It is poetry constituting a milestone and possibly a summit. Everything in it, even the few (inferior) verses at the end breathe its extraordinary significance. In it, the poet crystallizes the about-face he made when he stopped talking to himself and came down (or up) to speak with us, ordinary mortals, members of the mass of people.
It is the universal hymn of the Americas that retraces everything, from the geographic giants to the shameful little playthings of Mr. Monopoly.
The first chapter is called “A Lamp on Earth” and one hears in it, among other things, his greeting to the immense Amazon:
Amazon
Capital of the water’s syllables
patriarchal father...
A fitting metaphor unites with the precise tones of Neruda’s portrait, giving us the atmosphere, revealing to us its impact on him, so that he no longer sings as a subtle wanderer but as a man. It is this first chapter of his description, which we could call pre-Columbian, that closes with “Men,” our distant ancestors.
The mineral race was
like a cup of clay, man
made of stone and atmosphere,
clean as earthen jugs, sonorous.
The poet then finds the synthesis of what this Latin America of ours was, its greatest symbol, and he sings then to the “Heights of Machu-Picchu.” Machu-Picchu is the work of indigenous engineering that speaks most to us, with its elegant simplicity, its graying sadness, the marvelous landscape that surrounds it and the Urubamba River howling below. His synthesis of Machu-Picchu is achieved in three lines that are descriptions almost in the class of Goethe:
Mother of stone, seaspray of the condors.
Towering reef of the human dawn.
Spade lost in the primal sand.
He is not content merely with defining it and narrating its history so, in an episode of poetic madness, he pulls out of the hat all his dazzling and sometimes hermetic metaphors for the symbol-city, occasionally calling to it for help:
Give me silence, water, hope.
Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes.
What happened? We all know the sequence of the story. “The conquistadors” appear on the horizon:
The butchers razed the islands.
Guanahaní was first
in this story of martyrdom.
Then come Cortés, Alvarado, Balboa, Ximénez de Queseda, Pizarro and Valdivia. All of them are pitilessly savaged by his song, which explodes like pistol fire. The only one for whom the poet has any kindly words is Ercilla, singer of the epic “Araucana”:
Worthy man, sonorous Ercilla, I hear the pulsing
water of your first dawn, a frenzy of birds
and a thunderclap in the foliage.
Leave, oh, leave your blond
eagle’s imprint, crush
your cheek against the wild corn,
everything will be devoured in the dust.
Yet the conquest will continue and will mark its own stamp on the Americas, so that Neruda says in “Despite the Fury”:
But through fire and horseshoe,
as from a fountain illuminated
by the somber blood,
with the metal engulfed by the tempest,
a light was cast over the earth:
number, name, line and structure.
[...] So with the cruel
titan of stone,
the death-dealing falcon,
not only blood but wheat arrived.
The light came despite the daggers.
But the long night of Spain comes to an end and the night of the monopolies looms. All the greats of the Americas have their place in this hymn, from the early liberators to the new, the priests who struggle side-by-side with the people. Now the sound of gunshot disappears and a great song immerses the reader in its joy and hope. In particular it dreams of the epic of the land, of Lautaro and his guerrilla fighters and Caupolicán, who was impaled. “Lautaro Against the Centaur (1554)” gives a clear idea:
Fatigue and death led
Valdivia’s troops through the foliage.
Lautaro’s spears drew near.
Amid corpses and leaves Pedro de Valdivia
advanced, as in a tunnel.
Lautaro came in the dark.
He thought about stony Extremadura,
about golden olive oil in the kitchen,
the jasmine left beyond the seas.
He recognized Lautaro’s war cry.
[...] Valdivia saw the light coming, the dawn,
perhaps life, the sea.
It was Lautaro.
The mysterious meeting of Guayaquil had to be included in the hymn, and in the lines of their political discussion, the spirits of the two great generals are palpitating. But the story was not all the heroic and honorable struggle of these two generals. There were also betrayers, executioners, jailers and murderers. “The Sand Betrayed” opens with “The Hangmen.”
Saurian, scaly America coiled
around vegetable growth, around the flagpole
erected in the swamp:
you nursed terrible children
with poisonous serpent’s milk,
torrid cradles incubated
and covered a bloodthirsty
progeny with yellow clay.
The cat and the scorpion fornicated
in the savage land.
And the Rosas, the Francias, the García Morenos, etc., appear and parade by, and not just names but institutions, castes and groups. Neruda asks his colleagues in “Celestial Poets”:
What did you do, Gidists,
intellectualists, Rilkists,
mistificators, false existentialist
sorcerers, surrealist
butterflies burning
in a tomb, Europeanized
cadavers of fashion,
pale worms of capitalist
cheese…
And when he comes to the North American companies, his powerful voice exudes sympathy for the victims and disgust and loathing for the octopuses and for all those who fragment and gobble up Our America.
