The life of a writer is first of all a daily routine shared with everyone. Beyond that, for me, it's nothing more than reading, traveling, appreciating—art and wine, writing. Occasional speeches, quoting the Buddhist scriptures, are "speaking to others", one's own position, one's own understanding, and also communicating with people in this way, such as cutting like a discussion, like a grind. In the final analysis, it is to improve yourself and enrich yourself. I want to make this little book different from the previous books, that is, to use these words to show all aspects of a writer's life related to writing.
There is poetry and wine, there is love - to words, to natural things, to the world, to people, can be both, living in a certain unit in the forest of urban buildings and a certain floor of a room, you can also do the end of the world.
In the text, there is really a slightly deeper and broader life.
Xi Chun sighed because of the shortness of the light, and Fang wrote down the flow of the year with words.
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<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="6" > in Chile, with a poem as a travel guide</h1>
(Excerpt, with abridgement)
On the morning of June 12, 2017, Chengdu flew to San Francisco.
As the plane climbed, the morning sun was breaking through the clouds. When I opened Pablo Neruda's Poetry Collection, translated by Wang Yangle and published by the Shanghai Literary and Art Publishing House, my mind seemed to have flown to the Andes, and I even smelled something on the layers of stones in the Inca ruins. It should be the smell of moss on the rocks after a rain, the smell of the forest...
The Poetry Collection is not all of Neruda's poems, but only the name of one of his poems. This collection of poems was collected in 1949, the year the poet was in exile.
He concludes the book by writing:
This book ends here, and here /I leave my Poetry Collection, which was written in /persecution and sung under the protection of the wings of my homeland/underground. / Today is February 5, 1949, / In Chile, in Goduma de China, / In my age will be forty-five / A few months before. ("I Am")
A book that should be read from the beginning. But I often read this book in my twenties. Knowing that there was such a sentence at the end, I opened the book and couldn't help but turn to the end to look at it first. This is also the most plain and simple sentence in this collection of more than seven hundred pages of poetry. This generation of Latin American writers, for the most part, novelists are noisy, not afraid of complexity and layout, such as Asturias and Márquez. Not to mention that Neruda was a poet. His collection of poems is about important historical facts and real geography and people in Latin America, but it does not make rhetoric constrained. Instead of becoming depressed and pessimistic in the process of fleeing because of persecution, he sang freely and eloquently:
I am a fugitive hunted by the police. / In the moment of clarity, under the lonely stars, / I walk through the urban forest, / Village, port; / From the door of one man's house to the door of another, / From one man's hand to another's hand. / The night is so solemn, but the people / have placed their friendly signals. (The Fugitive)
Then you wake up naked, / Painted by the river; / Your damp head stretched out to the heights , / Sprinkle new dew all over the world. ("The Lamp on the Earth")
I re-entered the world of Neruda on this deliberately made night.
I used to go out with this book on my back in my twenties. Especially carrying it to nature. When riding a horse, on the back. On the back when hiking. It's also always around when bumpy on those rough mountain roads. The book is a little old, and some of the page numbers still have some special traces left by the time: a dull grass sap, a flower with a more faint imprint. At that time, I sandwiched the flowers in the middle of his moving poems about love. At that time, Whitman and Neruda were my textbooks on nature and human society. I like that style: broad, stretched, majestic, and never overwhelmed by sad facts. It was not a simple and vocal optimism, but a noble belief in humanity and history.
The Poetry Collection consists of fifteen long poems. The first song is "Lights on the Earth". Written about Latin America before colonists discovered and named it. At that time, Neruda's saying was: "Before the arrival of dresses and wigs..." In the world at that time, Neruda said: "My name is not called the land of America." ”
Everything started to get a little trance-like. I read poems about rivers that crisscross Latin America, and it dawns on me that there are rivers roaring in the shadows of the mountains, not airplane engines.
He wrote about the starlight hanging low in the wilderness of the southern hemisphere, and I felt as if I were lying under those stars, cold and cold like a piece of dew and like a piece of frost.
Wake up and press the open poems pressed against your chest.
I lifted up the book again and read some sentences, about rocks, about flowers, about all that a continent had to do, and I fell asleep again. Sleeping in the context of poetry...
Breakfast, cold milk soaked cereal.
The plane descended and plunged into the sea of clouds. After a jolt, we reached under the clouds. Now, above is the cloud and below is the sea.
