The Heights of Macchu Picchu

Pablo Neruda, Tomás Q. Morín, trans.

The Heights of Macchu Picchu has been called Pablo Neruda’s greatest contribution to poetry—a search for the “indestructible, imperishable life” in all things. Inspired by his journey to the ancient ruins, Neruda calls on the lost Incan civilization to “rise up and be born,” and also to empower the people of his time. This new translation by Tomás Q. Morín includes an introduction by Morín and Neruda’s Spanish original.

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ISBN: 9781556594441

Format: Paperback

I (an excerpt)

Cast and cast, like an empty net through air,

I went through the streets and the atmosphere, arriving and departing,

the crowning of autumn brought the free coins

of its leaves, and between spring and its spears of wheat,

there waits, like a heavy moon inside a glove

that falls, what the greatest love grants us all.

 

(On radiant days, I live in the elements

of bodies: steel backbones are converted

to the silence of acid:

nights are ground down to their last grain:

unraveled threads of the nuptial land.)

 

Someone who waited for me among the violins

encountered a world like a buried tower

winding its spire even lower than all

the leaves the color of hoarse sulfur:

farther down, in the geologic womb,

like a sword wrapped in meteors,

I sunk my muddy and gentle hand

into the precious treasure of the earth.

 

I dipped my forehead between the deep waves,

I ran like a single drop in peaceful sulfur,

and, like a blind man, returned to the jasmine

of our depleted human spring.

About the Author

Pablo Neruda was born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto in Parral, Chile, in 1904. He served as consul in Burma (Myanmar) and held diplomatic posts in various East Asian and European countries. In 1945, a few years after he joined the Communist Party, Neruda was elected to the Chilean Senate. Shortly thereafter, when Chile’s political climate took a sudden turn to the right, Neruda fled to Mexico and lived as an exile for several years. He later established a permanent home …

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About the Translator

Tomás Q. Morín is the author of Patient Zero. His debut poetry collection A Larger Country won the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. He is co-editor, with Mari L’Esperance, of the anthology Coming Close, and translator of The Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda. He is a writer-in-residence at Texas Tech University and teaches in the MFA program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.

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Reviews

“The greatest poet of the twentieth century—in any language.” —Gabriel García Márquez

“The Heights of Macchu Picchu is a poem of ascension… In its final passages, Neruda’s poetry jumps from a personal hope to a global one; from a poetry dealing with the poet’s heart to a poetry centered on humanity’s struggles. Similar to T.S. Eliot’s 1921 poem ‘The Wasteland’ in showing the emptiness of the modern world, The Heights of Macchu Picchu offers a solution that Eliot never did: become one with your past and use this to create a better future.” —BBC

“He is the poet of the eternal present. He revealed to us the best antidote to oppression (and its most noxious companion, oblivion): poetry.” —New York Times

“There really is a Neruda for everyone. There’s Neruda the love poet, Neruda the surrealist poet, Neruda the poet of historical epic, Neruda the political poet, Neruda the poet of common things, with the odes, Neruda the poet of the sea… And the people of Chile today, even now, associate Pablo Neruda with the idea of justice.” —Democracy Now!