London 2011
Image © Julian Lass 2011
London, 1933
It so happens that I tire of being a man
It so happens that I’ll enter the tailors or the cinemas
withered, faint, impenetrable like a cygnet with feathery down
swimming in a livid sea of ash.
The smell of hairdressers makes me cry like a baby
All I want is quiet, no stones, no down-feather
I don’t want to see any shops, any gardens
no goods, no spectacles, no lifts.
Sucede que me canso de ser hombre.
Sucede que entro en las sastrerías y en los cines
marchito, impenetrable, como un cisne de fieltro
navegando en un agua de origen y ceniza.
El olor de las peluquerías me hace llorar a gritos.
Sólo quiero un descanso de piedras o de lana,
sólo quiero no ver establecimientos ni jardines,
ni mercaderías, ni anteojos, ni ascensores.
From Residencia en la Tierra 2, Libro 2, Parte II (1931-1935)
Translation © 2011 Julian Lass
Neruda wrote ‘Walking Around’ in Buenos Aires between October and December 1933, when he was 29, and his partner Maruca became pregnant with his child.
Around this time, Neruda had a dream: of being surrounded by immense quantities of water, everywhere, and his bed was surrounded by clouds of smoke. He got up and went to the kitchen. Through the kitchen’s blueish glass panes he saw a tall, dark shadow, in profile. A black silhouette, motionless. ‘I saw death,’ he later said.
Compare this poem by Tennyson:
Tithonus
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapors weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many summers dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-haired shadow roaming like a dream
The eve-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.
This from Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra (III, 2)
Her tongue will not obey her heart, nor can
Her heart inform her tongue, —the swan’s
down-feather,
That stands upon the swell at full of tide,
And neither way inclines.
From King John (V, 7)
I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan,
Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death,
And from Joyce’s Ulysses, which Neruda was reading at the time:
‘His shadow lay over the rocks as he bent, ending. Why not endless till the farthest star? Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds. Me sits there with his augur’s rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid sea, unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars. I throw this ended shadow from me, manshape ineluctable, call it back. Endless, would it be mine, form of my form? Who watches me here?’
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