I want to count the number of times I've landed at this airport. When I counted to the sixth time, the cold wheel of light that I thought was the moon suddenly emitted a dazzling and dazzling light, making the sea glow golden and setting crimson edges on the clouds. It turned out that it was the sun. Surprisingly, sometimes, at least from high in the sky, the sun is not so brilliant at all times. It was five hours after it took off again. The destination is Houston. There, it's only a few more hours of stopover for Santiago, Chile' capital, which is the real start of the trip. Under the wings is the land of the United States. Looking down through the window, there is desert, and then the desert is gradually covered with green, and the light of rivers and lakes is flashing in between. Neruda wrote about the United States in his famous poem to Lincoln, "The Logger Awakens":
In the heavy breath of the steel of your trees, / I walk, stepping on Mother Earth, / Blue leaves, stones of waterfalls, / Hurricanes that tremble like music, / Rivers of prayer like monasteries.
At that time, as a left-wing intellectual, he had more hopes for the Soviet Union. But he loved Lincoln. Ideology made his portrayal of both the Soviet Union and the United States biased. Far less full of real feelings and emotions than chile and Latin America he portrays. This is also where artists and poets see it as a lesson today. They say that Neruda writes political poetry, so we have to avoid politics. They also say that writers should avoid ideology. What is their purpose in avoiding politics? Hope is eternal. The truth is that no writer can really avoid politics, no poet can really not have an ideology. Even the stones will have a choice. If you want to grow moss, you will tend to wind with moisture. If you want to grow a shiny forehead, you tend to be bright with sunlight. Many times, pure art is actually a crown excuse for cynicism, and sometimes it is a beautiful excuse for not being able to grasp complex social phenomena.
Boarding again, the destination is really Chile. It was really night. The plane came to sea. Outside the cabin, the last sunset is fading, and pre-dinner champagne is being served in the cabin.
When I woke up in the morning, there was a purple-red glow outside the porthole. Kasumi leans against a jagged ridge. It was still dark under the ridge. It was five o'clock in the morning. I know, that must be the Andes. Looking at the light, some writing about this mountain began to emerge in my mind. Saint-Exupéry's Night Voyage. There is also Zweig's "When the Stars Of Mankind Shine", one of which is about a Spanish colonist who set out from the Atlantic Ocean and crossed this mountain range to discover the Pacific Ocean. This man was named Balboa, and in order to discover the ocean on the other side of the continent, and in order to find the legendary Golden Land, he led a huge expedition (190 Spaniards and more than 1,000 Indians) across the American continent in 1513, to the west coast of the continent, and discovered the Pacific Ocean. Neruda writes of him in the third long poem of the Collected Poems, The Conqueror:
Balboa, you have brought / death and claws to / the corners of the sweet central earth; / Among all the hounds, / Your hounds are your soul. / Leonsico with a bloody mouth, / Captured the absconding slave, / Pulled the Spanish canine teeth / Bit into the throat that was still moaning. / Under the paws of the dog, / Tearing the flesh and blood of the victims, / And the gem fell into the pocket.
To this man, this conqueror, Neruda was unsure, ruthlessly revealing his crimes of plundering and slaughtering Indians. Plunder and massacre are the deep original sins of colonialism. Planes descended, and those black ridgelines turned into snow-covered mountains.
At such an altitude, you can't see the eagle, but the snow does spread endlessly under the wings. The aircraft flew from the north to the south. It's the opposite of the Northern Hemisphere. In Latin American literature, the South means the edge and the far side. I closed my eyes and imagined the moment I stepped out of the cabin door, what the strong sunlight and scent of south American land would come to my eyes. I always have a romantic and enthusiastic imagination of this continent. Although I have been to three countries on this continent before, I am still in that state of imagination at this time.
The cabin door opened. The earth did not swoop down like a great wave. The bridge slowly extends towards the cabin doors. There was no sunlight, but an icy mist was spreading. It's winter in the southern hemisphere.
Inspection of transit documents...
Enter the city of Santiago. On both sides of the highway, on one side are wilderness, on the other side are snow-covered Andean mountains, which is known from the map. The fog is foggy, and the mountains and fields are not visible. Everywhere you look, there are bleak scenery of the coastal plains in winter. Sun Xintang gave a preliminary introduction to Chile. In South America, Chile is the most economically developed country, with a per capita GDP of more than seventeen thousand US dollars. Earlier I said that bleakness refers to the weather in the cold fog.
