At the 2020 Universe in Verse, celebrating fifty years of Earth Day, astronaut and poetry lover Leland Melvin is one of the few people to have viewed our planet from a cosmic perspective – space. He read the following passage from Pablo Neruda’s “Memoirs”:
“Under the volcanoes, beside the snow-capped mountains, among the huge lakes, the fragrant, the tangled Chilean forest. My feet sink down into the dead leaves, a fragile twig crackles .. a decaying tree trunk: what a treasure . .black and blue mushrooms have given it ears . . . Anyone who hasn’t been in the Chilean forest doesn’t know this planet. I have come out of that landscape, that mud, that silence, to roam, to go singing through the world.”
(Neruda,P. “Memoirs” Penguin Books, 1978)
I love this passage in which Neruda describes the decaying tree trunk as “treasure”. When I witness the natural changes of decay and re-birth in the forest I consider both the decaying forms and the new growth to be precious examples of nature’s beauty.
Pablo Neruda is considered to be the national poet of Chile, sharing the World Peace Prize in 1950 with Paul Robeson and Pablo Picasso and winning the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature in 1971. His real name was Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. His father did not approve of a son who was a poet, so he took the Czech name from a magazine. He was very politically active, serving as a consulate in many countries. In 1969 he was designated as his party’s candidate for the Chilean presidency, although he then deferred to and campaigned for Salvador Allende. His love of life, nature, poetry and his homeland shine out in his memoirs. His book “Memoirs” was translated from the Spanish by Hardie St. Martin and is now, sadly, out of print. What a tribute to Neruda from Leland Melvin who breathed new life into Neruda’s forgotten words. Reviewing the book, Dawn.com considers:
“The sights, the sounds and the feelings are described in such a haunting manner that one cannot help but see, feel or hear every single thing Neruda describes.”
Pablo Neruda Leland Melvin
In her article Popova quotes a line from Jane Hirshfield’s poem on the death of a tree:
“Today, for some, a universe will vanish.”
Echoing the sentiments of William Blake’s passionate letter many years earlier in which he states that how we see a tree is how we see the world, which reveals what we are:
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. As a man is, so he sees.”
I agree wholeheartedly with Popov as she muses:
If a single tree is home to a miniature universe of life, and if we are learning with wide-eyed wonder that a tree is not a self-contained world but a synaptic node in a complex cosmos in communication with other nodes, in relationships that weave the fabric of earthly life . . what does it reveal about our character, as a planetary people and a civilisation - to watch the world’s forests vanish in flames before our eyes?”
(From an article by Maria Popova in the journal “Brain Pickings” 2020 and a book review of Neruda’s “Memoirs” by Dawn.com 201)
Comments