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POEM OF THE WEEK # 34- THE HEIGHTS OF MACHU PICCHU XI (AND XII, AT THE END!) BY
PABLO NERUDA

lookingtoleeward Okategoriserade 23 October, 20223 August, 2024 6 Minutes

This post is a translation of a text published on this page over a year ago, on
the 15th of September 2021, in Spanish. The very admirable translation of this
poem by Nathaniel Tarn, coupled with Pablo Neruda’s universal poetic genius
warrants, I feel, an English version too.

“To not admire Voltaire is one of many forms of stupidity”. So said Jorge Luis
Borges. I would equally like to state that not to admire Pablo Neruda is one of
many forms of stupidity in this world, above all if you are an American. Why?
Not because Neruda is one of the greatest of American authors, but because he,
in his artistic scope, is the Latin American poet par excellence. It is further
my opinion that he is the most important author to write in Spanish since the
Spanish Golden Age and is one of the most important figures of modern literature
whose poems are a gift for all humanity.

Nonetheless, for all his fame, Neruda is very often misunderstood. He is seen as
an author who is lacking in depth–popular because superficial. On the one hand,
I understand this opinion–his poetry has an almost unparalleled presence in
popular culture. On the website Poemhunter (one of the most popular
poetry-related websites on the web), one finds a number of his poems among the
list of the “Top 500 poems”. Lamentably, not a single one of them is good. Pablo
Neruda was quite a prolific author and in between the mediocrity it can be
difficult to divine the real gems.

But how wrong they are! Forgive them, for they know now what they say, because
notwithstanding this, among honest critics of his work, a majority are able to
agree on his genius and what his masterpiece is. It is found in a sequence of
twelve poems collectively called The Heights of Machu Picchu from the collection
Canto General. To understand the sequence it is important to understand the
theme of the collection as a whole. Canto General is a monumental work which
aims to present the history, the geography, the nature, the people, and above
all, the spirit of Latin America. In the general scheme of it, The Heights of
Machu Picchu can be considered a chapter in which the poet attempts to reconcile
the modern, colonial civilisation of Latin America with the history and the soul
of its indigenous past. The sequence, where we follow the poet on a journey from
a state of misery in modern, urban life to the heights of Machu Picchu, works as
an allegory where the poetry moves from despair and confusion towards spiritual
illumination. The city of Machu Picchu, this relic of the world that existed
before the arrival of the Europeans, is the special place where the poet will
undergo this experience.

The climax of The Heights of Machu Picchu is found in the penultimate canto that
we will now analyse. Having ascended the mountain and finally arrived at Machu
Picchu, the poet prepares himself to perform a symbolic, ritual act: he will
sink his hand into the earth. This act symbolises the reconciliation of the two
worlds that I have mentioned above.

I strongly encourage you to read the entire sequence (I will try to upload it on
this website some day) but I would just as well like to point out that it is not
necessary to have read the preceding poems in order to appreciate the beauty of
the end. I myself read this canto first without knowing the theme of either The
Heights of Machu Picchu or Canto General as a whole and it’s aesthetic immensity
nonetheless bowled me over immediately. I hope it will do the same for you.

Enjoy.


XI

Through a confusion of splendour,
through a night made stone let me plunge my hand
and move to beat in me
a bird held for a thousand years,
the old and unremembered human heart!
Today let me forget this happiness,
wider than all the sea,
because man is wider than all the sea
and her necklace of islands
and we must fall into him as down a well
to clamber back
with branches of secret water, recondite truths.
Allow me to forget, circumference of stone,
the powerful proportions,
the transcendental span, the honeycomb’s foundations,
and from the set-square allow my hand to slide
down a hypotenuse of hair shirt and salt blood.
When, like a horseshoe of rusting wing-cases,
the furious condor batters my temples in the order
of flight and his tornado of carnivorous feathers sweeps
the dark dust down slanting stairways,
I do not see the rush of the bird
nor the blind sickle of his talons–
I see the ancient being, the slave, the sleeping one,
blanket his field–a body, a thousand bodies, a man,
a thousand women swept by the sable whirlwind,
charred with rain and night,
stoned with a leaden weight of statuary:
Juan Splitstones, son of Wiracocha,
Juan Coldbelly, heir of the green star,
Juan Barefoot, grandson to the turquoise,
rising to birth with me, as my own brother.