Everything that passes by the side of the road, the trees, the country houses, the streets in the city, and the shaking faces outside the car windows, all have a warm and solemn meaning. More importantly, Sun said, the country has gone through a long and bloody struggle against dictatorship and is now the most democratized country in South America and the country with the highest degree of integrity. I think this is also the ideal of the Nerudas. For this purpose, the poet went into exile and sacrificed for it. The poet died of depression in 1973, months after a right-wing military coup, wondering if this was the social picture he had been expecting.
Go to the Confucius Institute. An old colonial building built at the beginning of the last century. On the first floor there is a photo exhibition about the Maritime Silk Road. Chinese ships and Chinese porcelain. Someone is setting up tables and chairs, and one of my lectures is going to be held here, and they're getting ready for it.
It was 10 a.m. on the 13th. Settle in at the hotel and walk eagerly down the street.
The tall plane trees have lost their leaves, leaving many black fruits hanging silently on the branches. On the other side of the street, the basswood hangs more fruit. This seems to be a tree from China, but paired with those old buildings, it seems to have stood here for a hundred thousand years.
It was in this city that Neruda began his poetic journey:
Later I came to the capital, confused/permeated with smoke and drizzle. /What are these streets? / 1921 clothing crowded, / between the strong smell of gas, coffee, and sidewalks. / I live in the students and can't understand / The walls around me focus on me, every evening / Look for branches in my poor poetry. / Look for lost water droplets with the moon. ("I Am")
People coming and going. The expressions are vivid and diverse. With different racial or distinct or vague marks, but not as many Indian marks as I expected. There's a reason for that, too. This was not the center of the ancient Inca Empire. The population is relatively sparse. Coupled with the fact that the local Indian tribes were very strong, not afraid of life and death, and desperately resisted the invading Spanish colonial army, after the war, the remaining population was even more sparse, and retreated to the remote areas of the country. Today, indigenous peoples make up about ten percent of the country.
This brings me to the fact that Neruda and the Latin American writers of his time, Asturias, Carpentier and Márquez, were actually descendants of the Spanish colonists, not only by blood, but also culturally. Even blood has had some infiltration of Indian blood, but it is mainly from old Europe. The main body of cultural consciousness is still the foundation of European culture, but when did they have such a change of consciousness: they believe that they have directly inherited the traditions of Indian culture and regard it as an important spiritual resource for establishing their own Latin American consciousness? Did it start in its own generation, or did it sprout from the earlier Latin American countries when they got rid of colonial rule and established independent states? In any case, finding this position, he found true poetry.
I, a descendant of the Clay Incas, / knocked on the stone and said: / Who / is expecting me? ("The Lamp on the Earth")
In the nameless depths of America, / the Arauco people in the midst of a dizzying / great water, / They are far from all the cold of this planet. ("The Lamp on the Earth")
Will Neruda have a bit of Arauco blood? Or the pedigree of another Indian ethnic group? I'm just guessing at this small point, not going to do a pedigree survey of him. I remember reading an article by the Spanish poet Jimenez, who asked Neruda, the descendant of the colonizers, when did he become a representative of the Indians? Gimenez, as a poet who had been the colonial master of South America, was skeptical of Neruda and the emergence of a latin American indigenous consciousness of the Nerudas. But I have a deep admiration for the emergence of this awareness of them. In China, a multi-ethnic country since ancient times, the basic consciousness of the intellectuals who dominate the country is still a single nation or a single culture. And Neruda and many of his contemporaries, writers and poets, sought to awaken and revive the American culture that their ancestors from Spain had to destroy hundreds of years ago. They were ashamed of their rebellion against colonial culture.
Instead of choosing to side with their ancestors, they chose to side with the culture ravaged by their ancestors. What Neruda denounces in his poem is the atrocities of their ancestors:
Cortés has no common people; he is a cold light; / He is a dead heart in the armor. / "My king, where there is fertile land, / and temples, The hands of the Indians / Decorate it with gold". ...... So he sprinted forward with his dagger... (The Conqueror)
Alvarado, with his claws and knives/ plunged into the hut, destroyed / the ancestral inheritance of the silversmith, / plundered the roses of the marriage of the tribe, attacked the clan, the property, the religion. / He is the chest where the thieves collect their stolen goods; / He is a crippled faceless falcon. (The Conqueror)
The bishop raised his hand, / in the name of his little god / Burned these books in the square, / Turned the pages of infinite time / worn pages into light smoke. (The Conqueror)
As I walked in the serene and tranquil city of Santiago, these verses echoed in my heart. These verses record and reflect on the real bloody history of this southern continent...
