Neruda, Pablo - Heights of Macchu Picchu

by peblo neruda

I

AM INCALCULABLY GRATEFUL To MR. RoBERT PRING-MILL, FELLow

of St. Catherine's College, Oxford, for his warmth, tact, and great
patience in helping me with this translation. His deep familiarity
with Neruda's work allowed me to see the structure of the poem
far more clearly than I would have done unaided, and many of
his suggestions were incorporated into the final version. Mr. J. M.
Cohen and Dr. George Steiner were also kind enough to give me
some valuable advice. At a late stage in the drafting, I studied with
profit and interest a number of available versions, including those
of Messrs. Roger Caillois and Rudolf Hagelstange....

Genres: Poetry

89 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 23, 2015

Reviews

[Elizabeth Sprague · Rating 4 out of 5]

decent translation and a very helpful introduction. going to get better about reading poetry bc i want to cultivate my tastes. i liked this, but at times a bit too abstract or atmospheric. incredibly moving relationship described between narrator and the temporal dimensions of humanity. you can hear him calling out in confused exhaustion for community

[Jennifer Kepesh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another book I read to fulfill a challenge, this one to read a collection of poetry in translation on a topic other than love. This is a longer poem rather than a collection, but still, I think, fulfills the spirit of the challenge. I am at best a dabbler in poetry, though I live with a poet and our shelves are full of poetry. I know only a little of Neruda's work, the short, beloved, oft-anthologized pieces, little teases of life's moments, little masterpieces, but little--circumscribed in length and topic, with no repetitions and no reconsiderations, just open questions or statements. But Neruda wrote much more, of course--poetry that requires steadfast attention, retracing one's steps, reading aloud and then silently and then aloud again, and for me, the dabbler, it is like taking a winter walk along a stretch of river and blundering into some brambles--the words, the meter, the vision all tangled, catching my ankles, my calves, my elbows and gloves and cap, forcing me to turn round and round and pick them apart to pick my way out. I'm caught, but not claustrophobically so--there is light and air all around, I am just steps away, I can stand still within the airy cage of words and listen to them and to what's beyond, and when I'm ready, I can snap their bonds one by one and step back to prose, where I will take the litter of the bramble with me on my walk.

I was drawn to this particular poem as a fulfillment of the challenge for many reasons: Suggested by Steve, handed to me by Steve, an old copy of his own, his name and a date in the cover, a Chicago bookstore label on the back, a few ballpoint underlinings scattered through the text. And also, our trip to Macchu Picchu my own touchstone for a poem with that title.

As I read the poem, especially as I began reading it, a memory arose of New Year's Eve in Sevilla a few years ago, when Steve and I ditched the rest of the family and wandered the streets all evening, discovering the Garden of the Poets park, and Steve translating words of love from each bronze plaque along the lamplit pathways. Neruda's poem is not a love poem, but my experience insists on the specious connection of Spanish and poetry with a nighttime ramble in the last hours of a foreign journey.

Neruda's poem, in its many parts, is mostly meditations upon mortality, the brevity of any human life against the eternity of earth as stone and nature. The poem looks at how time and how mortality humble human achievment, so that the silent stone outweighs the gardens and ornamentation, the armies and religion, of the builders and occupiers of Macchu Picchu as well as those of modern cities. Neruda's first person narrator also finds that time has flipped the value of the worker with the emperor, so that the narrator is more interested and connected to those who toiled to create what is left, while those who decreed it to be and who enjoyed its magnificence as their property are obscured, discarded--their power is long past, their names are long past, they are as anonymous as the slaves who worked for them, but it is the slaves' and artisans' and farmers' toils that leave their mark across the centuries.

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I revisited this poem to which I was first introduced in college, and it left me feeling; (1) once again, in profound admiration of Pablo Neruda's work, and (2) glad I made the effort, and (3) wanting to spend more time with the poem - it deserves the attention.

[Madison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stunning prose from Neruda. His words always have such a musicality about them and his lines are both interesting and original, he strings words you wouldn't assume to hear or read together and makes them sing back to you. Always a pleasure.