(Original title: In memoriam Pablo Neruda -
from: ‘Het houdt op met zachtjes regenen’ – 1978 –
Uitgeverij De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam.)
from: ‘Het houdt op met zachtjes regenen’ – 1978 –
 |
| C. Buddingh' [1918-1985] |
In Memoriam Pablo Neruda
—aside from wife and sons, of course—
is that little book about you in the series Poète d’aujourd’hui,
which you gave me three years ago in Rotterdam,
with the dedication: ‘de Pablo Neruda a su amigo
C. Buddingh’— well, real friends, of course
and yet we almost swapped ties: yours
a plain red one, mine a Liberty print.
you practically put the idea into my head,
but I was too shy to go along with it:
you were one of my heroes, and that I could simply
talk to you and drink a whisky in your room
was already so unbelievable
that I crawled further and further into that very shell
that you were trying to pull me out of.
People often asked what you looked like now, and I'd say:
‘A gentleman in a cap,’ and that was true enough,
but then ‘gentleman’ in the true sense of an aristocrat:
you are, together with Mazizi Kunene, I believe, the only
person that I've ever seen with the real allure of a monarch,
and actually that had little to do,
however monumental, with your poethood:
you only had to open your mouth, when there was a discussion
and everyone listened—and not
because you were a more powerful magician with language
than anyone else, or an ambassador in Paris, no, they listened
because you spoke not only for an entire continent,
but for every disadvantaged person in the world:
yours was the conscience that each of us so much
wanted to have, but couldn't, or didn't dare—and for that
alone you were the greatest of us all.
We knew you were ill: cancer, and that we would probably
never see you again, but you acted and fought
as if all eternity still lay before you.
When you left, you said, ‘see you’, but two years later,
your friend Allende was murdered and your house plundered
within an hour of your death by the same
mob that had previously chased you out of your country,
the Chile that you gave history and stature
and that now became the measure for what true virtue is: either you are
pro-Neruda, and then you would rather starve
than engage with slaughterers in tailored suits,
or anti: there is no middle ground,
and believe me: one day, maybe
not they themselves, but their descendants will pay
for what the hired assassins’ hands
have inflicted in that land of your dreams.
Yes, you preached revolution, but also and above all,
love and awe for everything life
had to offer humanity: beauty, art, companionship:
you no longer had to look for the philosopher's stone,
because every rock or pebble you found
on a beach or in mountain ravines
seemed to you a greater miracle than raising the dead,
or walking on water, and an onion had for you
the same ranking as a solar system:
wherever you looked you saw a Garden of Eden,
only: behind every Adam and Eve stood
almost everywhere a man with a whip, who therefore
had to disappear first, and then life
would become as simple as the colour red—and hatred
you had to feel, yes, but never foster, because
it was that which precisely kept blocking future's path.
If there was anything you weren’t, it was dogmatic, if there was something
you didn’t want, well then: as little for everyone:
no, you thought that even for the poorest farmer or stonemason,
even the best would scarcely be good enough,
for you the entire human race was a race of kings,
that’s why you steadfastly stood up for them,
they had not only to throw off their chains, that would be
wonderful of course, but only a beginning, the moment
when true life could finally make a start,
and every shit-shoveler or whore be crowned with gold.
That was your dream, for which you kept fighting and fighting,
and I know for sure that even in the hour of your death,
you continued to believe in that day when all the rejected,
displaced, downtrodden, vilified, hunted—and without
Jesus or anyone else descending — will
inherit paradise here on earth.