There are three Neruda houses in Chile. One is in the Black Island, one in Valparaiso, and one in the city of Santiago. Mr Tamim said the three houses are visited by 300,000 people a year. I helped him calculate the account, the ticket income alone, a year is more than 10 million yuan, enough to support the benign operation of the foundation. I think that's in line with Neruda's meaning. In his poem "I Am", written in 1949, he wrote two poems called "Testament", which expressed the meaning of benefiting young poets:
I take my old books,/Collected from corners of the world/Solemnly printed honorable old books/Bequeathed to the new poets of America, / They will one day / will be on the hoarse loom of the pause / Weave the meaning of tomorrow.
……
Neruda's former home is backed by the famous Mount Notre Dame.
In front of it is the city of Santiago on the mountain plain, and to the east of the city is the Andes Mountains rising from the ground. When we arrived, the sun was dispelling the thick fog. The city, the snow-capped mountains at the end of the city, are gradually appearing in front of you.
Turning a small street, passing a few giant cacti, a few trees, passing two or three walls with multicolored graffiti, the former residence arrived. As I looked through an iron door, a passing youth gestured for me to keep going. The young man, like many Chileans I met, had a big smile. It seems that everyone on this street knows what strange tourists are looking for here. A few steps further, I came across a well with plenty of water reflecting the blue sky.
A few steps ahead, there are several semicircular steps, which smell like the grandstands of the ancient Greek-style amphitheater. A few smooth and bright metal pillars erected behind the stairs immediately broke the smell again. Climb these steps and skirt the metal pillars. This time, I can be sure that Neruda's house has really arrived...
There is a landscape painting in the house. Judging from the snow-capped mountains at the eastern end of the city, it depicts the scene seen from the window of this house. At that time, there were no streets in front of the former residence, no dense buildings, but a pleasant wilderness dotted with palm trees.
Neruda's poetry is varied and swaying. Instead of fixing on one style to express different subjects (as most elaborate poets usually do), they are free to use rhetoric according to the needs of different subjects. His freewheeling, free-spirited style is also reflected in the architecture of his residence. The residence was designed by himself. There is no special ingenuity, that is, it is just a matter of giving shape to things. The house in front of you, if the location was slightly lower, could have been built in a regular manner.
But he chose the hillside at the end of the flat land. And this hill is still quite steep, it should be above thirty degrees. Enter the courtyard door from your right hand, and you have to go down a few steps first. It was a long, narrow house. Neruda loved the ocean, and the house mimicked the shape of a ship. I couldn't see the meaning of the boat from the outside, I just thought that the house was too low, and I had to bend down to enter the door. When I went in, it really felt like a ship's cabin. At least a dozen chairs are lined up on either side of the long table, indicating that the host was a hospitable person and that it was once a lively place in the city of Santiago. My translator listened to the headphones and at the same time translated the Spanish into Chinese. It is said that Neruda is sometimes bothered with socializing, and will sneak away from the small door when the guests are not paying attention...
Poets used to travel the world frequently. The hatchbacks of this ship-shaped restaurant house marine-related souvenirs that many poets brought back from around the world.
Another detached house is the bar...
The final show is to watch a video about Neruda's life. Actually, I don't need to look at these things. A poet is famous, he is speaking, he is receiving awards, he is among the readers who like him, he is enjoying the glory of success. I would rather read his poems, rather know the grinding, the pains behind his poems. That's the salt of the poet. Neruda liked to write about salt in his poems.
Salt replaces the brilliance of the lofty mountains, / turns the raindrops on the leaves, / turns into quartz clothes... ("The Lamp on the Earth")
But in this video, there's the biggest pinch of salt. That year, when I was thirteen years old, I read the story in a Chinese newspaper. President Allende on the left was surrounded in the presidential palace by right-wing soldiers who staged an armed coup. President Allende vowed to die. The news read in Chinese newspapers was that President Allende was killed in battle with a submachine gun. Since then, Allende has been a hero in my heart... On September 11, 1973, when I was thirteen years old, President Allende collapsed in the smoke. Just twelve days later, on September 23, Neruda died of illness in Santiago. A little material can be added. Neruda became a presidential candidate in 1969 and later quit in favor of Allende's campaign for president. He later served as ambassador to France in allende's government. A year after he resigned as ambassador and returned to Chile, a coup d'état took place and the poet died at the age of 69.
The narrator says that since the coup d'état in 1973, after Neruda's death, the former home has also been destroyed, and later... Later, the widow Urrudia, after the political ecology allowed, devoted the rest of her life to the restoration of the ruined building. In other words, many of the objects in the former residence are not necessarily the old objects of the year. In this way, this former house is not so much a real existence as a woman's deep memory of a person and an era. Thinking of this, I feel a little strange as I walk around this poet's house. Is it a journey through a freewheeling modernist architectural work, or is it lost in a poet's bizarre dream? But at least, the house commemorates a vigorous love affair.
