Indagadlo, indagadlo a cierta hora, en cierto mar que conozco.

Sin duda me preguntareis por el marfil maldito del narwhal, para que yo os conteste de que modo el unicornio marino agoniza arponeado.

Me preguntis tal vez por las plumas alcionarias que tiemblan en los puros orgenes de la marea austral?

Y sobre la construccin cristalina del plipo habeis barajado, sin duda una pregunta ms, desgranndola ahora?

Quereis saber la electrica materia de las pas del fondo?

La armada estalact.i.ta que camina quebrndose?

El anzuelo del pez pescador, la msica extendida en la profundidad como un hilo en el agua?

Yo os quiero decir que esto lo sabe el mar, que la vida en sus arcas es ancha como la arena, innumerable y pura y entre las uvas sanguinarias el tiempo ha pulido la dureza de un petalo, la luz de la medusa y ha desgranado el ramo de sus hebras corales desde una cornucopia de ncar infinito.

Yo no soy sino la red vaca que adelanta ojos humanos, muertos en aquellas tinieblas, dedos acostumbrados al tringulo, medidas de un tmido hemisferio de naranja.

Anduve como vosotros escarbando la estrella interminable, y en mi red, en la noche, me desperte desnudo, nica presa, pez encerrado en el viento.

PART XIV, called "The Immense Ocean," is a great poem to the Pacific Ocean, its islands and creatures. Many of the poems have a richness like the Residencia poems. "Enigmas" is the seventeenth of the twenty-four poems in this section.

ENIGMAS.

You've asked me what the lobster is weaving there with his golden feet?

I reply, the ocean knows this.

You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent bell? What is it waiting for?

I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.

You ask me whom the Macrocystis alga hugs in its arms?

Study, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.

You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal, and I reply by describing how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.

You enquire about the kingfisher's feathers, which tremble in the pure springs of the southern tides?

Or you've found in the cards a new question touching on the crystal architecture of the sea anemone, and you'll deal that to me now?

You want to understand the electric nature of the ocean spines?

The armored stalact.i.te that breaks as it walks?

The hook of the angler fish, the music stretched out in the deep places like a thread in the water?

I want to tell you the ocean knows this, that life in its jewel boxes is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure, and among the blood-colored grapes time has made the petal hard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of light and untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.

I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead of human eyes, dead in those darknesses, of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes on the timid globe of an orange.

I walked around as you do, investigating the endless star, and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked, the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.

Translated by Robert Bly

COMPAEROS DE VIAJE.

(1921).

Luego llegue a la capital, vagamente impregnado de niebla y lluvia. Que calles eran esas?

Los trajes de 1921 pululaban en un olor atroz de gas, cafe y ladrillos.

Entre los estudiantes pase sin comprender, reconcentrando en m las paredes, buscando cada tarde en mi pobre poesa las ramas, las gotas y la luna que se haban perdido.

Acud al fondo de ella, sumergiendome cada tarde en sus aguas, agarrando impalpables estmulos, gaviotas de un mar abandonado, hasta cerrar los ojos y naufragar en medio de mi propia substancia.

Fueron tinieblas, fueron slo escondidas, hmedas hojas del subsuelo?

De que materia herida se desgran la muerte hasta tocar mis miembros, conducir mi sonrisa y cavar en las calles un pozo desdichado?

Sal a vivir: crec y endurecido fu por los callejones miserables, sin compasin, cantando en las fronteras del delirio. Los muros se llenaron de rostros: ojos que no miraban la luz, aguas torcidas que iluminaba un crimen, patrimonios de solitario orgullo, cavidades llenas de corazones arrasados.

Con ellos fu: slo en su coro mi voz reconoci las soledades donde naci.

Entre a ser hombre cantando entre las llamas, acogido por companeros de condicin nocturna que cantaron conmigo en los mesones, y que me dieron ms de una ternura, ms de una primavera defendida por sus hostiles manos, nico fuego, planta verdadera de los desmoronados arrabales.

PART XV, the final section, is called "I Am." It contains thirty-eight autobiographical poems, of which we have chosen the fourth, describing his school days in Santiago when he was seventeen. The first poem of the section touches on the frontier in the year he was born, and the last records the day, February 5, 1949, when Canto General was finished, "a few months before the forty-fifth year of my age."

FRIENDS ON THE ROAD.

(1921).

Then I arrived at the capital, vaguely saturated with fog and rain. What streets were those?

The garments of 1921 were breeding in an ugly smell of gas, coffee, and bricks.

I walked among the students without understanding, pulling the walls inside me, searching each day into my poor poetry for the branches, the drops of rain, and the moon, that had been lost.

I went deep into it for help, sinking each evening into its waters, grasping energies I could not touch, the seagulls of a deserted sea, until I closed my eyes and was shipwrecked in the middle of my own body.

Were these things dark shadows, were they only hidden damp leaves stirred up from the soil?

What was the wounded substance from which death was pouring out until it touched my arms and legs, controlled my smile, and dug a well of pain in the streets?

I went out into life: I grew and was hardened, I walked through the hideous back alleys without compa.s.sion, singing out on the frontiers of delirium. The walls filled with faces: eyes that did not look at light, twisted waters lit up by a crime, legacies of solitary pride, holes filled with hearts that had been condemned and torn down.

I walked with them: it was only in that chorus that my voice refound the solitudes where it was born.

I finally became a man singing among the flames, accepted by friends who find their place in the night, who sang with me in the taverns, and who gave me more than a single kindness, something they had defended with their fighting hands, which was more than a spring, a fire unknown elsewhere, the natural foliage of the places slowly falling down at the city's edge.

Translated by Robert Bly

and James Wright

from Odas Elementales 19541957

ODA A LOS CALCETINES.

Me trajo Maru Mori un par de calcetines que teji con sus manos de pastora, dos calcetines suaves como liebres.

En ellos met los pies como en dos estuches tejidos con hebras del crepsculo y pellejo de ovejas.

Violentos calcetines, mis pies fueron dos pescados de lana, dos largos tiburones de azul ultramarino atravesados por una trenza de oro, dos gigantescos mirlos, dos canones: mis pies fueron honrados de este modo por estos celestiales calcetines.

Eran tan hermosos que por primera vez mis pies me parecieron inaceptables come dos decrepitos bomberos, bomberos, indignos de aquel fuego bordado, de aquellos luminosos calcetines.

Sin embargo resist la tentacin aguda de guardarlos como los colegiales preservan las luciernagas, como los eruditos coleccionan doc.u.mentos sagrados, resist el impulso furioso de ponerlos en una jaula de oro y darles cada da alpiste y pulpa de meln rosado.

Como descubridores que en la selva entregan el rarsimo venado verde al asador y se lo comen con remordimiento, estire los pies y me enfunde los bellos calcetines y luego los zapatos.

Y es esta la moral de mi oda: dos veces es belleza la belleza y lo que es bueno es doblemente bueno cuando se trata de dos calcetines de lana en el invierno.

ODE TO MY SOCKS.

Maru Mori brought me a pair of socks which she knitted herself with her sheepherder's hands, two socks as soft as rabbits.

I slipped my feet into them as though into

two.

cases knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin.

Violent socks, my feet were two fish made of wool, two long sharks sea-blue, shot through by one golden thread, two immense blackbirds, two cannons: my feet were honored in this way by these heavenly socks.

They were so handsome for the first time my feet seemed to me unacceptable like two decrepit firemen, firemen unworthy of that woven fire, of those glowing socks.