatoes stretching red to the sea. And one morning, oh, it was aflame. And one morning, the fires came out of the earth devouring people. And from then on, fire, gunpowder from then on, and from then on, blood. Bandits with airplanes

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and with Moors, bandits with the rings and duchesses, bandits with the black-robed friars blessing came through the air to kill children. And through the streets, the blood of the children ran simply like the blood of children. Jackals that

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the jackals would spurn, stones that the dry thistle would bite while spitting them out. Vipers that vipers would hate. Facing you, I have seen the blood of Spain rise up to drown you in a single wave of pride and knives. Treacherous generals: look at my

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dead house. Look at broken Spain, but from each dead house comes burning metal instead of flowers. But from each hollow of Spain, Spain comes forth. But from each dead child comes a gun with eyes. But from each crime, bullets are born, that one day,

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will find where your heart lies. You will ask, why does my poetry not speak of sleep and dreams, of leaves, of the great volcanoes, of your native land? Come and see the blood in the streets, come and see the blood in the streets, come and see the

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blood in the streets! The book came out, "Residencias III," in 1947. But three years later, a gigantic five hundred page book came from Neruda which was totally unexpected, and caught everyone off guard. He

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was one of the great powers of Spanish language literature now, but no one could have expected what was going on because most of the poems of, "Residencias III," had been written a long time before 1947. And Neruda had started in the early 40s on this

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gigantic book, which is supposed to be the song of Chile, but became so large it became the general song of all South America. And it is a book which is filled with historical meditations, with evocations of the discovery of South America

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by the Conquistadores, and before that, in this poem that I will read now, the actual geological construction of the South American continent itself. Wonderful, wonderful poems, and it is also filled with a lot of satires. Let's hear now,

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"Algunas Bestias," or, "Some Beasts," in my translation, and just hear how wonderful and evocative this book, which is like Walt Whitman's America, it is Pablo Neruda's South America. ALGUNAS BESTIAS

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It was the night of the iguana. From below his rainbow ridge brow, his tongue sank like a lance into the green mulch. The monastic ant heap tread through the forest with melodious step. The guanaco, fine as oxygen on the high, wide brown plains, or

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golden boots, or the llama, open candid eyes and the delicacy of a world filled with dew. The monkeys braided an interminably erotic thread along the banks of the dawn, demolishing worlds of pollen and startling the violet flight of the butterflies from

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Muzo. It was the night of the alligators, a pure and pullul ting night of snouts rising fr m the ooze, and from the sl ep-drenched bogs a dull sou d of armor returned to its ear hly origin. The jaguar was tou hing the leaves with his pho

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phorescent absence, the puma ran in the foliage like a dev uring fire, while the jun le's alcoholic eyes burned in im. The badgers scratched the feet of the river, sniffing out the nest whose throbbing del ght they attack with red teet

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. And in the depths of the grea water, like a circle of the arth, the giant anaconda, co ered in ritual mud, devours in religious devouring. Other kinds of poems in this book, which I certainly would

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suggest you read, and there is now a very fine English translation of it out, complete, is the satires of politics and politicians, especially contemporary ones. And this is the one called, "The United Fruit Company," the fruit

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company that brings us at a very reduced price because it is done on starvation wages for workers down in Central and South America, brings us the bananas and other goods that we get so cheap or got so cheap from Central and South America. So

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here is: THE UNITED FRUIT COMPANY When the trumpet sounded, it was all prepared on the earth and Jehovah parceled out the earth, took Coca Cola Incorporated,

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Anaconda, Ford Motors and other entities. The Fruit Company Incorporated reserved for itself, the most succulent, the central coast of my own land, a sweet waist of America. It rechristened its territories, "The Banana Republics," and over

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the sleeping dead, over the restless heroes who conquered greatness, liberty and flags, it established the comic opera. Alienated free will, gave out Caesar's crowns, unsheathed envy, attracted the dictatorship of flies: Trujillo flies, Tachos

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flies, Carias flies, Martinez flies, Ubico flies, damp flies of humble blood and marmalade, drunken flies who zoom over the graves of the people, circus flies, wise flies, well-trained in tyranny. Among the bloodthirsty flies, the Fruit

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Company lands it ships, filling them to the gunnels with coffee and fruit, ships which steal away with a treasure of our drowned lands like laden trays. Meanwhile, Indians are falling into the sugared chasms of the harbors wrapped for burial in

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the dawn mist. A body rolls, a thing that has no name, a fallen number, a cluster of dead fruit, dumped into alime pit. And in this book, "The Canto General," published in 1950 as I said, Neruda has a huge poem of a number of sections and it is

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called, "The Heights of Machu Picchu," and it records a symbolic as well as actual journey made to the high mountain city, which was discovered in 1911 by Hiram Bingham in the Andes. And to him, it is a return to the

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origins of the South American natives. And to him, it is getting back to the purity of what life should be. It is an astonishing poem, very Whitman-esque as I'm sure you've heard much of Neruda is, and maybe his single greatest poem.

