~ Nationality: Chile ~
Ode for Ironing (Oda para planchar) by Pablo Neruda
This is a film called Saccharine, directed by Raivan Hall with camera work by Josh Hittleman.
The poem is not from Neruda’s Odas Elementales, but the later Plenos Poderos from 1962. Here’s the Spanish and here’s an English translation by Jodey Bateman. The film uses the translation by Alastair Reid, which carries a less literal title: “In Praise of Ironing.”
As with any popular poet, there are a ton of Neruda videos on YouTube, but most of them are, um, not so good. So it’s a real pleasure to see a professionally made film with a Neruda poem in the soundtrack.
The Sad Mother (La Madre Triste) by Gabriela Mistral
Harry Garcia goes into some detail about the filming:
This is a visual experiment based on Gabriela Mistral poem “The Sad Mother”. All shoot with a Nikon D90 on a cold late October evening.
Lens: Nikkor 50mm 1.4. All lighting controlled with manual aperture. We took advantage of a couple good tricks to “tease” the D90, flashing right at the lens on “Aperture” mode to force the camera to lower down the ISO speed in order to eliminate any grain or noise. Then we locked the exposure with this settings and controlled light exclusively with manual apertures. Another reason for Nikon to add full manual control to our beloved D90!
The audio is from Daily Poetry Reading by Karin. For those who know Spanish, here’s the original poem:
La Madre Triste
Duerme, duerme, dueño mío,
sin zozobra, sin temor,
aunque no se duerma mi alma,
aunque no descanse yo.Duerme, duerme y en la noche
seas tú menos rumor
que la hoja de la hierba,
que la seda del vellón.Duerma en ti la carne mía,
mi zozobra, mi temblor.
En ti ciérrense mis ojos:
¡duerma en ti mi corazón!
Bombing of poems, Warsaw 2009
You never know what’s going to turn up on Vimeo. The instigators behind this event were a collective of Chilean poets called Casagrande. They explain,
We chose Warsaw due to its literary tradition and importance during relevant events in the XX century. It is the land of brilliant philosophers, musicians and poets. For the latter we consider it an important moment to claim the role of written word in life and human history. This year the city commemorates the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of WWII and the 65th anniversary of Warsaw Uprising. We recognise the unquestionable and universal importance of these historical experiences, still formative of the inhabitants of Warsaw as well as for the identity of Europeans in general.
According to an article in a Chilean newspaper, the group, which consists of poets Julio Carrasco, José Joaquín Prieto and Cristóbal Bianchi, began its poem-bombing campaigns back in 2001, with an event designed to commemorate the 1973 Chilean coup. The 100,000 leaflets dropped over Warsaw included the works of 40 contemporary Polish poets and 40 contemporary Chilean poets translated into Polish. Carrasco assured the newspaper that they were not littering: based on his experience with previous poem-drops, he said that within five minutes after it was over, not a single poem would remain on the street.
There was also a public, bilingual poetry reading in Warsaw two days in advance of what I am beginning to think of as P-day.
Walking Around by Pablo Neruda
“Perhaps one of Neruda’s more disturbing poems, Walking Around, comes to life through a mosaic of classic silent horror films featuring among others the great John Barrymore,” says Four Seasons Productions. Recitation and translation by Robert Bly.
There are a number of videos for this poem on YouTube, but I find all of them flawed in some way — it’s one of my favorite poems. The approach here is at least original.
Four Seasons are, by the way, mistaken about the date: it was published in 1935 in Residencia en Tierra II, not in 1971 as they claim. The title is in English in the original.
Alabanza by Martín Espada
Arte Poética by Vicente Huidobro
Poem by Vicente Huidobro
Music by Iván Lizama, performed by Ensamble Transiente – Música Experimental Latinoamericana (see YouTube for personnel)
| Arte poética
Que el verso sea como una llave Inventa mundos nuevos y cuida tu palabra; Estamos en el ciclo de los nervios. Por qué cantáis la rosa, ¡oh Poetas! Sólo para nosotros El Poeta es un pequeño Dios. |
Let poetry become a key Invent new worlds and guard your word; We dwell in a circle of nerves. Poets! Why eulogize the rose? Everything under the sun The Poet is a little God. |
My attempt at a translation. The last line became the slogan of the literary movement Huidobro founded, Creacionismo (“Creationism”).
