Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market and Right Comrade, It’s the Hour of the Garden By Pablo Neruda--National Poetry Month 2024

 

Pablo Neruda.

Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature.  Elected as a Communist Party Senator, he was forced into hiding and exile from 1948 to ’52.  Despite this and continuing persecution, he is considered the national poet of Chile and his works are still popular and influential.  Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez called him “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language”, and the critic Harold Bloom, an instinctive conservative and self-appointed defender of the Western literary canon, included Neruda as one of the writers central to the Western tradition.

In 1970, Neruda was nominated as a candidate for the Chilean presidency but ended up giving his support to Salvador Allende, who later won the election and was inaugurated in 1970 as Chile’s first democratically elected socialist head of state.  Allende appointed Neruda  ambassador to France, from 1970 to 1972.  In Paris, his health began to deteriorate and he was forced to retire at home.  As General Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état of 1973 unfolded, Neruda was diagnosed with prostate cancer.  Shortly afterwards his home was searched by troops and his books and papers were destroyed.  Many expected him to be arrested and perhaps murdered despite his international literary acclaim. 

Neruda's public funeral.  The blonde woman behind the casket was his wife, Matilde Urrutia Cerda.

It was originally reported that on  September 23, 1973 died of heart failure at Santiago’s Santa María Clinic.   But in  March 2015 an official Chilean Interior Ministry report prepared in for the court investigation into Neruda’s death, “he was either given an injection or something orally which caused his death six-and-a-half hours later.”  He had been preparing to fly to Mexico to establish a government in exile.

Neruda’s funeral took place with a massive police presence, and mourners took advantage of the occasion for the last great public protest against the new regime.

Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market

 

Here,  

 among the market vegetables,

 this torpedo

 from the ocean  

 depths,  

 a missile  

 that swam,

 now  

 lying in front of me

 dead.

 

Surrounded

 by the earth’s green froth  

 —these lettuces,

 bunches of carrots—

 only you  

 lived through

 the sea’s truth, survived

 the unknown,

 the unfathomable

 darkness, the depths  

 of the sea,

 the great  

 abyss,

 le grand abîme,

 only you:  

 varnished

 black-pitched  

 witness

 to that deepest night.

 

Only you:

 dark bullet

 barreled  

 from the depths,

 carrying  

 only  

 your  

 one wound,

 but resurgent,

 always renewed,

 locked into the current,

 fins fletched

 like wings

 in the torrent,

 in the coursing

 of

 the

 underwater

 dark,

 like a grieving arrow,

 sea-javelin, a nerveless  

 oiled harpoon.

 

Dead

 in front of me,

 catafalqued king

 of my own ocean;

 once  

 sappy as a sprung fir

 in the green turmoil,

 once seed

 to sea-quake,

 tidal wave, now

 simply

 dead remains;

 in the whole market

 yours  

 was the only shape left

 with purpose or direction

 in this  

 jumbled ruin

 of nature;

 you are  

 a solitary man of war

 among these frail vegetables,

 your flanks and prow

 black  

 and slippery

 as if you were still

 a well-oiled ship of the wind,

 the only

 true

 machine

 of the sea: unflawed,

 undefiled,  

 navigating now

 the waters of death.

 

—Pablo Neruda

Translated by  Robin Robertson

 

This was Neruda’s final poem composed in his Santiago home shortly after the coup d’état and days before his final hospitalization.

 

 Chile's Presidential Palace under attack with President Salvadore Allende inside during the 1973.  Allende died in the final stand.

 

Right, comrade, it’s the hour of the garden

 

Right, comrade, it’s the hour of the garden

and the hour up in arms, each day

follows from flower or blood:

our time surrenders us to an obligation

to water the jasmines

or bleed to death in a dark street:

virtue or pain blows off

into frozen realms, into hissing embers,

and there never was a choice:

heaven’s roads,

once the by-ways of saints,

are jammed now with experts.

 

Already the horses have vanished.

 

Heroes hop around like toads,

mirrors live out emptinesses

because the party is happening somewhere else,

wherever we aren’t invited

and fights frame themselves in doorjambs.

 

That’s why this is the last call,

the tenth clear

ringing of my bell:

to the garden, comrade, to the pale lily,

to the apple tree, to the intransigent carnation,

to the fragrance of lemon blossoms,

and then to the ultimatums of war.

 

Ours is a lank country

and on the naked edge of her knife

our frail flag burns.

 

—Pablo Neruda