In the 1920s, my favourite poet, the Chilean Nobel Prize winner, Pablo Neruda was posted as his country's counsel in Rangoon..
There are lots of poems from this period and my favourite ones are certainly about JOSIE BLISS, the local woman who became intertwined with his life..
It had become a metaphor for me.. Josie Bliss and Pablo Neruda..
There are lots of poems from this period and my favourite ones are certainly about JOSIE BLISS, the local woman who became intertwined with his life..
It had become a metaphor for me.. Josie Bliss and Pablo Neruda..
Así como me aflige pensar en el claro día de tus piernas
recostadas como detenidas y duras aguas solares,
y la golondrina que durmiendo y volando vive en tus ojos,
y el perro de furia que asilas en el corazòn,
así también veo las muertes que están entre nosotros desde ahora,
y respiro en el aire la ceniza y lo destruido,
el largo, solitario espacio que me rodea para siempre.
It just pains me to think of your legs in the clear of day
lying down like motionless and firm solar waters,
and the swallow that lives in your eyes sleeping and flying,
and the dog of fury that you give refuge to in your heart,
I also see the deaths that are between us from now on,
and I breathe the ash in the air and what's been destroyed,
the long, lonely space that surrounds me forever.
I have a special affection for Rangoon and Burma, and Pablo is certainly part of it.
and Josie Bliss, hiding in those lines some of my own dark history of AMORES..
I was at Old Bagan and staring at the River Ayerrawaddy, while brother Eliyahu and I waited for our lunches and I remember I had the book by Pablo Neruda in my hands
I opened the pages to the poem AMORES JOSIE BLISS
and read it aloud, as if someone or no one was listening and as the poem ended thus, I could not stop a tear slowly rolling down my cheeks
Now, maybe,
she rests restlessly
in the great cemetery in Rangoon,
or maybe on the banks
of the Irrawaddy they burned her body
all afternoon, while
the river murmured
things that I might have said to her in tears.
she rests restlessly
in the great cemetery in Rangoon,
or maybe on the banks
of the Irrawaddy they burned her body
all afternoon, while
the river murmured
things that I might have said to her in tears.
The apartment where Pablo Neruda lived in Rangoon..
Yes I look occasionally for the whisper of Pablo in places where he had lived ..
La Chascona, and the house in Valparaiso and of course Isla Negra
in Rangoon
in Wellawatta I stared often at the water near the house where he used to live
to the Josie Bliss' of this world
How poor we would be, without your presences in our lives..
