![]() But not enough to give us the real story in detail. In his account and those of his biographers, there are place names or hints about the weather, the mountains, and occasional dramatic moments. It’s cursory and quick, hardly satisfying if the reader wants to know everything about this extraordinarily dangerous trek. Neruda describes his escape in Confieso que he vivido, but in just thirteen pages. (To punish yourself a little, read Neruda’s political poetry, most especially his odious “Oda a Stalin.”) That attention is often super-rewarding, although not always. ![]() You have to pay attention to what he’s doing, while at the same time relaxing and flowing with it. Neruda is a poet who goes out on a limb almost constantly. So, I have a ready sense of his often breezy and very adventuresome writing style. Luckily, I have read many, many Neruda poems in Spanish as well as his very entertaining memoir, Confieso que he vivido ( I Confess That I Have Lived). To talk about the more carnal differences between the two peoples is another matter altogether.) (I’m talking about the languages here and the cultures they represent. For me, a romantic tale is not the same in English as it is in Spanish. You realize that this is a real possibility once you’ve studied the two languages and understand the difference in feel, one from the other. English has such a northern European twist to it (a combination of Celtic, Britannic, Germanic, Danish and who knows how many other frozen-tundra linguistic elements) that a rendering of it into Spanish may not have the sunny, warm-breezes, wine-induced, olive-oil Mediterranean flow that such a story deserves. It will be available in bookstores everywhere (especially, of course, in Central and South America) and online at the usual sites.ĭespite all this, which was pretty fast-moving for me and exciting, I worried that because the original is in English, a Spanish-language translation wouldn’t have the kind of authenticity that such a book would have, had its author been hispanic. So… La espléndida ciudad will come out in its Spanish-language edition on Decemin the translation by Jaime Collyer. Jaime read my novel (he is remarkably fluent in the English language) and liked it. ![]() Through a friend of mine, a prominent Chilean novelist living in the United States, I made the acquaintance of Jaime Collyer, who is himself a noted novelist and short story writer, and a prominent figure in contemporary Chilean writing. I’ve always thought that there would have to be a Spanish-language translation of the book, Neruda’s fame and readership in Spanish-speaking countries being of legendary proportions. I succeeded in finishing the novel, which has the title The Splendid City, and it was published in 2019. He went on to even greater international fame and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. Despite very rough conditions and a couple of close brushes with death, they completed the trek, and Neruda was able to move on to Paris, where his wife Delia del Carrill was awaiting him. It was a very dangerous undertaking in which Neruda was led through the cordillera by trackers familiar with the territory. It was decided by the Communist Party in Chile, of which Neruda was a member, that the only way to get him out of the country safely was on horseback through the Andes. He had been barred from his senator’s seat in the Chilean Congress, and there was a warrant out for his arrest…all due to grave political disagreements with then-president Gabriel González Videla. I had read about the very dangerous passage that Chilean poet Pablo Neruda made in 1949, escaping from Chile to Argentina on horseback through the Andes Mountains. This despite my having translated three of that author’s books to English. But to write a full novel in English about one of the principal Spanish-speakers and writers of the last hundred years does present a challenge. ![]() I speak Spanish, which I learned as an adult, and I write in English.
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