The next poem of
praise I’d like to talk about is by the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who
lived from 1904 to 1973. Neruda is probably best known for his early book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair,
published in 1924 and written when Neruda was only 19. He’s also well known as
a poet of political protest. In this blog, I’m going to discuss Neruda’s odes.
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| Pablo Neruda |
The ode was
originally a song of praise in ancient Greece commissioned by a rich person.
For instance, a wealthy individual might want to celebrate the victory of a
chariot he sponsored in the Olympic games. People with means used to pay for
chariots in the Olympics just like corporations now put their logos on NASCAR racing
cars. Greek poets, notably Pindar, began writing odes to celebrate those
winners, but the ode eventually came into much wider use.
Neruda didn’t
write his odes in praise of a rich person’s chariot, though. He wrote what he
called “Elemental Odes,” odes in praise of ordinary things used and enjoyed by
ordinary people, such as “Ode to the Watermelon,” “Ode to My Socks.” I’d like
to focus on Neruda’s “Ode to Salt.” Here’s a translation that I did loosely based on
the translations of James Wright and Robert Bly, and the translation by
Margaret Sayers Peden. If you'd like to read the Spanish original, you can find it here.
Pablo
Neruda
Ode to Salt
This
salt
from
the salt shaker
I
saw it on the salt flats.
I
know you
won’t
believe
me,
but
it
sings,
that
salt sings, the hide
of
the salt flats
sings,
its
mouth choked
with
earth.
I
shivered in those lonely
expanses
when
I heard
the
voice
of
the
salt
in
the desert.
Near
Antofagasta
the
whole
pampa
of saltpeter
rumbles:
it’s
a
gruff
voice,
its
song
a
lament.
And
in its crevices
rock
salt, mountains
of
buried light,
a
transparent cathedral,
sea
crystals, forgotten
by
the waves.
And
you’re on every table
on
this earth,
salt,
your
eager
sustenance
scattering
vital
light
over
our
food.
Preserver
of
the musty
barrels
of ships,
explorer
of
the oceans,
your
substance
anticipated
by
the undiscovered, half-open
paths
in the foam.
Dust
of the sea, through you
the
acquatic night
kisses
our
tongues,
your
oceanic taste melts
into
each seasoned morsel,
so
the slightest
the
least
wave
of the salt shaker
reveals
not
just your domestic whiteness
but
the flavor at the core of the infinite.
translation © 2015 by Zack Rogow
translation © 2015 by Zack Rogow
Most of us, if
we were asked to celebrate salt, might start with something like, “It’s good on
eggs, and it’s really terrific on corn with butter.” Neruda goes way beyond
this because praise for him is not just description, but an act of imagination.
Let’s begin with
Neruda’s title, which in Spanish is “Oda a la sal.” It only takes five letters
to spell the entire title: a, d, l, o, s.
A name with only five letters—how much more elemental can you get? Neruda
starts with the basic building block of salt in line one, and then in the next
two lines begins to permutate that word into “salt shaker” and “salt flats.”
The speaker
starts in a very domestic setting, which is often where salt is used, but then
is quickly swept up to an expansive landscape of salt flats and desert. Neruda
names this unusual landscape: it’s the region of Antofagasta in his native Chile,
which is part of the Atacama Desert, often called the driest place on earth.
Charles Darwin, during the voyage of the Beagle,
wrote of it, “It was almost a pity to see the sun shining over so useless a
country.”
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| Salt crystals in the Atacama Desert, Chile |
The Atacama
Desert is a place of hallucinatory strangeness, where rain sometimes doesn’t
fall for decades at a time, and when it does, the air is so dry the water
sometimes evaporates before it touches the ground. Some of the lakes in this
area are pink or silver-gray from the minerals in them, even when gathered in a
clear bottle. In parts of the Atacama Desert the salt forms strange sculptures.
Neruda knew this area well because it was the district that he represented when
he was elected to the Chilean Senate. Neruda vividly describes campaigning in
this region in his Memoirs:
“It hasn’t
rained for half a century there, and the desert has done its work on the faces
of the miners. They are men with scorched features; their solitude and the
neglect they are consigned to has been fixed in the dark intensity of their
eyes. Going from the desert up to the mountains, entering any needy home,
getting to know the inhuman labor these people do, and feeling that the hopes
of isolated and sunken men have been entrusted to you, is not a light responsibility.”
Responsibility.
I think that is a crucial word when it comes to praise. Often a work of praise
is created out of a deep sense of responsibility.
Neruda makes the
salt flats much more than a cliché place of toil. They take on an otherworldly
beauty—”mountains/of buried light”—“a transparent cathedral.” These fantastical
images transform this desolate, impoverished area into a place of splendor.
Neruda makes this forsaken region a most holy place because of the dignity of
the human sweat that goes into it, suggesting medieval cathedrals that were an
accumulation of decades and even centuries of work.
Right at this
point in the poem where Neruda seems to be taking us farthest from everyday
reality into the realm of imaginary cathedrals, he yanks us back to the here
and now:
And
you’re on every table
on
this earth,
salt,
your
eager
sustenance
scattering
vital
light
over
our
food.
Salt is again
the familiar condiment of daily life, but it has metamorphosed during the poem’s
journey to the salt plains and saltpeter mines. He addresses the salt directly
with the familiar tu, as if it’s now
a person he knows well, and what could be more familiar than salt? The salt has
retained that remarkable light that it had in the desert—la luz vital, Neruda calls it in Spanish, so it still has an aura
to it, though it’s back to the most ordinary, domestic setting. Neruda uses a
delicious word—espolvoreando—to
describe the salt’s sprinkling, portraying the simple act of its pouring as
almost gymnastic.
The conclusion
of “Ode to Salt” reunites the planetary and the particular. The salt combines
the smallest and largest things, the driest and wettest, all in the space of a
few short lines of poetry. By the end, the salt is the flavor of a cosmic kiss
that lets us touch the core of the universe.
As in Gerard
Manley Hopkins’s psalm of praise to “Pied Beauty,” Neruda’s “Ode to Salt”
begins to take on the attributes of the thing praised. He sprinkles the words
lightly down the page as if they are grains of salt. Neruda is also careful not
to overstate, always an important consideration in poems of praise.
Praise and Lament, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 9
Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe
Other recent posts about writing topics:
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry?
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry
Beautifully explained! Almost as poetically as Neruda.
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