Want to hear one real quick poem by Pablo Neruda
that you probably haven't ever heard?
So a few years ago, like 2015 after Pablo Neruda's
third wife, who ran his estate, died,
the Foundation, the Neruda Foundation
went through all these boxes, hundreds and hundreds of boxes
of his materials, and they found these poems
that no one had ever seen before.
Written on, I mean, some were typed up perfectly,
some were written on musical scores,
some were written on dinner menus,
and they were published in Chile, and then in Mexico,
and I thought at first that this was a horrible idea that it
was going to be this junk that he never
wanted to have published, and they were just
trying to get the last juice out of those grapes.
But then I read the reviews of the Spanish language
translations, and they were great.
And then I was given the opportunity
to translate these 23 poems no one had seen before,
and they're really amazing.
Not all of them are really amazing,
but a good percentage of them are really amazing,
and I thought I could read you just one.
As you probably know, Pablo Neruda grew up in the sticks.
His last name was Basoalto, and he came to Santiago
as a 19-year-old wanting to cut his teeth with the poets.
To meet the city poets, and to become a poet, but when
he got there, there were these incredibly violent protests
of the workers in the mines protesting
for rights and payment.
And the mine owners had the police in their hands,
and the police were just massacring people.
So this is sort of a poem about that moment in time
and about how he came to feel his responsibility as a poet.
I won't read the Spanish, because I've
read too much already, so this is just the English.
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 niter 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
that their lives were my own, and I
came by friends who will defend me to the last,
because my poetry though barely coming into its own
received the honor of their agonies.
[CLAPPING]
Thank you.