Rise up and be born with me, brother.
From the deepest reaches of your
disseminated sorrow, give me your hand.
You will not return from the depths of rock.
You will not return from subterranean time.
It will not return, your hardened voice.
They will not return, your drilled-out eyes.
Look at me from the depths of the earth,
plowman, weaver, silent shepherd:
tender of the guardian guanacos:
mason of the impossible scaffold:
water-bearer of Andean tears:
goldsmith of crushed fingers:
farmer trembling on the seed:
potter poured out into your clay:
bring all your old buried sorrows
to the cup of this new life.
Show me your blood and your furrow,
say to me: here I was punished
because the gem didn’t shine or the earth
didn’t deliver the stone or the grain on time:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I come to speak through your dead mouth.
How did Neruda have the privilege to speak through them, to speak from them? Neruda strove to tell the history from the point of view of the people themselves, not the history told by the conquerors.
The canto ends:
Through the earth unite all
the silent and split lips
and from the depths speak to me all night long
as if we were anchored together,
tell me everything, chain by chain,
link by link and step by step,
sharpen the knives you kept,
place them in my chest and in my hand,
like a river of yellow lightning,
like a river of buried jaguars,
and let me weep, hours, days, years,
blind ages, stellar centuries.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Come to my veins and my mouth.
Speak through my words and my blood.*
He sees with their eyes; they see with his. The “poet’s calling” conveys a sense of vocation and, at the same time, a sense of activity: the poet is simultaneously called and is calling to others, and through his voice, he gives voice to others’ calls.
The Chilean Raúl Zurita, a modern master in poetry of resistance, feels this is the single greatest poem in the history of the Spanish language. For the 2014 anthology Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America, which Zurita edited (with Forrest Gander), the only selected poems by Neruda were cantos from “The Heights of Macchu Picchu.” Magdalena Edwards, interviewing Zurita and Gander for the Los Angeles Review of Books, noted there was nothing from the Residences: “How to choose in this case?”
Zurita explained that he made his selections based on “which poem makes a poet exactly who that poet is.” To choose a poem from Residence is to choose a great work, “no doubt, one of the two or three most powerful works of 20th century poetry.” But such a poem is one by an individual first named Ricardo Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, then Pablo Neruda. To choose “The Heights of Macchu Picchu,” however, “is not simply to choose the most extraordinary poem in the language, it is to choose the language; that is to say, it is to choose the speech of a continent.” It is attempting to wash away the crimes that came with the imposition of Spanish language on the continent through the poetic use of that very same language. For Zurita, then, choosing “Macchu Picchu” over any other poem by Neruda was to “wager on a new destiny: not for a single individual”—like the narrator of Residence—“but for everyone.”
Neruda’s poems for the Spanish Republic and the survival of Stalingrad were reactions to real-time events. “Macchu Picchu” reached far back in history. Yet unlike many of Neruda’s poems to come, it is not merely Communist propaganda. Neruda’s commitment to the workers who built Machu Picchu drew from a well that he had now dug and explored deeply, one of empathy and commitment that he attached to the working class on a much broader scale through a more enabled technique than he first had as a teenager with “Railroad Roundhouses at Night.”
This empathy is what allowed him to audaciously appoint himself as the workers’ spokesman, to say, “I’ve come to speak through your dead mouths,” to implore, “Come to my veins and my mouth.” But despite his political commitment and work, had he really earned this privilege? It was certainly a lofty assertion that few others would be bold enough to make. But Neruda’s persona at this point was so great that he pulled it off, even more so because he used it so skillfully as a poetic device. It situates the poem, and the poem’s speaker, so as to bring together the realities of the past and present. Regardless of his arrogance, “Macchu Picchu” succeeds and is one of the century’s richest, most dynamic poems. For while Neruda proclaims that he is the one through whom the dead slaves will speak, it is in the end not about him, as Zurita emphasizes, but rather an exploration of the past as a way to create a better destiny for everyone.
And the acceptance by the general readership of Neruda as the voice of the fallen and the downtrodden further established the persona he was creating for himself, the sense of responsibility—one that he had felt ever since he began writing as a teenager. In a 1965 interview with the English critic J. M. Cohen, Neruda said, “The problem of the future in our world and in yours is man himself. In my poem ‘The Heights of Macchu Picchu,’ I use a vision of ancient men to understand the men of today. From the Inca to the Indian, from the Aztec to the contemporary Mexican peasant, our homeland, America, has magnificent mountains, rivers, deserts, and mines rich in minerals. Yet the inhabitants of this generous land live in great poverty. What then should be the poet’s duty?”
Chapter Fifteen
Senator Neruda
You, what did
