BOOKPATHS

Chile

Isabel Allende talks about returning to Chile with Jenny Cockle.

“I returned to Chile recently to make a film for The South Bank Show. It's a different country now, especially Santiago. If you travel out of the city, you can still find some of the old-style Chilean hospitality and kindness that I remember. But Santiago has grown into a huge city of 6 million people; everybody is in such a hurry all the time, and there are terrible problems with traffic and smog. During filming, we took the funicular up the San Cristobel Hill. Fortunately, it was a beautiful sunny day and there was no smog, so we got a great view of the city. We could see the whole of Santiago.” – from “Isabel Allende Returns to Chile,” by Jenny Cockle, The Independent

Bookpath: Chile

But when I hold you I hold everything that is -- sand, time, the tree of the rain....
--from "Sonnet VII", 100 Love Sonnets, by Pablo Neruda

100 Love Sonnets: Cien Sonetos de amor, by Pablo Neruda, translated by Stephen Tapscott (Austin : University of Texas Press, 1986, Bilingual edition)

"We in the United States discovered Neruda during a period of our own turmoil in the 1960s; we seemed to need a poet who could be simultaneously affirmative, political, and emotionally generous, and we found him. In so doing, we tended to translate primarily the political Neruda.... Neruda's early 20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair and the later One Hundred Love Sonnets are on the whole his most popular works in South America; once we can realign our concept of him a little, to see him first as a lyrical love poet working from that base, we can know him more fully and consistently." -- from Stephen Tapscott's Translator's Note, 100 Love Sonnets: Cien sonetos de amor

Pablo Neruda dedicated 100 Sonnets to his "beloved wife," Mathilde Urrutia. They were together from 1955 until his death in 1973. Divided into sections -- Morning, Afternoon, Evening, Night -- the sonnets reach into all hearts as Neruda expresses the joy and pain of love through the days, months, and seasons.

The natural world moves through the poems as both imagery and landscape. Neruda calls on nature for images -- plants, stone, wood, bees, clay, water, sky. "I made these sonnets out of wood," he shares in his dedication to Matilde, "I gave them the sound of that opaque pure substance, and that is how they should reach your ears." The landscape of the sonnets belongs to Chile, the homeland of both Pablo and Matilde. "Like the man who loves you," he writes, "you come from the green provinces: / from there we brought the clay that runs in our blood." With the sea and sand of Isla Negra as backdrop, the sonnets for Matilde Urrutia flow out to all who read and connect with them.

100 Love Sonnets : Cien sonetos de amor is a fitting volume for St. Valentine's Day. The sonnets are sensuous, earthy, emotional, truthful, and so very beautiful.

Here are the bread -- the wine -- the table -- the house:
a man's needs, and a woman's, and a life's.
Peace whirled through and settled in this place:
The common fire burned, to make this light.
--from "Sonnet LIII", 100 Sonnets : Cien sonetos de amor, by Pablo Neruda

Today is today, with the weight of all past time,
with the wings of all that will be tomorrow;
today is the South of the sea, water's old age,
the composition of a new day.
-- from "Sonnet LXXVII", 100 Sonnets : Cien sonetos de amor, by Pablo Neruda

Chile

In today’s Guardian, Carlos-Reyes Manzo talks to Richard Lea "about his life in Chile, the threats facing the world today, and his faith in the power of poetry to communicate these dangers to the people.”

Chile

Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, translated by Ursula Le Guin (Albuquerque, NM : University of New Mexico Press, 2003)

"This translation was a labor of love for many years. There is no other voice in poetry like Mistral's, from the miraculous clarity of her rounds and lullabyes, to the fiery rage of her love poems, to the dark complexity and visionary power of her late work. I hope this book may begin to restore this amazing poet to the recognition she deserves. Most of all I hope it comes to the hands of readers who will love her." -- Ursula Le Guin

Ursula Le Guin offers readers a beautiful translation of Gabriela Mistral's poetry. According to the publisher, Le Guin was "strongly drawn to Mistral's work as soon as she discovered it" and "work[ed] on this translation for five years." Additional information on Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral can be found on the University of New Mexico Press website. Ursula Le Guin also shares her thoughts on Mistral, along with three poems, on her generous website.

Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), the first Nobel Prize Laureate from Latin America, is celebrated in Chile. The Gabriela Mistral website, sponsored by the University of Chile and other agencies, provides a fitting tribute to the poet. You'll find biographical information, essays about her work, poetry selections, and more. The house where Mistral was born, located in the city of Vicuña, is a national historic site, as is her tomb, "the mausoleum of Gabriela Mistral," in Monte Grande. Indeed, reading Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, translated by Ursula Le Guin, not only begins a journey into Mistral's poetry, but into her homeland as well.

"Keeping time in the dance together,
you'll be singing the song with me.
Grass in the wind, and nothing more,
grass in the wind is all we'll be."
--from "Give Me Your Hand," by Gabriela Mistral, translated by Ursula Le Guin

BOOKPATH: Chile

My Invented Country : a Memoir, by Isabel Allende

"No one who is born and lives in a natural world like ours can resist writing poetry. In Chile, you lift up a rock, and instead of a lizard out crawls a poet or a balladeer." Isabel Allende, from My Invented Country : a Memoir

Two events led to the writing of My Invented Country : a Memoir -- a comment from Isabel Allende's grandson that reminded her of time's passage and a young man's question at a reading about "the role nostalgia played in my novels." "Nostalgia...'a bittersweet longing for things, persons, or situations of the past. The condition of being homesick.'" With nostalgia as her guide, readers follow Allende into the Chile she both knows and invents. The landscape, her family, the people, history, and politics come alive, along with the meaning of exile.

Allende begins with Chile's landscape, "that remote land few people can locate on the map because it's as far as you can go without falling off the planet." It's an extravagant country, with the dry Atacama Desert to the north and the frigid land of the south. The Andes soar on the eastern border and the Pacific Ocean forms its western edge. Between mountains and coast is the fertile valle central, "a land of grapes and apples." Easter Island, annexed by Chile in 1888, "is lost in the immensity of the Pacific Ocean, 2,500 miles from continental Chile." It is a violent land of earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanoes, and floods.

Allende tells readers that in order to write about the nostalgia she feels for Chile she must write about family, "because nation and tribe are confused in my mind." And, so, as Allende describes her life and that of her family during "the years of the smoke and carnage of the Second World War," the assassination of her uncle Salvador Allende Gossens, and the rise of the dictator General Augusto Pinochet, we come to empathize with the Chilean people. And, as Allende remembers her grandfather, grandmother, mother, father, stepfather, marriage, children, and other people and moments in her life, we see into the Chilean temperament and spirit. Allende is funny, too, and gossipy, telling readers that her "worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's."

Near the beginning of My Invented Country : a Memoir, Allende urges readers to "read Neruda" if you want "to see my country with the heart." Yes, read Neruda, but also read Isabel Allende.

"Who, really, are these and the other spirits who live with me? I haven't seen them floating around the hallways of my home, wrapped in white sheets, nothing as interesting as that. They are simply memories that come to me and that from being caressed so often gradually acquire flesh. That happens with people, and also with Chile, that mythic country that from being missed so profoundly has replaced the real country. That country inside my head, as my grandchildren describe it, is a stage on which I place and remove objects, characters, and situations at my whim. Only the landscape remains true and immutable; I am not a foreigner to the majestic landscape of Chile." Isabel Allende, from My Invented Country : a Memoir