Analysis

The poet has spent the night atop Machu Picchu (“through a night made stone…”)
and is ready to plunge his hand into the earth to reach and resuscitate the
civilisation that is buired there, that is to say, the aboriginal roots of
America itself. It is a world that is dead and forgotten (“let me plunge my
hand/and move to beat in me/a bird held for a thousand years,/ the old and
unremembered human heart!”). Even if the poet presages the great joy that he
will experience in doing this, he does not intend it to be a sollipsistic,
egoistic act: the poet knows that this is an act of personal sacrifice. Because
of this, he writes, with such beauty, the following verses:


> Today let me forget this happiness,
> wider than all the sea,
> because man is wider than all the sea
> and her necklace of islands
> and we must fall into him as down a well
> to clamber back
> with branches of secret water, recondite truths.

Neruda lets us know that he wishes to reach down to something immaterial–he
wishes to arrive at the soul of man–to what touches all humanity:


> I do not see the rush of the bird
> nor the blind sickle of his talons–
> I see the ancient being, the slave, the sleeping one,
> blanket his field–a body, a thousand bodies, a man,
> a thousand women swept by the sable whirlwind,

The universal quality of this “soul” as well as the connection between the two
civilisations is represented by the names of the final verses: “Juan” (the
English “John”) is perhaps the most typically general of European names, yet
this Juan is juxtaposed at the same time as the “son of Wiracocha”, “son of the
green star” and “grandson to the turquoise”.

At the end of the poem, the poet has not realised this connection yet. The poem
ends only with an imperative, “arise to birth with me, my brother”. The
reconciliation between these two worlds–the objective of the poet–occurs in the
succeding canto. I am attaching it below because it follows on so naturally from
the preceding one. I will not be analysing it, however, above all because it
doesn’t really add any new elements to the sequence itself and ought to be
enjoyed on its own. The climax of the sequence is the eleventh, the full
terminus is the twelfth.



XII

Arise to birth with me, my brother.
Give me your hand out of the depths
sown by your sorrows.
You will not return from these stone fastnesses.
You will not emerge from subterranean time.
Your rasping voice will not come back,
nor your pierced eyes rise from their sockets.

Look at me from the depths of the earth,
tiller of fields, weaver, reticent shepherd,
groom of totemic guanacos,
mason high on your treacherous scaffolding,
iceman of Andean tears,
jeweler with crushed fingers,
farmer anxious among his seedlings,
potter wasted among his clays–
bring to the cup of this new life
your ancient buried sorrows.
Show me your blood and your furrow;
say to me: here I was scourged
because a gem was dull or because the earth
failed to give up in time its tithe of corn or stone.
Point out to me the rock on which you stumbled,
the wood they used to crucify your body.
Strike the old flints
to kindle ancient lamps, light up the whips
glued to your wounds throughout the centuries
and light the axes gleaming with your blood.

I come to speak for your dead mouths.

Throughout the earth
let dead lips congregate,
out of the depths spin this long night to me
as if I rode at anchor here with you.

And tell me everything, tell chain by chain,
and link by link, and step by step;
sharpen the knives you kept hidden away,
thrust them into my breast, into my hands,
like a torrent of sunbursts,
an Amazon of buried jaguars,
and leave me cry: hours, days and years,
blind ages, stellar centuries.

And give me silence, give me water, hope.

Give me the struggle, the iron, the volcanoes.

Let bodies cling like magnets to my body.

Come quickly to my veins and to my mouth.

Speak through my speech, and through my blood.


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Published 23 October, 20223 August, 2024


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