It's just love, in a bubble of/emptiness, the love of the streets of death, / love, when everything is dead, / leaving us with only burning corners. ("I Am")
When I left, the setting sun was falling to the sea to the west. The blue sea sparkles behind you.
The sea of Valparaiso, / The light waves of the lonely night, / The windows of the ocean, from which / The figure of my country is protruding, / Still looking with my eyes. The sea of the south, the sea of the ocean, / the sea, the mysterious moon, / the terrible empire in the oak trees, / The chiroe guaranteed by blood, / From the Strait of Magellan to the poles, / All are the roar of salt, all are crazy moons. / And horses with stars coming out of the ice. (The Poetry of Chile)
Today I took quite a few photos on the seashore in Valparaiso. Fleshy leaves of pine leaf chrysanthemum, cactus among rocks, seagulls, sea lions, sand and waves.
These are Chile, the Chile of Neruda.
We will fly south. The south there is our north, and the clear air is full of the fragrance of grass and trees, the fragrance of snow, and the silent waves along the long coastline. The target was Puerto Montt, which was also sung by the poet:
I remembered, in Puerto Montt, or on the island, / The night back from the beach, the waiting ship, / Our feet left fire on its tracks, / A mysterious flame of a phosphorescent god. / Every foot you step on is a phosphorescent sulfur. / We write on the earth with the stars. (The Poetry of Chile)
That night, I wanted to walk on the beach, to see the phosphorescence of the sea in the poet's pen, but it was raining. It was rainy and cold verdant green to the south. I invited everyone to a whiskey in that isolated hotel on the high shore.
The cup is trembling, there is your salt, your honey, / It is the omnipresent hollow of water. (Oceans)
It kept raining.
In the morning, the rain was still falling, and the dark clouds at the junction of sea and sky were glowing with iron ash.
Holding an umbrella, descend from the hotel on the high shore to the sea.
It is like running water grinding marks on stones, / It falls on us, gently carrying us / Falling into darkness... / You are familiar with the land and the rain, as if it were my mouth, / Because we are made of mud and water. Sometimes / I think: we fall asleep below with death, / Go deeper at the feet of the statue and look at the ocean. (Oceans)
The rain is still falling. But there was a glow in the sky. Standing in the chill, I look out over the iron-blue sea. Within ten minutes, the rain had stopped. The red light in the sky expanded all the way, from the sky, from the water, all the way to the embankment in front of it, and even the wet saga boulders were glowing with a slight red light.
Go to the University of St. Thomas to give a lecture.
Still the old title, or Neruda.
This full-day tour is really the most beautiful scenery: the lake, the snowy volcano, all day round around this lake and the two active volcanoes by the lake. Until dusk, the sun settles down and sets the last rays of light on the lake and on the top of the snow-capped mountains. On this day, I finally saw the living cypress tree under the snowy mountain. At night at the hotel, I stared at the towering trees on the cover of the album for a long time.
We also went to see a mosquito waterfall.
The mosquitoes have long since disappeared, so we just stand in the sun and gaze at the waterfalls and snow-capped mountains. The waterfall is there, the snow waves churn and rumble.
It is not just the sharp air of the plants that awaits me, / Not just the thunder on the snow; / Tears and hunger as if two fevers, / Climbing the bell tower of the fatherland and roaring; / From there, in the midst of the thunderous sky, / From there, when the October blossoms, the antarctic spring / As it flows above the splendor of fine wine, / There is another lament, another lament, another lament, another lament, / until it crosses the snow, brass, the road, the boat, / through the night, through the earth, / Until my bleeding throat hears it. ("Sorrows near Orissava")
The most beautiful things always cause melancholy. Look at it for a while, and feel that I feel a little bit like it's inside, which is to see something interesting. The journey is hurried, and it is interesting enough to see such a meaning...
It is very close to Neruda's hometown in southern Chile. The scene he described his hometown was exactly the same as what I saw before my eyes:
In the foothills of the volcano, next to the perennial snow, between several large lakes, the quiet Chilean forests emit fragrance... I started from that territory, from the mud there, from the silence there, to the world to experience and praise.
Chile, goodbye.
The author is a contemporary writer and the chairman of the Sichuan Writers Association
The original article was published in the October 2021 issue of New Reading