Interlitq publishes the translation from Spanish into English of Pablo Neruda’s “Oda al Bosque de las Petras” (Ode to the Bosque de las Petras) by Paul Scott Derrick, a contributor to Issue 9 and Issue 11 of Interlitq and www.interlitq.wordpress.com
from The Third Book of Odes, 1957
Ode to the Bosque de las Petras
Somewhere on the coast, between the
purple eucalyptus
and the newer mansions
of the carob tree,
a solemn forest
stands:
an ancient
handful of trees
that death forgot.
The centuries
have twisted
their trunks, scars
have covered every branch,
ash and mourning
have sifted through their ancient crowns,
all of the leaves
are tangled and twined
like gigantic spider
webs
and the limbs, like fingers
of agonizing green,
have slowly gnarled together
and knotted up, and petrified.
But the agéd forest is still
alive: a new leaf
sometimes struggles to the light,
a nest
shook its branch
in the spring,
a drop
of fragrant resin
falls into the water and dies.
Quiet, quiet is the shade
and the compact silence
is
like
black glass
on the aging arms
of forgotten candelabras.
The ground rises up,
the knotty feet have unearthed themselves –
the stony dead,
broken statues, bones,
the roots
that sifted the earth.
The silence there
at night
is a bottomless lake
where
presences
emerge,
flowing hair
of moss
and of vines,
ancient eyes
with
turquoise
light,
forgotten ashen lizards,
broad-beamed women madly dead,
dazzling
warriors,
Araucanian
rites.
The petrified
forest
fills up like
a monstrous
salon,
and later
darkness,
rain,
time
and oblivion
fall,
and the lights go out.
The invisible beings
take themselves home
and the forest
returns
to immobility, its solemn
virtue of stone and dream.
from El tercer libro de las odas, 1957
Oda al bosque de las Petras
Por la costa, entre los
eucaliptos azules
y las mansiones nuevas
de Algarrobo,
hay un bosque
solemne:
un antiguo
puñado de árboles
que olvidó la muerte.
Los siglos
retorcieron
sus troncos, cicatrices
cubrieron cada rama,
ceniza y luto
cayeron sobre sus antiguas copas,
se enmarañó el follaje
de uno y otro
como telas titánica
de araña
y fueron los ramajes como dedos
de agonizantes verdes
anudados
unos en otros y petrificadas.
El viejo bosque vive
aún, alguna nueva
hoja asoma en la altura,
un nido
palpitó
en la primavera,
una gota
de resina fragante
cae en el agua y muere.
Quieta, quieta es la sombra
y el silencio compacto
es
como
cristal negro
entre los viejos brazos
de los desfallecidos candelabros.
El suelo se levanta,
los pies nudosos se desenterraron
y son muertos de piedra,
estatuas rotas, huesos,
las raíces
que afloraron a la tierra.
De noche
allí el silencio
es un profundo lago
del que salen
sumergidas
presencias,
cabelleras
de musgos
y de lianas,
ojos
antiguos
con
luz
de turquesa,
cenicientos lagartos olvidados,
anchas mujeres locamente muertas,
guerreros
deslumbradores,
ritos
araucanos.
Se puebla el viejo bosque
de las Petras
como un salón
salvaje
y luego
sombra,
lluvia,
tiempo,
olvido
caen
apagándolo.
Los invisibles seres
se recogen
y el viejo bosque
vuelve
a su inmovilidad, a su solemne
virtud de piedra y sueño
About Pablo Neruda (1904-1973). Pablo Neruda, whose real name is Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, was born on 12 July, 1904, in the town of Parral in Chile. His father was a railway employee and his mother, who died shortly after his birth, a teacher. Some years later his father, who had then moved to the town of Temuco, remarried doña Trinidad Candia Malverde. The poet spent his childhood and youth in Temuco, where he also got to know Gabriela Mistral, head of the girls’ secondary school, who took a liking to him. At the early age of thirteen he began to contribute some articles to the daily “La Mañana”, among them, Entusiasmo y Perseverancia – his first publication – and his first poem. In 1920, he became a contributor to the literary journal “Selva Austral” under the pen name of Pablo Neruda, which he adopted in memory of the Czechoslovak poet Jan Neruda (1834-1891). Some of the poems Neruda wrote at that time are to be found in his first published book: Crepusculario (1923). The following year saw the publication of Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada, one of his best-known and most translated works. Alongside his literary activities, Neruda studied French and pedagogy at the University of Chile in Santiago.
