A few years after I graduated, I headed south again, with the same weathered book in my tattered green pack. Eventually I reached Chile, that slender country sliding off toward Antarctica. Somehow I found myself working on a ranch in its Central Valley, nestled between the Andes and the sea. This was certainly part of Neruda’s territory, his terroir: here grew the grapes that made his velvet red wine and the red poppies that flower in his verse.
The ranch was close to the Pacific coast, the source of so many of his metaphors. His fabled eccentric house at Isla Negra was not too far up the rocky shoreline. It spread out like a boat, for he was, as he liked to say, “a sailor on land”; this was the vessel from which he wrote most of his poetry in the second half of his life. Its walls, often curved, were covered in his endless collections, everything from ship figureheads to butterflies, all overlooking the beach.
I also spent time in Neruda’s home in Chile’s capital, Santiago. Like Isla Negra and La Sebastiana—another small home he had in the funky port city of Valparaíso—it is preserved as a casa-museo, a house-museum. La Chascona was named for the wild curly hair of his third wife, Matilde Urrutia. They built the home as a refuge while he was still living with his second wife, Delia del Carril.
When I approached La Chascona from the street for the first time, adrenaline surged through me. Amid thick green vegetation, I saw that the house had been painted in a color like French blue and rested atop a street-level wall of warm gray and gold stones. A steep hill rose behind, with what seemed like rooms and outcroppings coming off a stepped path.
I entered a room behind heavy brown doors. To my dismay, it was a gift shop. I resigned myself to the limitations of the moment and bought my ticket.
Then I found myself on an open patio canopied by a wooden trellis covered in grapevines. From the patio, stairs climbed up to the living room and other rooms on both sides of the stairs. His library and writer’s cabin were situated at the top of the hill, above the bedroom. The floors alternated in color, blue and yellow, like the tiers of a multicolored and unusually shaped wedding cake; the yellow floor had rounded walls, while the blue floor above was a charming box perched among the treetops. One white door in a white wall featured a rough stone mosaic. This was clearly the house of an artist.
There were sculpted metal frames on two windows off of one of the rooms on the patio; one held a P for Pablo, the other an M for Matilde, both set against a pattern of white iron waves. I wanted to run my fingers along them, but such intimacy was prohibited within the confines of the tour.
As I walked from one room to another, I realized Neruda had intricately decorated his home so that he was actually living inside of a visual poem: a double-faced painting of Matilde by friend Diego Rivera next to the stairs leading to their small bedroom; antique maps of the world and many of Chile in one room and a collection of East Asian statues in another; art deco furniture in the living room; a grand photo of Walt Whitman in one of the house’s two bars; several enchanting women figureheads from the prows of old boats; and a collection of books ranging from the maritime history of Chile to Allen Ginsberg’s poetry in his library, along with his Nobel Prize medal.
As I walked out of Neruda’s library toward his little writer’s cabin, the sunset turned the distant Andes into a glowing rigid curtain of breathtaking orange, blending into the white of the snow covering the sheer mountains.
I returned to the patio to soak it all in. There I met Verónica, who was working for the Pablo Neruda Foundation while doing graduate work in feminist Latin American literature at the University of Chile, Neruda’s alma mater. We started up a conversation, which turned into a friendship. Later that week I met her for lunch at one of the old bohemian spots near Neruda’s house. Afterward, she let me sit at Pablo’s desk, with his framed picture of Walt Whitman on it.
Neruda seemed to be everywhere. My life became saturated by his poetry, to a degree I’ve never experienced with any literature. With my Spanish now at a much more agile and precise level of fluency, I felt closer to his words than ever before and took up the art of translating his poetry at night in the little cabin I lived in on the ranch. Although there were many beautiful translations, and I had grown to love Neruda through the translations in that book brought from Ann Arbor, I now began to realize that many did not flow as I felt they should, and I often had interpretive differences with them.
I reached out to Verónica about this. She introduced me to two of her professors and the executive director of the foundation, and there was a consensus validating the dictum that Edmund Keeley, prominent translator of Greek poetry, put so well: “Translation is a moveable feast . . . there must always be room for retouching and sharpening that image as new taste and new perception may indicate.” These conversations, combined with a few I had with people back in the States, prompted me to create a new book of dynamic translations that would serve as a fresh voice of Neruda in English, involving an unprecedented collaboration