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I'm going to read part ten. He has already found the town and now he is addressing as all of these are, they are addresses, to the cities themselves or the people in the cities. And this has some beautiful images in it, this is:

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#10 of THE HEIGHTS OF MACHU PICCHU Stone, upon stone, and man, where was he? Air upon air, and man, where was he? Time upon time, and man, where was he? Were you too the broken fragment of man's incompleteness, of the

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empty eagle the through today's streets, that through the footprints, that through the leaves of dead autumn is pounding his soul to the tomb? Poor hand, poor foot, poor life. Days of light unraveled on you like rain on the banderillas of

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a fiesta, dropping that dark nourishment petal by petal into your empty mouth. Hunger, coral of man, hunger, secret plant would cut his root, hunger, did your reef edge rise up to these high fallen towers? I ask you, salt of the highways, to show me

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the spoon, allow me, architecture, to scrape the stamens of stone with a stick, to climb all the steps of air, to emptiness, to scratch at the entrails until I touch man. Machu Picchu, did you place stone upon stone, and at the

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base, rags? Coal upon coal and at the bottom, tears? Fire upon gold and in that gold, trembling red raindrops of blood. Return to me the slave you buried here, wrench from the land the hard bread of the poor, show me the clothing of the servant and his

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window frame. Tell me whether his sleep was raucous, half-open like a black hole and the wall made by exhaustion. The wall, the wall, whether each floor of stone weighed on his sleep and whether he fell beneath it as if beneath a moon overcome by his

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sleep. Ancient America, sunken bride, did your fingers too on leaving the forest for the high emptiness of the gods, under the nuptial banners of light and honor, mixing the thunder of drums and lances, did you too, did your fingers too, those

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which transcribed the abstract rows and the cold line and the blood stained breast of new grain into cloth of radiant material into hard cavities? Did you too, you too, buried America, store in the loneliness, in the bitter

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intestines, hunger, like an eagle? And the question of course is, was even this great civilization built on slave labor? Was it built on the hunger of the poor, the misery of the poor? Because now it is Neruda, as communist,

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asking these questions, wanting to know the answer. Well, the book was stunning and Neruda just kept building this incredible reputation, one of the great poets the world has ever known. And then, just four years later, he came out not

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with a more complex, huge, overflowing Baroque book like, "Canto General," but he made suddenly a series of very simple poems called, "Odas Elementales," or, "Elemental Odes," which are very simple, shortline celebrations of the

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everyday things of life -- shoes, socks, spoons, tomatoes, onions -- they are his most popular poems, and he wrote them as poems which would engage the non-poetic, even the non-educated, the workmen again, they're inspired by his

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political philosophy, to show the worker the wonder of the world, to show him that in his daily life, he is working for a world in which things could be enjoyed, and that there is marvels everywhere around him. Let me read one or two of these.

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Here is, "Ode to a Pair of Socks," and Neruda, who was living in exile at this time, has been brought a pair of socks by a shepherdess by the name of Maru Mori, and here is, "Ode to a Pair of Socks," and now you see a Neruda who can be

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tremendously playful and humorous and for the rest of his poetic career, this playfulness, there's whimsy and humor, shows itself more and more. And again, the wonderful original imagery, which is everywhere, a part of his poetry.

00:51:00.020 - 00:51:15.760

ODE TO A PAIR OF SOCKS Maru Mori brought me a pair of socks, knitted with her shepherder's hands, two socks soft as rabbits. I slipped my feet into them as into two cases, knitted with strands of

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sunset and the pelts of sheep. Outrageous socks, my feet were two woolen fish, two large sharks of ultramarine blue traversed by a golden hair, two gigantic blackbirds, two cannon. My feet were honored in this way by these celestial socks. So

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beautiful were they that for the first time, my feet seemed as unacceptable as two decrepit firemen, firemen unworthy of that embroidered fire, of those luminous socks. Nevertheless, I resisted the acute temptation to save the socks as college boys

00:52:00.430 - 00:52:20.440

save fireflies, as the erudite collect sacred documents. I resisted the wild impulse to place the socks in a golden cage, and each day feed them bird seed and rosy melon bulb. Like the explorer who in the jungle surrenders the unique

00:52:20.440 - 00:52:42.520

fresh venison to the roasting spit and eats it remorsefully, I stretched out my feet and encased them in beautiful socks and then in my shoes. And the moral of my ode is this: twice is beauty, beauty, and what is good is doubly good when it

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concerns two woolen socks in winter. Well, we are running out of time on this birthday salute to Pablo Neruda. And I rush through some more books here. And we'll read some of his later poems here from a wonderful collection

00:53:17.900 - 00:53:59.060

translated beautifully by Alastair Reid called, "Estravagaria," and I will read the poem, I hope- well, maybe I won't. Maybe I won't. I will read the poem, which I thought I had right here and I do not. Oh, there it is, "Lazy Bones." And

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here is this new attitude, now an old man. The book was published in the late 60s. He talks, and we will end our readings with him and with this wonderful sense of him. There's also another wonderful book, poem in this book, by the way,

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called, "Bestiary," in which he looks at all of the small animals of the world with amazingly original imagery. But anyway, I would like us to remember him and this new whimsical and humorous side of him with his poem called:

00:54:36.000 - 00:54:56.760

LAZY BONES, or, EL PEREZOSO They will continuing wandering, these things of steel among the stars, and worn out men will still go up to brutalize the placid moon. There, they will found their drugstores. In this

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time of the swollen grape, the wine begins to come to life between the sea and the mountain ranges here in autumn. In Chile now, cherries are dancing, the dark secret girls are singing, and in guitars, water is shining. The sun is touching

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every door and making wonder of wheat. The first wine is pink in color, sweet with the sweetness of a child, the second wine is able-bodied, strong like the voice of a sailor, and the third wine is a topaz, is a poppy and a fire all in one. My house has

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both the sea and the earth, my woman has great eyes the color of wild hazelnuts, when night comes down, the sea puts on a dress of white and green, and later the moon in the spindrift foam dreams like a sea-green girl. I have no wish to change

00:55:58.590 - 00:56:26.000

my planet. We have been celebrating the 88th birthday of Pablo Neruda, who was born July 12th, 1904, in Parral, Chile, and died in 1973 in Isla Negra, Chile, one week after the CIA coup, which sent

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the communist government of Chile to wreck and ruin and more than twenty years now of horror and torture and the death of Salvador Allende, Neruda's great friend. A birthday reading of the great Nobel Prize poet. We will see you in two weeks.

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