The poem that Neruda dedicated to Stalin

“Comrade Stalin, I was by the sea on the black island, / resting from fights and travels, / when the news of your death came like a blow from the oceanthe verses say. “We must learn from Stalin / his serene intensity, / his concrete clarity”they say. The death of the fearsome Soviet leader occurred on March 5, 1953, 70 years ago. The verses are from Pablo Neruda.

it’s only chilean Pablo Neruda -who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971- was, in addition to the poet of Twenty poems of love and a song of despair– a communist activist who became a presidential candidate in 1969, although he declined the following year in favor of Salvador Allende.

I had been to Spain during the Civil war -he was consul for Spanish immigration in Paris- and he actively stood on the Republican side: in 1939 he chartered a ship with 2,000 Spanish refugees fleeing Francois Franco and it had been twenty years two Delia Del Carrilan Argentinian artist who brought him closer to Communism. He also admired the role of Soviet Union in the Nazi defeat Second World War.

As we know, in the Soviet Union After the death of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in 1924, Joseph Stalin he seized power and his internal opponents were persecuted. This is how they drove out of their country Leon Trotsky, another prominent revolutionary leader. He traveled to Mexico and in 1940 the Stalinist painter David Alfaro Siqueiros -one of the great muralists of this country- was among those who entered his house to kill him. For that, siqueiros he was arrested and a year later Neruda -again, the consul- visited him and got him a visa to go to Chile. A few months later, in August 1940, Trotsky was murdered on the orders of Stalin.

Afterwards Stalin died in 1953 and at the end of that year Neruda receives the “Stalin Peace Prize” awarded by the Society of Soviet Writers. The political poet who had written the most moving verses on the Francoist massacres of the civil war –“Come see the blood in the streets, come see the blood in the streets, come see the blood in the streets”- now he raises his pen to celebrate another murderer (to give you an idea, 48,000 Communist Party leaders were executed in 1938 alone).

Here is the poem:

By Pablo Neruda

Comrade Stalin, I was by the sea on the Black Island,

rest from struggles and travels,

when the news of your death came like a swell of the sea.

First there was silence, the amazement of things, then a

hello big.

Seaweed, metals and men, stones, foam and tears, this

oh.

From history, space and time he drew his material

and got up crying over the world

until in front of me it comes to touch the coast

and spilled his mourning message at my doors

with a giant scream

as if the earth were suddenly breaking.

It was in 1914.

Waste and pain accumulated in factories.

The rich of the new century

they shared the oil and the islands, the copper and the canals.

Not a single flag flew its colors

without blood spatter.

From Hong Kong to Chicago the police

I was looking for documents and I repeated

the machine guns into the flesh of the people.

Military marches since dawn

They sent little soldiers to die.

Frenzied was the dance of the gringos

in the smoky clubs of Paris.

The man was bleeding.

a rain of blood

fell off the planet

stained the stars

Death then released steel armor.

Hunger

on the roads of Europe

it was like an icy wind blowing dry leaves and breaking bones.

Autumn has blown the rags.

The war had bristled the roads.

Smell of winter and blood

emanated from Europe

Like an abandoned slaughterhouse.

meanwhile the owners

coal,

of iron,

steel,

smoke,

banks,

some gas,

Golden,

of flour,

saltpetre,

from the newspaper El Mercurio,

brothel owners,

american senators,

filibusters

laden with gold and blood

From all countries,

they were also the owners

History.

there they sat

in line, very busy

in the distribution of decorations,

handing over checks at the entrance

and steal them on the way out,

by donating shares of the butcher’s shop

and spread into bite-size pieces

pieces of city and geography.

then with modest

worker outfit and cap,

the wind came in,

The city wind has entered.

Lenin period.

He changed the earth, man, life.

The revolutionary outdoors

upset the papers

colored. a country is born

It has continued to grow.

It’s as big as the world, but it fits

even in the heart of the most

little

factory or office worker

of farming the boat.

It was the Soviet Union.

next to Lenin

Stalin advanced

and so, with a white blouse,

with a gray workman’s cap,

Stalin,

with his quiet step,

made history accompanied

of Lenin and the wind.

Stalin since

was building. All

it was missing. Lenin received from the tsars

cobwebs and rags.

Lenin left a legacy

of a free and extended homeland.

Stalin populated it

with schools and flour,

printers and apples.

Stalin of the Volga

until the snow

inaccessible north

He put his hand and in his hand a man

started to build.

Cities were born.

the deserts have sung

for the first time with the voice of water.

The minerals

they came,

They left

of his dark dreams,

they got up,

rails, wheels were made,

locomotives, wires

which bore the electric syllables

for all extent and distance.

Stalin

built.

were born

with his hands

cereals,

tractors,

lessons,

roads,

and him there,

simple like you and me

if you and me could

be simple like him

But we will learn it.

Its simplicity and its wisdom,

its structure

good bread and inflexible steel

helps us to be men every day,

every day helps us to be men.

Be men! is it

Stalinist law!

It’s hard to be a communist.

You must learn to be.

be communist men

it’s even more difficult

and we must learn from Stalin

its serene intensity,

its concrete clarity,

his contempt

to the empty garland,

to hollow editorial abstraction.

he went straight

untangle the knot

and showing the line

line clarity,

to have troubles

without the phrases that hide

empty,

right center weak

that in our struggle we will rectify

trim the foliage

and showing the fruit design.

Stalin is noon,

the maturity of man and of peoples.

In the war they saw it

broken cities

dig rubble

hope,

cast it again,

make it steel,

and attack with their lightning

destroy

the fortification of darkness.

But it also helped the apple trees

Siberian

to bear fruit in the storm.

taught everyone

grow, grow,

plants and metals,

to creatures and rivers

taught them to grow

bear fruit and fire.

He taught them peace

and therefore stopped

with his chest strained

war wolves

Facing the sea of ​​Isla Negra, in the morning,

I hoisted the Chilean flag at half mast.

The coast was lonely and a silver mist

mingled with the solemn foam of the ocean.

Halfway up her mast, in the blue field,

the lone star of my homeland

It felt like a tear between heaven and earth.

A man from the village passed, greeted with understanding,

and took off his hat.

A boy came over and shook my hand.

Later, the sea urchin fisherman, the old diver

and poet,

Gonzalito came to accompany me under the flag.

“He was wiser than all men put together,” he told me.

looking at the sea with his old eyes, with the old

eyes of the people

And then for a long time we said nothing.

A wave

shook the stones on the shore.

“But Malenkov will now continue his work,” he continued.

raise the poor fisherman in the threadbare jacket.

I looked at him surprised thinking: How, how do you know?

From where, on this lonely shore?

And I understood that the sea had taught him.

And there we look together, a poet,

a fisherman and the sea

to the distant Captain who on entering death

He left to all peoples his life as a heritage.

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