OK.
So the other--
I'll switch now to--
how's my timing?
It's-- OK, good-- to some Neruda.
So these three years ago, the--
Darío Oses, who is in charge of the Neruda estate in Chile,
started going through the boxes of Neruda's work,
that Matilde Urrutia, Neruda's last wife,
had been through dozens of times.
But had-- but what Oses started finding were things shoved
in the back of manuscripts, things hidden in the bottom
of boxes, poems that no one had ever seen before of Neruda's.
They were written in notebooks.
Some of them were typed up.
Some of them were in Neruda's own hand.
And some of them are written on musical programs, or on menus,
on ships that he was crossing the Atlantic on.
And they were published in Spanish,
and I thought this is awful.
There's going to be terrible Neruda poems that he never
wanted published, and he'd hidden away.
And now they're just going to, you know,
get whatever they can out of Neruda, poor dead guy.
And then the reviews came out, in Spanish,
and they were really good.
And then I got interested.
Like, I'm interested, now, in trying to find them.
Like, why can't I?
What does this mean?
And there was a bidding war for the poems.
And Copper Canyon, which has been dedicated to publishing
Neruda, won the bidding wars.
And then they looked for translators.
And my name was among the translators
they were interested in asking.
And oh, I see, I don't have internet here, and the poems--
[INAUDIBLE]
No, that's not going to work.
[INAUDIBLE]
Yes, please.
Just ad lib, that's great.
OK.
Well, I'll start with a Neruda poem.
So when I looked at the poems, there
were super secretive about it.
They sent me this thing--
this electronic file, that I couldn't copy a word of.
I couldn't-- I couldn't print it out.
It couldn't do anything with it except read it.
But reading it, as I started to get into it,
I got very excited.
And here's why.
Well, this one has a terrific funny story to it, so.
And they did a beautiful edition, printing the book,
so you see Neruda's handwriting, and you see his notes,
and so you see him thinking.
Because you see what he crosses out, what he changes.
And this one is terrific, because it starts with a line--
give me one second, let me see if I can do this correctly.