I Want To Turn To The South: 1941

Little known fact:
Andrew Glaze did translations from Russian and Spanish poets, even though he studied and spoke French. In April 1972, The Atlantic Monthly published his translation of Pablo Neruda’s poem “I Want to Turn to the South: 1941”. Later a mutual friend brought him a copy of the magazine’s page, on which Neruda had scribbled, “Andrew you did make a great poem of my poem. Thanking you, Pablo Neruda. In Algonquin, New York, 1972.”  I’m pretty positive that the mutual friend was the writer and anthologist Selden Rodman.  Selden featured both my father and Neruda in his 1997 book, Geniuses & Other Eccentrics:  photographing my friends.

Unfortunately, Neruda’s hand written note has faded a lot as he used a pen marker rather than an ink pen, and it hung in a frame on a wall for a long time, but it is still visible.  I once asked my father what led him to do translations and he said, “Because I felt that I could do a better job than the ones I was reading.” By which, I understood him to mean that he found the previously existing translations to be frustratingly awkward.

By Pablo Neruda, Translated by Andrew Glaze, April, 1972 The Atlantic Monthly
Later published in 1974 in Andrew Glaze’s book “A Masque Of Surgery”.
Translated version © 1974 by Andrew Glaze.

“From a sickbed in Veracruz, I remember a day
of the South in my country, a silver-plated day
like the quickest fish in the waters of heaven.
Lonchonche, Lonquimay, Carahue, whose heights
are barren, ringed around with silence and roots,
watchmen from the thrones of leather and timber.
The South is a great horse sunk like a stone
crowned with slow-moving trees and rocks,
as though lifting his green snout hanging with waterdrops.
The shade of his streaming tail is a great Archipelago
and in his intestine sprouts the miraculous coal.
Will you never more give me, darkness, never more, oh, hand,
never more foot, threshold, thigh, my struggle–
to startle the forest, the highway, the ear of wheat,
the mist, the cold, which like azure decides
which one of your ceaseless steps shall accomplish itself?
Sky summon up a day when I move star on star
trampling the light like fireworks, wasting my blood
till I come to the nest of the rains,
I ask to go
back to the river of the timber, the musky
Tolten, let me pass by the sawmills,
and enter the cantinas my feet soaked with water,
guide me past the light of the hazelnut’s electricity.
lay me out full length in the excrement of cattle
to die and revive gnawing at the wheat.
Ocean, bring me
a day of the South, a day gripped by your waves,
a day of wet trees, brought by a wind
of azure, out of the pole, to my ice-bound banner.”

—-E. Glaze