'Each Day a Little Death'
GOLDMAN, LLOYD
'Each Day a Little Death' THE HEIGHTS OF MACCHU PICCHU By Pablo Neruda Translated by Nathaniel Tarn Farrar, Straits and Giroux 71 pp. $4.50. Reviewed bv LLOYD GOLDMAN Contributor,...
...Here, in Tarn's English version, is the third verse-paragraph from the second section of The Heights of Macchu Picchu: How many times in wintry city streets, or in a bus, a boat at dusk, or in the denser solitude of festive nights, drenched in the sound of bells and shadows, in the very lair of human pleasure, have I wanted to pause and look for the eternal, unfathomable truth's filament...
...Then ". . . their ominous dwindling each day was like a black cup they trembled while they drained...
...It is a greatness, however, that both oppresses and stimulates the poet...
...Tarn, an Englishman, has realized how well the techniques of one American poet can fit those of another American...
...If that lost civilization was built "stone above stone on a groundwork of rags," how oppressed were its builders, its men who moved stone...
...Were they like us????modern urban and suburban man, suffering "each day a little death, a little death with fat wings" which enters "like a short blade...
...The peak of Macchu Picchu, overlooking that ancient city, symbolizes Neruda's twin quest...
...the metaphors into new images...
...Yet they are strangely appropriate, permitting Tarn to come to grips with the heady brilliance, the almost torrential flow of images that stream from Neruda's mind...
...This happens so frequently, so rapidly, so intensely, that one does not know from where to quote...
...It should not seem odd, then, that art, so swift and so compressed, should also be highly meaningful...
...the images, in turn, evolve into metaphors...
...Because he could not love "all these fake deaths within each man," because he wanted "to swim in the most ample lives," but found modern man willfully denying him, Neruda also found himself a spiritual wanderer unable to communicate...
...Incan invention and greatness are fitting concerns for Neruda's poetic art...
...As each section of the poem emerges, it seems to contract, to gather in the images, the metaphors, the plot of previous sections, only to expand again in new sections...
...Thus the stakes of the poem are high, and Neruda is inextricably involved in his journey...
...Translator Nathaniel Tarn has chosen to adapt the images of Neruda's Spanish poems to the rhetoric of Hart Crane...
...And so, shut off from modern man's "wounded inexistence," Neruda was shut into himself, ironically (as he says) "dying of my own death...
...The rhythms, the strategy of placing the diction in syntax...
...For if Neruda's images reek of local color, his rhythms are as sinuous as his syntax...
...The 12 sections of Neruda's poem do not belie expectation...
...The poem, though, is in no sense a true narrative...
...The journey to the heights of Macchu Picchu is a journey into us all...
...Wrench from these lands the stale bread of the poor, prove me the tatters on the serf, point out his window...
...the long, undulating periodic sentence, seem to come right out of The Bridge: How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him, Shedding while rings of tumult, building high Over the chained bay waters Liberty...
...It is a striking literary combination...
...If each stone floor weighed down his sleep, and if he fell beneath them, as if beneath a moon, with all that sleep...
...The plot is an oblique reflection of the images...
...Among poets in modern English, only Crane can begin to approach that earthy learn-edness...
...Tell me how he slept when alive, whether he snored, his mouth agape like a dark scar worn by fatigue into the wall...
...For truth is more important than greatness: Let me have back the slave you buried here...
...More than anything else, this triple conflict of the past, the present, and fear for the future, drives the current, the metaphors, of the poem...
...That wall, that wall...
...They represent, at once, 12 stages on a journey to a lost Inca city (the lost history of Chile, the past), and 12 stages on a journey to the inner peace (the inner self, the future) of Neruda, and through his actions, urban man...
...Were they, too, "all of them weakened waiting for their death, their brief and daily death...
...Reviewed bv LLOYD GOLDMAN Contributor, "Carleton Miscellany," "Prairie Schooner," and "Minnesota Review" The fine Chilean poet Pablo Neruda published his long poem, The Heights of Macchu Picchu, in 1948 and revised it in 1962...
...It is a journey that has found a worthy translation...
Vol. 50 • July 1967 • No. 14
