As most of you know, Neruda grew up in--
OK, closing down here--
grew up in the sticks, and came to the city at the age of 17,
to cut his teeth with the big poets.
And when he got to Santiago, there were riots going on.
There were marches against the [? nitre ?] barons, who
had the police on horseback riding right
through the masses of marchers and beating people.
It was very violent time.
And that really marked his trajectory as a poet.
That was what he first encountered,
coming to be a big poet in the big city.
So this is a poem that he writes, later,
remembering that.
"I rolled beneath hooves.
The horses passed over me like cyclones.
The moment clutched its flags.
And riding the student fervor, it blew into Chile.
Sand and blood from nitre quarries,
coal from backbreaking mines, copper extracted
into the snow with our blood.
And so the map was changing.
The pastoral nation bristled into a forest
of fists and horses.
And before I turned 20, I received,
amid the blows of police cudgels,
the throbbing of a vast subterranean heart.
And in safeguarding others, I understood
their lives were my own.
And I came by friends who will defend me to the last,
because my poetry, barely even shucked,
received the honor of their agonies."