Between 1927 and 1935, the government put him in charge of a number of honorary consulships, which took him to Burma, Ceylon, Java, Singapore, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Madrid. His poetic production during that difficult period included, among other works, the collection of esoteric surrealistic poems, Residencia en la tierra (1933), which marked his literary breakthrough.
The Spanish Civil War and the murder of García Lorca, whom Neruda knew, affected him strongly and made him join the Republican movement, first in Spain, and later in France, where he started working on his collection of poems España en el Corazón (1937). The same year he returned to his native country, to which he had been recalled, and his poetry during the following period was characterised by an orientation towards political and social matters. España en el Corazón had a great impact by virtue of its being printed in the middle of the front during the civil war.
In 1939, Neruda was appointed consul for the Spanish emigration, residing in Paris, and, shortly afterwards, Consul General in Mexico, where he rewrote his Canto General de Chile, transforming it into an epic poem about the whole South American continent, its nature, its people and its historical destiny. This work, entitled Canto General, was published in Mexico 1950, and also underground in Chile. It consists of approximately 250 poems brought together into fifteen literary cycles and constitutes the central part of Neruda’s production. Shortly after its publication, Canto General was translated into some ten languages. Nearly all these poems were created in a difficult situation, when Neruda was living abroad.
In 1943, Neruda returned to Chile, and in 1945 he was elected senator of the Republic, also joining the Communist Party of Chile. Due to his protests against President González Videla’s repressive policy against striking miners in 1947, he had to live underground in his own country for two years until he managed to leave in 1949. After living in different European countries he returned home in 1952. A great deal of what he published during that period bears the stamp of his political activities; one example is Las Uvas y el Viento (1954), which can be regarded as the diary of Neruda’s exile. In Odas elementales (1954- 1959) his message is expanded into a more extensive description of the world, where the objects of the hymns – things, events and relations – are duly presented in alphabetic form.
Neruda’s production is exceptionally extensive. For example, his Obras Completas, constantly republished, comprised 459 pages in 1951; in 1962 the number of pages was 1,925, and in 1968 it amounted to 3,237, in two volumes. Among his works of the last few years can be mentioned Cien sonetos de amor (1959), which includes poems dedicated to his wife Matilde Urrutia, Memorial de Isla Negra, a poetic work of an autobiographic character in five volumes, published on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, Arte de pajáros (1966), La Barcarola (1967), the play Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta (1967), Las manos del día (1968), Fin del mundo (1969), Las piedras del cielo (1970), and La espada encendida.
About Paul Scott Derrick: Paul Scott Derrick is a Senior Lecturer of American literature at the University of Valencia, Spain. His main field of interest is Romanticism and American Transcendentalism and their manifestations in the art and thought of the 20th and 21st centuries. His critical works include: Thinking for a Change: Gravity’s Rainbow and Symptoms of the Paradigm Shift in Occidental Culture (1994) and “We stand before the secret of the world”: Traces along the Pathway of American Romanticism (2003). He has co-edited several critical studies, including: Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry, with Viorica Patea (Rodopi, 2007); and with Norman Jope and Catherine E. Byfield, The Salt Companion to Richard Berengarten (Salt Publishing, 2011). As a translator, he has published bilingual English-Spanish editions of a number of works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Adams and Emily Dickinson and has co-authoredand co-translated, with Juan López Gavilán, a critical Spanish edition of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs [La tierra de los abetos puntiagudos] (2008). He has also published translations into English of poems by Jorge de Montemayor, Luis Cernuda, Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges. He is coordinating a critical study and translation into Spanish of Emily Dickinson’s fascicles and is currently preparing, with Miguel Teruel, a Spanish version of Richard Berengarten’s Black Light.
