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Contents : Pablo Neruda HEIGHTS OF MACCHU PICCHU translated by John Felstiner First published in Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu John Felstiner Stanford CA: Stanford University Press 1980. I From the air to the air like an empty net I went on through streets and thin air arriving and leaving behind at autumn's advent the coin handed out in the leaves and between spring and ripe grain the fullness that love as in a glove's fall gives over to us like a long-drawn moon. (Days of live brilliance in the storm of bodies: steels transmuted into silent acid: nights raveled out to the final flour: battered stamens of the nuptial land.) Someone expecting me among violins met with a world like a buried tower sinking its spiral deeper than all the leaves the color of rough sulfur: and deeper yet in geologic gold like a sword sheathed in meteors I plunged my turbulent and gentle hand into the genital quick of the earth. 78 Janus Head I bent my head into the deepest waves dropped down through sulfurous calm and went back as if blind to the jasmine of the exhausted human spring. Pablo Neruda 79 II While flower to flower gives up the high seed and rock keeps its flower sown in a beaten coat of diamond and sand man crumples the peal of light he picks in the deep-set springs of the sea and drills the pulsing metal in his hands. And soon among clothes and smoke on the broken table like a shuffled pack there sits the soul: quartz and sleeplessness tears in the ocean like pools of cold: yet still man kills and tortures it with paper and with hate stuffs it each day under rugs rends it on the hostile trappings of the wire. No: in corridors air sea or roads who (like crimson poppy) keeps no dagger to guard his blood Anger has drained the tradesman's dreary trafficking in lives while in the height of the plum tree the dew leaves its clear mark a thousand years on the same waiting branch oh heart oh face ground down among deep pits in autumn. How many times in the city's winter streets or in a bus or a boat at dusk or in the densest solitude that of night festivity under the sound of shadows and bells in the very cave of human pleasure have I wanted to stop and seek the timeless fathomless vein I touched in a stone once or in the lightning a kiss released. (Whatever in grain like a yellow history of small swelling breasts keeps repeating its number ceaselessly tender in the germinal shells and identical always what strips to ivory and what is clear native land welling up a bell 80 Janus Head from remotest snows to the blood-sown waves.) I could grasp only a clump of faces or masks thrown down like rings of hollow gold like scattered clothes daughters of a rabid autumn that shook the fearful races' cheerless tree. I had no place to rest my hand none running like linked springwater or firm as a chunk of anthracite or crystal to give back the warmth or cold of my outstretched hand. What was man Where in his simple talk amid shops and whistles in which of his metallic motions lived the indestructible the imperishable--life Pablo Neruda 81 III Lives like maize were threshed in the bottomless granary of wasted deeds of shabby incidents from one to sevenfold even to eight and not one death but many deaths came each man's way: each day a petty death dust worm a lamp snuffed out in suburban mud a petty fat-winged death entered each one like a short spear and men were beset by bread or by the knife: the drover the son of seaports the dark captain of the plow or those who gnaw at the cluttered streets: all of them weakened waiting their death their brief death daily and their dismal weariness each day was like a black cup they drank down trembling. IV The mightiest death invited me many times: like invisible salt in the waves it was and what its invisible savor disseminated was half like sinking and half like height or huge structures of wind and glacier. I came to the iron edge the narrows of the air the shroud of fields and stone to the stellar emptiness of the final steps and the dizzying spiral highway: yet broad sea oh death! not wave by wave you come but like a gallop of nighttime clarity or the absolute numbers of night. You never came poking in pockets nor could you visit except in red robes in an auroral carpet enclosing silence in lofty and buried legacies of tears.

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