When the trumpet blared everything
on earth was prepared
and Jehovah distributed the world
to Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors and other entities:
United Fruit Inc.
reserved for itself the juiciest,
the central seaboard of my land,
America’s sweet waist.
To González Videla, the [Chilean] president who sent him into exile, Neruda shouts:
Wretched clown, miserable
mixture of monkey and rat, whose tail
is combed with gold pomade on Wall Street.
But neither has everything died, and his cry bursts forth from hope.
America, I do not invoke your name in vain.
He concentrates on his own country with the “Canto General of Chile” in which, after describing it and singing to it, he offers his “Winter Ode to the Mapocho River”:
O, yes, imprecise snow,
O, yes, trembling in full snowy blossom,
boreal eyelid, little frozen ray,
who, who called you to the ashen valley,
who, who dragged you from the eagle’s beak
down to where your pure waters touch
my country’s terrible tatters?
Then comes the land in “The Earth’s Name is Juan,” and through the awkward singing of each worker, the song of Margarita Naranjo is heard, heartbreaking in its naked pathos.
I am dead. I am from María Elena.
The poet unleashes all his rage against the main guilty parties, against the monopolies, and he addresses his poem “Let the Woodcutter Awaken” to a Yankee soldier:
West of the Colorado River
there’s a place that I love.
He warns:
The world will be implacable for you.
Not only will the islands be deserted but the air
that now knows the words that it loves.
br /> […] And from the laboratory covered with vines
the unleashed atom will also set forth
toward your proud cities.
González Videla begins the persecution of Neruda, making of him “The Fugitive,” and here his hymn loses a little, for it is as if improvisation has found its pastures in his poetry so that the Canto’s lofty metaphor loses height and abandons its delicate rhythms. Then comes “The Flowers of Punitaqui,” after which he greets his Spanish-speaking colleagues. In “New Year’s Chorale for the Country in Darkness” he takes on the Chilean government, and then recalls “The Great Ocean with his Rapa Nui”:
Tepito-te-henua, navel of the great sea,
workshop of the sea, extinguished diadem.
The book closes with “I Am,” in which he leaves his last testament, after looking once again at himself:
I leave my house by the seaside
in Isla Negra to the labor unions
of copper, coal and nitrate.
Let them rest here, those abused children
of my country, plundered by axes and traitors,
dispersed in its sacred blood,
consumed in volcanic tatters.
[...] I leave my old books, collected
in corners of the globe, venerated
in their majestic typography,
to the new poets of America,
to those who’ll
one day weave tomorrow’s meanings
on the raucous interrupted loom.
Finally, he shouts:
This book ends here.
[...] And this word will rise again,
perhaps in another time free of sorrow,
without the impure fibers that adhered,
black vegetation in my song,
and my burning and starry heart
will flame again in the heights.
And so this book ends, here I leave
my Canto general written
on the run, singing beneath
the clandestine wings of my country.
Today, February 5, in this year
of 1949, in Chile, in “Godemar
de Chena,” a few months before
I turned forty-five.
With this conclusion from François Villon, he ends the greatest volume in Latin American poetry. It is the epic of our time, brushing with its curious wings all that is good and evil in the great land of our birth. There is room for nothing but struggle. As with Arauncana, his brilliant forebear, it is a continuous fight, and its caress is the clumsy caress of the soldier, which is no less loving for being awkward, charged as it is with the power of the earth.
1. Pablo Neruda (1904-73) was a Chilean poet and among the most outstanding communist intellectuals of his time. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971 and his epic poem Canto General is considered one of the greatest works of Latin American literature.
Guatemala: la democracia y el imperio
[Guatemala: Democracy and Empire]
by Juan José Arévalo1
Twenty years have passed since his last book, La pedagogía de la personalidad [Pedagogy of the Personality], La Plata: 1937.
Arévalo was president of this small country for six years and, with its backing, stood firm against the arrogant and voracious US monopolies that constantly launched themselves on Guatemala’s wealth. After his six years as president, he turned it over to Árbenz; halfway through Árbenz’s term, Guatemala was openly attacked. Arévalo recalls memories of his time in the presidency and the offers the United States made to buy him, to get him to accept its rules of the game.
He analyzes the complex panorama of world politics and points with serious irony to the stupidities of US propaganda concerning the “Guatemalan threat.” He analyzes the actions that the Árbenz administration took concerning UFCO [United Fruit Company], IRCA [International Railways] and [Electric] Bond and Share and comes to the conclusion that those actions were indirectly responsible for the plundering of Guatemala.
Naturally, no thinking person could believe otherwise, for it was extremely clear, but it takes courage to speak out and say so at this special moment in Latin America’s history.
This is not a book that will survive its period; it will die with it because its 100 impassioned pages contain no lasting value. But it is interesting to note the difference 20 years has made between the pedantic work of a young doctor of philosophy and the virile address of a patriot who was the president of his homeland and who, as such, should always do his utmost to protect his country against efforts to belittle it.