Standard Oil Co. by Pablo Neruda
Poem by Pablo Neruda, translated by Jack Schmitt (reading by Allen Dwight Callahan) — the text is here
Video by Four Seasons Productions
Here’s the Spanish original:
Cuando el barreno se abrió paso
hacia las simas pedregales
y hundió su intestino implacable
en las haciendas subterráneas,
y los años muertos, los ojos
de las edades, las raíces
de las plantas encarceladas
y los sistemas escamosos
se hicieron estratas del agua,
subió por los tubos el fuego
convertido en líquido frío,
en la aduana de las alturas
a la salida de su mundo
de profundidad tenebrosa,
encontró un pálido ingeniero
y un título de propietario.Aunque se enreden los caminos
del petróleo, aunque las napas
cambien su sitio silencioso
y muevan su soberanía
entre los vientres de la tierra,
cuando sacude el surtidor
su ramaje de parafina,
antes llegó la Standard Oil
con sus letrados y sus botas,
con sus cheques y sus fusiles,
con sus gobiernos y sus presos.Sus obesos emperadores
viven en New York, son suaves
y sonrientes asesinos,
que compran seda, nylon, puros,
tiranuelos y dictadores.Compran países, pueblos, mares,
policías, diputaciones,
lejanas comarcas en donde
los pobres guardan su maíz
como los avaros el oro:
la Standard Oil los despierta,
los uniforma, les designa
cuál es el hermano enemigo,
y el paraguayo hace su guerra
y el boliviano se deshace
con su ametralladora en la selva.Un presidente asesinado
por una gota de petróleo,
una hipoteca de millones
de hectáreas, un fusilamiento
rápido en una mañana
mortal de luz, petrificada,
un nuevo campo de presos
subversivos, en Patagonia,
una traición, un tiroteo
bajo la luna petrolada,
un cambio sutil de ministros
en la capital, un rumor
como una marea de aceite,
y luego el zarpazo, y verás
cómo brillan, sobre las nubes,
sobre los mares, en tu casa,
las letras de la Standard Oil
iluminando sus dominios.
La Bailarina (The Dancer) by Gabriela Mistral
http://youtu.be/Q7n3Ki73D1Q
Poem by Gabriela Mistral — full text here; excerpts used in the poem below
Animation by ultapopdsgn
La Bailarina
The Dancer
La bailarina ahor est danzando
la danza del perder cuanto tenia
The dancer now is dancing
the dance of losing it all
Se solto de su casta y de su carne
She loosed herself from caste and flesh
desnuda de todo y de si misma
stripped of everything and of herself
sigue danzando sin saberse ajena
she dances on, not knowing she is changed
unica y torbellino, vil y pura
alone, a whirlwind, foul and pure
(Ursula K. Guin, trans.)
An interesting attempt to convey the mood of a work with just a few fragments of text, given out of order, and a rapid, pop music-video-style succession of images. I like it!
Since this is Women’s History Month (in the U.S., at any rate), I thought this would be a good time to recall that Pablo Neruda was not the first Chilean poet to win the Nobel Prize. I’m not sure which are the best English translations, but the volume I own seems pretty good: Gabriela Mistral: A Reader, tr. by Maria Giachetti and ed. by Marjorie Agosin. Its only drawback is that it does not include the original Spanish. The translation used above comes from a more recent book — Selected Poems of Gabriala Mistral, tr. by Ursala K. LeGuin, which I haven’t seen.
Though never well known in North America, Mistral remains a beloved figure in Latin America. She appeals strongly to conservatives and leftists alike, who tend to project their own values onto the clear and deceptively simple surfaces of her poems, much as readers do here with Emily Dickinson. Unlike Dickinson, Mistral was very active on the world stage, and her mix of progressive activism and traditional Catholic religiosity makes her supremely dificult to pigeonhole. According to Petri Liukkonen,
In 2001 Mistral’s sexual inclinations arose fierce debate in Chile. Yuri Labarca’s film, La Pasajera, written by Francisco Casas, dealt with her relationship to Doris Dana, her American secretary. Mistral’s devoted readers considered the film outrageous and said that her true, traditional views of life and love were present in her works. However, an independent woman, Mistral has also been presented as a feminist icon. The absence of male friendship and her life as an unmarried woman has contributed to her image of a defender of all racial minorities and “the mixed-race mother of the nation”.
As for me, I am of course fondest of her nature poetry.
