PARTISAN REVIEW
y Ie pido excusas a todas:
dejenme solo con el mar:
yo naci para pocos peces.
I'm a workaday fisher
for living, splashed verses
that go leaping up my veins.
I could never do anything else
nor manage the chances
for sheer showing off
or for the twisty careerist,
and it's not propaganda for goodness
that I'm putting across in my song:
since
I
never knew how to do that,
and I ask everyone's pardon:
let them leave me alone by the sea:
I was born for a few fishes.
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Neither of these versions is absolutely literal, but one regrets that Mr.
Belitt left out "saltando" and failed to see that Neruda is not deprecating
"propaganda del bien" or apologizing that his verse in general is clumsy
but apologizing, clearly by the syntax, not for a general clumsiness in his
versification but for not being able to speak out directly, as a poet, on
behalf of the good as such. He doesn't say
"my
ocean" but "the sea,"
and he does not say "leave me alone" but "let them leave me alone"
(it is not a boastful poem, nor one that addresses the reader di–
rectly). In the last line a perfectly literal version, "I was born for a few
fishes," happens, by sheer luck, to have more euphony than Mr. Belitt's
"I was born for a handful of fishes." But Neruda's Spanish is
en face,
and
Mr. Belitt's versions do convey the sad, rather heavy dignity of this
poet's old age.
Robert Bly's versions, which have three translators, offer an excel–
lent selection of Neruda's poems from his extreme youth onward, and it
must be admitted that, like many poets, he was more exciting when he
was looking forward than when he is looking back, and that one misses
in
the later poems an unappeasable fierceness of melancholy. Here is a
moving passage from Bly's own version of one of the most despairing
earlier poems, "No Hay Olvida":
If you ask me where I have come from I have to start
talking with broken objects,
with kitchenware that has too much bitterness,
with animals quite often rotten
and with my heavy soul.
