Sublime Blue: Selected Early Odes by Pablo Neruda by Pablo Neruda

INTRODUCTION
“OUR BREAD AND OUR DREAM”
    W hen Neruda wrote in his
Memoirs *
that “We must open America’s matrix to bring out her glorious light,” he took metaphorically the
el dorado
image Cortés and company have always taken literally. In doing so, he projected a perspective which, by placing a higher value on light than on the mineral which merely imitates it, resembles the idea of gold prevalent among
las indigenas,
the first people native to the American continent. For Neruda, the poet’s role as explorer was to discover and rediscover the many forms of wealth native to the spirit and to return it all mysteriously gleaming to those closest to the source.
    Neruda discharged this labor unflaggingly, mining a ceaseless vein of epics, lyrics, and dramatic narratives, stopped only by his death. He died shortly after the bloody CIA-assisted coup on September 11, 1973, which toppled the popular government and ended the high promise of Salvador Allende, his close friend. Neruda’s last words, according to Matilde Urrutia, his wife, were repeated over and over in his final hours: tortured by news of the brutal purge claiming the lives of Allende’s friends and sympathizers, the dying poet lapsed in and out of consciousness crying, “My people, my people, what are they doing to my people!” Neruda’s funeral quickly swelled to threatening proportions as his countrymen learned of his death and gathered in the streets to quote verses they knew by heart. This spontaneous convocation constituted what may be construed as the first public show of opposition to Pinochet. About that time, Pinochet’s forces rerouted a small creek to flood through the poet’s home, where many of his poems were written and stored. It is unlikely that they appreciated the profound irony of this, given the connection Neruda, throughout his life, had felt with water in all its forms.
    Among North American poets, the kind of popularity excited by the man born Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto and reborn Pablo Neruda, is quite unknown. Only in the figure of Walt Whitman, whom Neruda revered, can we find an equivalent sensibility. Both men exhibited a spirit whose passionate openheartedness readily engaged at an elemental level the issues and history of their times with the intention of making available to their contemporaries a portrait of themselves, in language close to their own speech, making them participants in a vision they could not otherwise experience so memorably.
    Whitman’s reception, less than a century earlier, little resembled Neruda’s acclaim, which began early and lasted throughout his life. “Gossiping in the early candlelight of old age,” Whitman acknowledged how “public criticism on the book and myself as author of it yet shows mark’d anger and contempt more than anything else.” Now an institution, our good grey poet was first reviled as “arrogant” for proclaiming himself “the Poet of the time” and as “disgraceful” (this was the received opinion cited by Emily Dickinson to explain why she had not read her contemporary) for rooting “like a pig among a rotten garbage of licentious thoughts.” Neruda, however, saw to the center of Whitman’s enterprise. “I like the ‘postive hero’ in Walt Whitman … who found him without formula and brought him, not without suffering, into the intimacy of our physical life, making him share with us our bread and our dream.”
    Among the most prolific important poets ever to live, Neruda is, again like Whitman, one of the most widely translated poets of present times. Scores of his poems have appeared in new English translations every year since his death in 1973. The poems in this selection come from his first collection of
Odas elementales,
published in 1954, when Neruda was about 50. Of this time he has said “nothing out of the ordinary