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Pablo Neruda.
Spain in Our Hearts
(Espana en el Corazon)
New Directions, 2005. $8.00
Review by Tom Pynn
You will ask: why does your poetry
Not speak to us of sleep, of the leaves,
Of the great volcanoes of your
native land?
It is our sleepwalking
that leads to greater catastrophes that than of natural disasters. It is also our faith in life that is our
glory in death. Spain in the 1930s was
the prelude to what was to come: the slaughter of non-combatants on a scale
previously unimagined. Guernica, Almeria, for most
Americans these names have always been lost to us.
Yet, 1930s Spain is also to be understood in the rise of the Republic and the
hope it entailed for human freedom. The
tension between life and death is the Corazon of the pueblo Neruda
calls Espana.
Neruda’s
subtitle seems a little ironic. “Hymn to
the Glories of the People at War.” As soon as the Republic took power, it was
already fracturing. The
socialists fighting with the liberals and everyone fighting against the
anarchists who were already fighting with each other. How could they have hoped to prevail against
the iron-throated Franco and his allies in Fascist Italy, Germany and
America? Already as the Republic arose
to give the Spanish people hope of self-rule after centuries of monarchical
domination, Henry Ford—self-righteous purveyor of White Supremacy and vitriolic
anti-Semitism—plotted to send Franco and his legions Ford trucks through
Italy. Yet, isn’t this the stuff of
epics? Achilles fighting in Troy knowing full well that in
doing so he will die. Roland blows his horn even as he dies. Quixote and his windmills. Espana en el Corazon is all of this and more. Every bit as profound as
the insights into the nature of war and peace as Tolstoy continues to offer us.
One important sense in which Espana en el Corazon is extraordinary in that Neruda’s
voice, albeit a translated voice, interweaves the personal and the political
thereby showing us that the deepest awareness of self is not mutually exclusive
of our social and political self. Gary Snyder, Robert Bly,
Adrienne Rich, and Carolyn Forche have written not
only of political poetry’s possibility, but also of its necessity. In her introduction to Best
American Poetry, 1995, Adrienne Rich writes that in editing the
anthology she sought out poems “not drawn from the headlines but able to resist
the headlines and the shattering of morale behind them.” In “Leaping up Into Political Poetry,” Bly explains that the death knell for a political poem
occurs when the poet is pulled out of him/herself and ever deeper into events.
In the deeper recesses of self one finds the intimate connections with external
life. One cannot be forgotten for the
other. In the seamless interplay of
public and private, the poet exposes the tensions at the heart (Corazon) of the human condition. Its effect is not to demoralize, but to give
hope. Perhaps it was this that the men
and women fighting for the Republic knew as they, on the eastern front, printed
Neruda’s book.
In the volume’s preface, Neruda writes: “My book was the pride of these men who had
worked to bring out my poetry in the face of death.” Poetry is that signing voice which brings us
into intimate contact between life and death.
If political poetry is to make a difference in our lives, the poet
can neither immerse him/herself in the immediate, nor can he/she escape the
existence we do not choose. In no part
of this poem do we ever get the sense that Neruda is
standing outside the course of events.
We know he was not involved in any of the fighting, did not witness the
massacres at Guernica and Almeria,
but he was residing in Madrid while working in the Chilean embassy and did
indeed see the results of Franco’s siege.
Madrid, alone and solemn, July
surprised you with your joy
Of
humble honeycombs: bright was your street,
Bright
was your dream.
A
black vomit
Of
generals, a wave
Of
rabid cassocks
Poured
between your knees
Their
swampy waters, their rivers of spittle.
He witnesses the death of
the joy of July and the bright street metaphorizing
death in war as rape, collusion of generals and bishops-- betrayal. It is Franco who is the general
in whose hand/ jingle thirty coins the
bishop of Madrid the bishop of turbid scruff.
In Neruda’s
litany of Spanish towns, atrocities, as well as heroic exploits, especially the
arrival and departure of the International Brigades, we are never in danger of
drifting off on a cloud of romantic lyricism as we are with Beethoven’s Eroica, for instance. Instead, Neruda
calls us back through his vision of the blood-soaked Spanish soil, to the
details of a Spain before the civil war:
Spain was tense and lean, a daily
drum of opaque sound,
plainland and eagle’s nest,
silence
of scourged inclemency.
What was stands in
contrast to what is happening, not as an act of nostalgia, but to deepen the
always already conflict in ourselves and in the world, a drumbeat we cannot
clearly comprehend. Espana is as complex as any country: your bitter wine, your smooth/ wine, your violent/ and delicate vineyards.
Through understanding the self-contradictions at the core (Corazon) of his own experience he can faithfully show us the
complexity of Espana. Spain is in our hearts as much as East Timor,
El Mazote, Rwanda, Sudan, Gaza.
It is the poetic communication of the external through the enigmatic lens of
the internal that makes political poetry effective.
What would it mean to compose a “Hymn to the Glories of the People
at War?” As a song of praise to the Divine, glory becomes not simply the accolades of human
achievement, but an emphasis on praising our participation in what is beyond
the limits of mortal consciousness, an acknowledgement of what is
illuminated from within by transcendence.
Espana en el Corazon praises transcendence at the core of (Corazon) immanence.
This is an important theme in Neruda’s poetry:
mystery at the heart of life that yields an enigmatic experience of things (los enigmas). In this hymn, Neruda
praises the glories of the people (Pueblo). Pueblo conveys the sense of home: the
interpenetration of people and land, not in the fascist sense of mystifying
origins in a brutal conjoining of blood and soil, but of dwelling together in
the always already tensions at the core (Corazon) of
one’s self, the community, and the encompassing ecology. Spain in the 1930s is a place whose people
are at war with one another and the biosphere. One might say that Espana en el
Corazon is a hymn in praise of the enigma of human life even as it
degenerates into barbarism. Herein lies the difficulty of this poem.
The poem’s difficult hope
depends as much on our own private struggle into self-understanding as it does
in our public defense of justice. As human beings we carry a two-fold burden of
awakening into life the ultimate end of which is always opaque. While we live, we live in ambiguity: root and garland rise from the silence/ to await the mineral victory.
Neruda’s viewpoint is not a Greek or Roman fatalism,
the fatalism also of the black vomit
spreading across Spain and most of Europe in the first half of the twentieth
century, but a faith in life that is identical with faith in God. Espana en el Corazon stirs the hope within me for justice even as
our country’s military drops cluster bombs on old men walking with their
grandchildren in early evening. The
poem ends appropriately with an image of the flow of time in which the core of
transcendence (Corazon) is always already
sinking its raucous rays into death and with its
emergence, hope:
each instrument, each red wheel,
each mountain mango or plume of plough,
each product of the soil, each tremor of blood
wants to follow your steps, Army of the People:
your ordered light reaches poor forgotten
men, your sharp star
sinks its raucous rays into death
and establishes the new eyes of hope.