1. Juan José Arévalo Bermejo (1904–90) was president of Guatemala (1945-51), who instituted a number of reforms in education, land reform and labor laws.
El Hechicero [The Witch Doctor]
by Carlos Solórzano1
A small drama well done. Of philosophical depth, though not very original. When all is said and done, the story of an alchemist enamored by an idea is as old as alchemy itself. The important thing is that the author found a social topic and echoes the cries of the poor.
The topic and its development are classical: Shakespeare (Hamlet and Macbeth) covered them to a great extent, and O’Neill also contributed to the work.
The witch doctor is killed by his brother, who is egged on by his (the brother’s) wife. The couple gains nothing, because the witch doctor had nothing more than illusions—not a formula for making gold. The witch doctor’s daughter takes revenge in a way whose psychological complexity is reminiscent of the US playwright.
All of this takes place against the backdrop of a subjugated nation of the hungry, who seek a savior wherever he may be.
1. Carlos Solórzano Fernández (1919–2011) was born in Guatemala, but became one of Mexico’s most important playwrights. El Hechicero was first published in 1954.
Journalism (1953–54)
This article was published as “Un vistazo a las márgenes del gigante de los ríos” while Che Guevara was in Panama in October-November 1953. Published in the Panamá-América Dominical supplement, November 22, 1953, it describes some of his experiences in Peru, including his time at the San Pablo leper colony deep in the Amazon, during his first trip through Latin America in 1952.
A View from the Banks of the Giant of Rivers
The Amazon, with its cortege of tributaries, forms an enormous brown continent in the middle of the Americas. During the long rainy months, all of the water courses increase in volume in such a way that the river invades the jungle, turning it into the home of creatures of the water and the air. Beasts of the earth seek refuge on the spots of land that emerge from the water on the brown savannah. Alligators and piranhas (or caneros) are the new, dangerous guests of the Tronda, replacing the ocelots, jaguars and peccaries in the task of preventing human beings from setting up camp in the jungle.
Ever since that time long ago when the fearful and famished hosts of Orellana looked upon this muddy sea and in their makeshift boats followed it to the sea, millions of conjectures have been made about the exact birthplace of the giant. For a long time, the Marañón was considered the true source of the river, but modern research has erred toward the other powerful tributary, the Ucayali. By patiently tracing its banks and dividing it up into ever smaller affluents, the researchers came to a tiny lake high in the Andes that feeds the Apurimac, at first a tinkling stream and then a powerful voice of the mountain, thus justifying its Quechua name apurimac, which means the “great roarer.” This is the birthplace of the Amazon.
But who remembers the pure mountain streams here, where the river has become so colossal and its vast silence increases the mystery of the jungle night? We are in San Pablo, a colony of patients suffering from Hansen’s disease [leprosy] that the Peruvian government maintains at the margins of its territory and which we are using as a base of operations to enter the heart of the forest.
In every image of the jungle, whether Hudson’s polychrome paradises or José E. Rivera’s somber tones, the smallest and most terrib
le of enemies, the mosquito, never features. In the evening, a shifting cloud floats over the water of the rivers and launches itself at whatever living thing happens to be passing. It’s far more dangerous to enter the jungle without a mosquito net than without a weapon. The fierce carnivores won’t readily attack a human being; not all of the swamps one must wade through are inhabited by alligators or piranhas; nor do the snakes fling themselves on travelers to inject them with their venom or strangle them in a mortal embrace. But the mosquitoes will most certainly attack. They will bite you inexorably all over your body and, in exchange for your blood, they leave troublesome welts and maybe yellow fever or, more frequently, the malaria parasite.
You have to look down at a micro level to see the enemy. Another powerful and invisible one is the anchylostoma, a parasite whose larvae bore their way through the skin of your bare feet and then travel throughout your body to settle in your digestive tract, sucking your blood and causing the very serious anemia from which nearly all the inhabitants of this region suffer to a greater or lesser extent.
We walk through the jungle, following the meandering of an Indian path, heading for the huts of the Yaguas, the indigenous people of the region. The forest is huge and terrifying; its sounds and silences, its furrows of dark water and the clear drops that drip from the leaves—all its so well-orchestrated contradictions—eventually reduce anyone walking to an infinitesimal speck with no thought of their own. To escape from its powerful influence, you have to fix your gaze on the broad, sweaty neck of your guide or on the footprints on the floor of the forest that indicate the presence of humans and recall the strength of the community. When all our clothes were stuck to our bodies and several streams had poured from our foreheads, we reached the settlement. A small number of huts built on posts in a clearing in the jungle and a thicket of yucca are its wealth—an ephemeral wealth that must be abandoned when the rain swells the veins of the jungle and the water pushes people toward higher ground. The harvest of yucca and palm nuts, the basis of the Indian diet, will enable them to survive.