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ertenezco a un pedazo de pobre tierra austral
hacia Araucanía, “I belong to a piece of poor austral earth verging on Arauca-
nia,” he writes, giving Chile ’s southern provinces their Indian name,
my doings have been timed from far away, as if that wooded and perpetually
rainy land held a secret of mine that I do not understand, that I ignore and
must come to know, and that I search for desperately, blindly, examining long
rivers, fantastic plantlife, heaps of wood, the seas of the south, plunging myself
into botany and the rain without ever reaching that precious spume the waves
lay down and break up, without reaching that span of special earth, without
touching my true soil,sin llegar a ese metro de tierra especial, sin tocar mi verdadera arena. Yet this sen-
tence does touch it, priming an act of memory by our most celebrated twentieth-
century poet, Pablo Neruda (1904–1973). Word waves carry him back and
down in time and space, earth and sea, each verb pressing further: “I search
... examining,” “plunging... without reaching... without touching.” Time
past gathers the tierra, madera, vegetación, mares, olas, lluvia making up this
landscape: earth, wood, plant life, seas, waves, rain. Truly his sense of things
stems from nature in that “span of special earth.”
Neruda took to memory when his father and stepmother died in 1938. His
mother had died two months after he was born, which sharpened the poet ’s urge to
root himself. Desolate, he seeks his origin in “the tangled Chilean forest,” a damp
“Gale sustained on a slope”
Pablo Neruda at Machu Picchu
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