Across the street was a very large cementerio that included the final resting place of former President Allende. He is on a pathway named O'Higgins, which is a name quite prevalent for streets and parks in Santiago and other places in Chile. O'Higgins was one of Chile's independence founders who helped Chile free itself from Spain in the early 1800's. He was of Spanish and Irish ancestry.
Allende was of course the President of Chile from 1970 to 1973. He died on September 11, 1973, during the Pinochet led coup. Interestingly, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (Naftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto - Pablo Neruda is his pen name), was also a candidate for the Presidency of Chile in 1970, but he gave his support to Allende. Neruda had prostate cancer in 1973 and died of heart failure on September 23, 1973, at the Clínica Santa María - which is just down the street from my apartment. Neruda had homes in Valparaíso and in the Bellavista neighborhood in Santiago - which is also just down the street from my apartment. The presence of both Allende and Neruda is easily felt throughout Chile. Both were communists. Neruda won a Nobel Prize for his poetry and is frequently cited as one of the top 10 poets of all time - and usually in the top three if you do a little research on rankings.
This above painting is on one of the market booth walls in Barrio Bellavista. It is the start of one of his poems titled Poema 20. Click here if you want to read it in its entirety in Spanish. At the end of the poem is an audio link with him reading it. Below is a translation of the entire poem:
I can write the saddest lines tonight.
Write, for example, 'The night is starry
and shiver, blue, those stars, in the distance."
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
I can write the saddest lines tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
On nights like this I held my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How to not have loved her great still eyes.
I can write the saddest lines tonight.
To think that I have not. Feel that I have lost.
To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
Does it matter that my love could not keep.
The night is shattered and she is not me.
That's it. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is lost without her.
As if to bring my eyes search for her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, true, but how I loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her hearing.
Another. She will be another. As before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.
Love is so short, and forgetting is so long.
Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
My soul is lost without her.
Though this be the last pain she causes me,
and these the last verses that I write.
end of post
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