Heights of Machu Picchu

 

Macchu Picchu has an inspired force to South Americans, because seing that city and its glory we say ourselves we were great once in the past, and that we can do it again.

 

It is hard to explain the feelings that such city inspire upon us, but also to any visitor of any nationality that has visited the place. I haven't been there, but still it is a power source for me in  a personal level.

 

Perhaps if I post here the translation of the poem "Heights of Machu Picchu" of Pablo Neruda, Nobel Prize winner of 1971, it could start to make sense what I say. Machu Picchu is our own Jerusalem.

 

 

 

 

Some fragments of the poem:

 

 

...On the day the clay-colored hand
was utterly changed into clay, and when dwarf
eyelids closed
upon bruised walls and hosts of battlements,
when all of man cringed back into his burrow
there remained a precision unfurled on the high places
of the human dawn,
the tallest crucible that ever held our silence:
a life of stone after so many lives.

 

 

Then up the ladder of the earth I climbed
Through the barbed jungle�s thickets
Until I reached you, Macchu Picchu.
Tall city of stepped stone,
Home at long last of whatever earth
Had never hidden in her sleeping clothes.
In you two lineages that had run parallel
Met where the cradle of both man and light
Rocked in a wind of thorns

Mother of stone and sperm of condors.
High reef of the human dawn.
Spade buried in primordial sand.
This was the habitation, this is the site:
Here the fat grains of maize grew high
To fall again like red hail.

The fleece of the vicuna was carded here
To clothe men�s loves in gold, their tombs and mothers,
The king, the prayers, the warriors.

 

�Heights of Machu Picchu�

Arise with me to be born, brother.
Give me your hand from the deep
Region of your spreading pain.
You won�t return from the rocks below.
You won�t come back from that underground time.
Don�t revert to your hardened voice.
Your punctured eyes won�t come back.

 

Another fragment.

Pablo Neruda

from "Heights of Macchu Pichu" by Pablo Neruda

From air into air, like an empty net,
I wandered between the streets and the atmosphere, arriving and saying goodbye
in the coming of autumn with its scattered coins
of leaves, and between spring and the ripe wheat,
What the greatest love, as inside a falling
glove, hands over to us like endless moonlight.

Days of live shining in the storminess
of bodies: sharp steel abraded
to acidic silence:
night unraveled down to the last floor:
assaulted stamens in the country of sex.)

Someone awaiting me among the violins
encountered a world like a buried tower
its spiral stairs corkscrewing into the earth
beneath all those leaves the color of hoarse sulfur:
and deeper still, into geologic gold
like a sword sheathed in meteors,
I plunged my turbulent and tender hand
into the most genital of earthly places.

I pressed my face down through the deepest waves,
I sank like a drop through sulfuric stillness
and, as if blind, I groped my way back to the jasmine
of the exhausted springtime of humanity.
                                                        -Pablo Neruda

I hope you like it.

 

 

 

 

 

A picture of Cuzco (the navel in Quechua), Peru.

 

 

This is the cover of the album, which show a typical folk dancer with a mask of a demon.

 

 

The group at the 70s