From: lichter@oahu.cs.ucla.edu (Michael I. Lichter)
Subject: Pablo Neruda: Toward An Impure Poetry / To The Foot From Its Child
Organization: UCLA, Computer Science Department
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 92 10:03:30 GMT

	Included here are an "essay" by Pablo Neruda, followed by
	a poem of his.  These are taken from _Five Decades: Poems
	1925-1970_ by Pablo Neruda, edited and translated by Ben Belitt,
	Grove Weidenfeld, 1974.

	Although this "essay" was aimed at a very different audience, I
	thought it might be of interest.  The author is one of Latin
	America's best known poets (if not the best known).  The
	bookbackblurb says "Pablo Neruda was born in Chile in 1904 and
	died in 1973 shortly after the Allende government, which had
	earlier appointed him Ambassador to France, was overthrown by a
	military junta" (sponsored by us, of course).


	Toward An Impure Poetry
	by Pablo Neruda
	------------------------------------------------------------------

	It is good, at certain hours of the day and night, to look
	closely at the world of objects at rest.  Wheels that have
	crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable
	burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels, and baskets,
	handles and hafts for the carpenter's tool chest.  From them
	flow the contacts of man with the earth, like a text for all
	troubled lyricists.  The used surfaces of things, the wear that
	the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at
	others, of such things---all lend a curious attactiveness to
	the reality of the world that should not be underprized.

	In them one sees the confused impurity of the human condition,
	the massing of things, the use and disuse of substance,
	footprints and fingerprints, the abiding presence of the human
	engulfing all artifacts, inside and out.

	Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's
	obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke,
	smelling of the lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the
	trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it.

	A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies,
	soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles
	and vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies,
	declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beasts, the
	shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts,
	affirmations and taxes.

	The holy canons of madrigal, the mandates of touch, smell,
	taste, sight, hearing, the passion for justice, sexual desire,
	the sea sounding---willfully rejecting and accepting nothing:
	the deep penetraion of things in the transports of love, a
	consummate poetry soiled by the pigeon's claw, ice-marked and
	tooh-marked, bitten delicately with our sweatdrops and usage,
	perhaps.  Till the instrument so restlessly played yields us
	the comfort of its surfaces, and the woods show the knottiest
	suavities shaped by the pride of the tool.  Blossom and water
	and wheat kernel share one precious consistency: the sumptuous
	appeal of the tactile.

	Let no one forget them.  Melancholy, old mawkishness impure and
	unflawed, fruits of a fabulous species lost to the memory, cast
	away in a frenzy's abandonment---moonlight, the swan in the
	gathering darkness, all hackneyed endearments: surely that is
	the poet's concern, essential and absolute.

	Those who shun the "bad taste" of things will fall flat on the
	ice.


	----------------------------------------------------------------
	****************************************************************
	----------------------------------------------------------------


	Note: I don't include the Spanish origional because I'm too
	lazy.  I have changed the translation slightly (probably
	unethical) to restore more of the flavor of the Spanish.  I get
	the feeling that translators take more pride in transforming
	than in transmuting or rendering.


	To The Foot From Its Child
	---------------------------------------------------------

	The child's foot still doesn't know it's a foot,
	it wants to be a butterfly or an apple.

	Later, the stones, bits and pieces of glass,
	streets, stairways,
	the packed earth of the road,
	go on teaching the foot it can't fly,
	can't be round as a fruit on a branch.
	The child's foot,
	defeated, taken down
	in battle,
	a prisoner
	condemned to live in a shoe.

	Little by little in the dark it began
	to comprehend the world in its own fashion,
	never knowing the other foot, enclosed,
	feeling out life like a blind man.

	Those toe-nails, glossy
	as quartz, in a cluster, 
	hardened over, assumed
	matter's opacity; tough as horn,
	the child's little petals
	flattened out, lost their balance,
	took the form of an eyeless reptile,
	the triangular head of a worm.
	They grew calluses,
	covered themselves 
	with death's littlest volcanoes,
	unwanted fossilizations.

	But this blind thing trudged on
	without stopping, without flinching,
	hour after hour,
	one foot then the other foot,
	now a man's
	or a woman's
	above,
	below,
	crossing meadows, mines
	warehouses and offices
	back, 
	outside, inside,
	forward
	this foot worked with its shoe
	hardly had time
	to undress for love or sleep,
	it walked, they kept walking,
	until the entire man ceased.

	And then under the earth
	it went and knew nothing more,
	since all things, all possible things, are shadowy there.
	It never knew it had stopped being a foot---whether
	they had buried it to teach it to fly,
	or because one day it might 
	turn into an apple.

			  Pablo Neruda
			  _Estravagario / Book of Vagaries_
			  1958
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems