T me preguntas dnde estoy? Te contare -dando slo detalles tiles al Gobierno- que en esta costa llena de piedras salvajes se unen el mar y el campo, olas y pinos, guilas y petreles, espumas y praderas.

Has visto desde muy cerca y todo el da cmo vuelan los pj aros del mar? Parece que llevaran las cartas del mundo a sus destinos.

Pasan los alcatraces como barcos del viento, otras aves que vuelan como flechas y traen los mensajes de reyes difuntos, de los prncipes enterrados con hilos de turquesa en las costas andinas, y las gaviotas hechas de blandura redonda, que olvidan continuamente sus mensajes.

Que azul es la vida, Miguel, cuando hemos puesto en ella amor y lucha, palabras que son el pan y el vino, palabras que ellos no pueden deshonrar todava, porque nosotros salimos a la calle con escopeta y cantos.

Estn perdidos con nosotros, Miguel.

Que pueden hacer sino matarnos y aun as les resulta un mal negocio, slo pueden tratar de alquilar un piso frente a nosotros y seguirnos para aprender a rer y a llorar como nosotros.

Cuando yo escriba versos de amor, que me brotaban por todas partes, y me mora de tristeza, errante, abandonado, royendo el alfabeto, me decan: "Que grande eres, oh Teocrito!"

Yo no soy Tecrito: tome a la vida, me puse frente a ella, la bese hasta vencerla, y luego me fu por los calle jones de las minas a ver cmo vivan otros hombres.

Y cuando sal con las manos tenidas de basura y dolores, las levante mostrndolas en las cuerdas de oro, y dije: "Yo no comparto el crimen".

Tosieron, se disgustaron mucho, me quitaron el saludo, me dejaron de llamar Teocrito, y terminaron por insultarme y mandar toda la polica a encarcelarme, porque no segua preocupado exclusivamente de asuntos metafsicos.

Pero yo haba conquistado la alegra.

Desde entonces me levante leyendo las cartas que traen las aves del mar desde tan lejos, cartas que vienen mojadas, mensajes que poco a poco voy traduciendo con lent.i.tud y seguridad: soy meticuloso como un ingeniero en este extrano oficio.

Y salgo de repente a la ventana. Es un cuadrado de transparencia, es pura la distancia de hierbas y penascos, y as voy trabajando entre las cosas que amo: olas, piedras, avispas, con una embriagadora felicidad marina.

Pero a nadie le gusta que estemos alegres, a ti te asignaron un papel bonachn: "Pero no exagere, no se preocupe", y a m me quisieron clavar en un insectario, entre las lgrimas, para que estas me ahogaran y ellos pudieron decir sus discursos en mi tumba.

Yo recuerdo un da en la pampa arenosa del salitre, haba quinientos hombres en huelga. Era la tarde abrasadora de Tarapac. Y cuando los rostros haban recogido toda la arena y el desangrado sol seco del desierto, yo vi llegar a mi corazn, como una copa que odio, la vieja melancola. Aquella hora de crisis, en la desolacin de los salares, en ese minuto debil de la lucha, en que podramos haber sido vencidos, una nina pequenita y plida venida de las minas dijo con una voz valiente en que se juntaban el cristal y el acero un poema tuyo, un viejo poema tuyo que rueda entre los ojos arrugados de todos los obreros y labradores de mi patria, de America.

Y aquel trozo de canto tuyo refulgi de repente en mi boca como una flor purprea y baj hacia mi sangre, llenndola de nuevo con una alegra desbordante nacida de tu canto.

Y yo pense no slo en ti, sino en tu Venezuela amarga.

Hace anos, vi un estudiante que tena en los tobillos la senal de las cadenas que un general le haba impuesto, y me cont cmo los encadenados trabajaban en los caminos y los calabozos donde la gente se perda. Porque as ha sido nuestra America: una llanura con ros devorantes y constelaciones de mariposas (en algunos sitios, las esmeraldas son espesas como manzanas), pero siempre a lo largo de la noche y de los ros hay tobillos que sangran, antes cerca del petrleo, hoy cerca del nitrato, en Pisagua, donde un despota sucio ha enterrado la flor de mi patria para que muera, y el pueda comerciar con los huesos.

Por eso cantas, por eso, para que America deshonrada y herida haga temblar sus mariposas y recoja sus esmeraldas sin la espantosa sangre del castigo, coagulada en las manos de los verdugos y de los mercaderes.

Yo comprend que alegre estaras, cerca del Orinoco, cantando, seguramente, o bien comprando vino para tu casa, ocupando tu puesto en la lucha y en la alegra, ancho de hombros, como son los poetas de este tiempo -con trajes claros y zapatos de camino-.

Desde entonces, he ido pensando que alguna vez te escribira, y cuando Guillen lleg, todo lleno de historias tuyas que se le desprendan de todo el traje y que bajo los castanos de mi casa se derramaron, me dije: "Ahora", y tampoco comence a escribirte.

Pero hoy ha sido demasiado: pas por mi ventana no slo un ave del mar, sino millares, y recog las cartas que nadie lee y que ellas llevan por las orillas del mundo, hasta perderlas.

Y entonces, en cada una lea palabras tuyas y eran como las que yo escribo y sueno y canto, y entonces decid enviarte esta carta, que termino aqu para mirar por la ventana el mundo que nos pertenece.

LETTER TO MIGUEL OTERO SILVA, IN CARACAS.

(1948).

Nicolas Guillen brought me your letter, written invisibly, on his clothes, in his eyes.

How happy you are, Miguel, both of us are!

In a world that festering plaster almost covers there is no one left aimlessly happy but us.

I see the crow go by ; there's nothing he can do to harm me.

You watch the scorpion, and polish your guitar.

Writing poetry, we live among the wild beasts, and when we touch a man, the stuff of someone in whom we believed, and he goes to pieces like a rotten pie, you in the Venezuela you inherited gather together whatever can be salvaged, while I cup my hands around the live coal of life.

What happiness, Miguel!

Are you going to ask where I am? I'll tell you- giving only details useful to the State- that on this coast scattered with wild rocks the sea and the fields come together, the waves and the pines, petrels and eagles, meadows and foam.

Have you ever spent a whole day close to sea birds, watching how they fly? They seem to be carrying the letters of the world to their destinations.

The pelicans go by like ships of the wind, other birds go by like arrows, carrying messages from dead kings, viceroys, buried with strands of turquoise on the Andean coasts, and seagulls, so magnificently white, they are constantly forgetting what their messages are.

Life is like the sky, Miguel, when we put loving and fighting in it, words that are bread and wine, words they have not been able to degrade even now, because we walk out in the street with poems and guns.

They don't know what to do with us, Miguel.

What can they do but kill us ; and even that wouldn't be a good bargain-nothing they can do but rent a room across the street, and tail us so they can learn to laugh and cry like us.

When I was writing my love poems, which sprouted out from me on all sides, and I was dying of depression, nomadic, abandoned, gnawing on the alphabet, they said to me: "What a great man you are, Theocritus!"

I am not Theocritus: I took life, and I faced her and kissed her, and then went through the tunnels of the mines to see how other men live.

And when I came out, my hands stained with garbage and sadness, I held my hands up and showed them to the generals, and said: "I am not a part of this crime."

They started to cough, showed disgust, left off saying h.e.l.lo, gave up calling me Theocritus, and ended by insulting me and a.s.signing the entire police force to arrest me because I didn't continue to be occupied exclusively with metaphysical subjects.

But I had brought joy over to my side.

From then on I started getting up to read the letters the sea birds bring from so far away, letters that arrive moist, messages I translate phrase by phrase, slowly and confidently: I am punctilious as an engineer in this strange duty.

All at once I go to the window. It is a square of pure light, there is a clear horizon of gra.s.ses and crags, and I go on working here among the things I love: waves, rocks, wasps, with an oceanic and drunken happiness.

But no one likes our being happy, and they cast you in a genial role: "Now don't exaggerate, don't worry,"

and they wanted to lock me in a cricket cage, where there would be tears, and I would drown, and they could deliver elegies over my grave.

I remember one day in the sandy acres of the nitrate flats ; there were five hundred men on strike. It was a scorching afternoon in Tarapaca. And after the faces had absorbed all the sand and the bloodless dry sun of the desert, I saw coming into me, like a cup that I hate, my old depression. At this time of crisis, in the desolation of the salt flats, in that weak moment of the fight, when we could have been beaten, a little pale girl who had come from the mines spoke a poem of yours in a brave voice that had gla.s.s in it and steel, an old poem of yours that wanders among the wrinkled eyes of all the workers of my country, of America.

And that small piece of your poetry blazed suddenly like a purple blossom in my mouth, and went down to my blood, filling it once more with a luxuriant joy born from your poem.

I thought of you, but also of your bitter Venezuela.

Years ago I saw a student who had marks on his ankles from chains ordered on him by a general, and he told me of the chain gangs that work on the roads and the jails where people disappeared forever. Because that is what our America has been: long stretches with destructive rivers and constellations of b.u.t.terflies (in some places the emeralds are heavy as apples).

But along the whole length of the night and the rivers there are always bleeding ankles, at one time near the oil wells, now near the nitrate, in Pisagua, where a rotten leader has put the best men of my country under the earth to die, so he can sell their bones.

That is why you write your songs, so that someday the disgraced and wounded America can let its b.u.t.terflies tremble and collect its emeralds without the terrifying blood of beatings, coagulated on the hands of the executioners and the businessmen.

I guessed how full of joy you would be, by the Orinoco, singing probably, or perhaps buying wine for your house, taking your part in the fight and the exaltation, with broad shoulders, like the poets of our age- with light clothes and walking shoes.

Ever since that time, I have been thinking of writing to you, and when Guillen arrived, running over with stories of you, which were coming loose everywhere out of his clothes -they poured out under the chestnuts of my house- I said to myself: "Now!" and even then I didn't start a letter to you.

But today has been too much for me: not only one sea bird, but thousands have gone past my window, and I have picked up the letters no one reads, letters they take along to all the sh.o.r.es of the world until they lose them.

Then in each of those letters I read words of yours, and they resembled the words I write, and dream of, and put in poems, and so I decided to send this letter to you, which I end here, so I can watch through the window the world that is ours.

Translated by Robert Bly PART XIII is a New Year's greeting to Chile, for January 1, 1949, written after Neruda had succeeded in getting over the Andes, and to Europe. He talks of the many South American countries still under dictatorship, "dancing with the sharpened teeth of the night-time alligators." The United States support of these dictators he considers part of a general foreign policy, policy of an "empire," which destroys client countries. We chose "They Receive Orders Against Chile."

RECIBEN RDENES CONTRA CHILE.

Pero detrs de todos ellos hay que buscar, hay algo detrs de los traidores y las ratas que roen, hay un imperio que pone la mesa, que sirve las comidas y las balas.

Quieren hacer de ti lo que logran en Grecia.

Los senoritos griegos en el banquete, y balas al pueblo en las montanas: hay que extirpar el vuelo de la nueva Victoria de Samotracia, hay que ahorcar, matar, perder, hundir el cuchillo aesino empunado en New York, hay que romper con fuego el orgullo del hombre que asomaba por todas partes como si naciera de la tierra regada por la sangre.

Hay que armar a Chiang y al nfimo Videla, hay que darles dinero para crceles, alas para que bombardeen compatriotas, hay que darles un mendrugo, unos dlares, ellos hacen el resto, ellos mienten, corrompen, bailan sobre los muertos y sus esposas lucen los "visones" ms caros.

No importa la agona del pueblo, este martirio necesitan los amos duenos del cobre: hay hechos: los generales dejan el ejercito y sirven de asistentes al Staff en Chuquicamata, y en el salitre el general "chileno"

manda con su charrasca c.u.n.to deben pedir como alza de salario los hijos de la pampa.

As mandan de arriba, de la bolsa con dlares, as recibe la orden el enano traidor, as los generales hacen de policas, as se pudre el tronco del rbol de la patria.

THEY RECEIVE INSTRUCTIONS AGAINST CHILE.

But we have to see behind all them, there is something behind the traitors and the gnawing rats, an empire which sets the table, and serves up the nourishment and the bullets.

They want to repeat in you their great success in Greece.

Greek playboys at the banquet, and bullets for the people in the mountains: we'll have to destroy the flight of the new Victory of Samothrace, we'll have to hang, kill, lose men, sink the murderous knife held to us from New York, we'll have to use fire to break the spirit of the man who was emerging in all countries as if born from the earth that had been splashed with blood.

We have to arm Chiang and the vicious Videla, give them money for prisons, wings so they can bomb their own populations, give them a handout, a few dollars, and they do the rest, they lie, bribe, dance on the dead bodies and their first ladies wear the most expensive minks.

The suffering of the people does not matter: copper executives need this sacrifice: facts are facts: the generals retire from the army and serve as vice-presidents of the Chuquicamata Copper Firm, and in the nitrate works the "Chilean" general decides with his trailing sword how much the natives may mention when they ask for a raise in wages.

In this way they decide from above, from the roll of dollars, in this way the dwarf traitor receives his instructions, and the generals act as the police force, and the trunk of the tree of the country rots.

Translated by Robert Bly

and James Wright

LOS ENIGMAS.

Me habeis preguntado que hila el crustaceo entre sus patas de oro y os respondo: El mar lo sabe.

Me decs que espera la ascidia en su campana transparente? Que espera?

Yo os digo, espera como vosotros el tiempo.

Me preguntis a quien alcanza el abrazo del alga Macrocustis?