32. Barcarole by Pablo Neruda - translated by Robert Hass - A Friend To Mark

In this episode, Mark talks about the poem that has been a friend to him – ‘Barcarole' by Pablo Neruda - translated by Robert Hass.

We’re delighted to feature ‘Barcarole’ in this episode and would like to thank Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells, City Lights Books and Frederick Courtright for granting us permission to share the poem in this way.

You can find ‘Barcarole’ in ‘The Essential Neruda’ - Selected Poems - edited by Mark Eisner, published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK and City Lights Books in the US.

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Barcarole

by Pablo Neruda

If only you would touch my heart,

if only you were to put your mouth to my heart,

your delicate mouth, your teeth,

if you were to put your tongue like a red arrow

there where my dusty heart is beating,

if you were to blow on my heart near the sea, weeping,

it would make a dark noise, like the drowsy sound of

train wheels,

like the indecision of waters,

like autumn in full leaf,

like blood,

with a noise of damp flames burning the sky,

with a sound like dreams or branches or the rain,

or foghorns in some dismal port,

if you were to blow on my heart near the sea,

like a white ghost,

in the spume of the wave,

in the middle of the wind,

like a ghost unleashed, at the seashore, weeping.

Like a long absence, like a sudden bell,

the sea doles out the sound of the heart,

raining, darkening at sundown, on a lonely coast:

no question that night falls

and its mournful blue of the flags of shipwrecks

peoples itself with planets of throaty silver.

And the heart sounds like a sour conch

calls, oh sea, oh lament, oh molten panic,

scattered in the unlucky and dishevelled waves:

The sea reports sonorously

on its languid shadows, its green poppies.

If you existed, suddenly, on a mournful coast,

surrounded by the dead day,

facing into a new night,

filled with waves,

and if you were to blow on my cold and frightened heart,

if you were to blow on the lonely blood of my heart,

if you were to blow on its motion of doves in flame,

its black syllables of blood would ring out,

its incessant red waters would come to flood,

and it would ring out, ring out with shadows,

ring out like death,

cry out like a tube filled with wind or weeping,

like a shaken bottle spurting fear.

So that's how it is, and the lightning would glint in your braids

and the rain would come in through your open eyes

to ready the weeping you shut up dumbly

and the black wings of the sea would wheel round you,

with its great talons and its rush and its cawing.

Do you want to be the solitary ghost blowing,

by the sea its sad instrument?

If only you would call,

a long sound, a bewitching whistle,

a sequence of wounded waves,

maybe some one would come,

(someone would come,)

from the peaks of the islands, from the red depths of the sea,

someone would come, someone would come.

Someone would come, blow fiercely,

so that it sounds like a siren of some battered ship,

like lamentation,

like neighing in the midst of the foam and blood,

like ferocious water gnashing and sounding.

In the marine season

its conch of shadow spirals like a shout,

the seabirds ignore it and fly off,

its roll call of sounds, its mournful rings

rise on the shores of the lonely sea.

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