I was quite satisfied with the excellent Ble Noir Bretagne crepe I had for dinner and then followed by thoughts on the outlying regions of my heart, I sat down to read an email which arrived from Tehran. It was about Hafez. There is no Persian/Iranian worth his salt who cannot talk about Hafez, a poet eternal and poet for everyday. There are excellent translations and approximations, and a person well versed in the beautiful language, Persian that gave rise to hundreds of years of Poems of love and adoration across deserts and moutains and river plains... can distinguish the one truthful to the original and the others who are just wonderful imitators. but it is better to read Hafez in a shadow than not to read him at all..
Perhaps one should learn Persian to read Hafez in the original.
I thought back to that distant day, on my way home from school in Sweden, I had bought a magazine with four poems translated by Alistair Read of a poet Pablo Neruda.. Little did I know that Pablo would be travelling in my heart for years to come and I, from another antipodean country with winds caressing its shore, coming without hindrance from cold antarctica, would read him first in english and then try to read his original words without understanding.. It remained that way until that star of the Americas, Cuba entered my life and I began to speak Spanish and began to read and understand Pablo in the original... follow his history which is the history of care and tenderness for the suffering of the Continent..
From his Noberl Prize Lecture:
And I believe that poetry is an action, ephemeral or solemn, in which there enter as equal partners solitude and solidarity, emotion and action, the nearness to oneself, the nearness to mankind and to the secret manifestations of nature. And no less strongly I think that all this is sustained - man and his shadow, man and his conduct, man and his poetry - by an ever-wider sense of community, by an effort which will for ever bring together the reality and the dreams in us because it is precisely in this way that poetry unites and mingles them. And therefore I say that I do not know, after so many years, whether the lessons I learned when I crossed a daunting river, when I danced around the skull of an ox, when I bathed my body in the cleansing water from the topmost heights - I do not know whether these lessons welled forth from me in order to be imparted to many others or whether it was all a message which was sent to me by others as a demand or an accusation. I do not know whether I experienced this or created it, I do not know whether it was truth or poetry, something passing or permanent, the poems I experienced in this hour, the experiences which I later put into verse.
I watched a few videos on youtube and was so moved to listen to Alberto Cortez singing Puedo Escribir the poem no 20 and was touched to listen a short video where Atahualpa Yupanqui paid homage to Nuestro Pablo, tu estas en tu chile, gracias por la ternura...
In every corner in the darkest of Latin America, a young man recites his poems... to me it is a check of intellectual character of any american from those climes...
Can you recite a poem by Pablo?
Thank you friends, near and far for this tenderness felt tonight
