Spain in the Heart: Hymn to the Glories of the People at War.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

Pablo Neruda had travelled throughout the world with the Chilean diplomatic corps when he became consul in Madrid before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. There he met with leading Spanish poets of the day - Garcia Lorca, Alberti, Aleixandre - with whom he collaborated on a magazine called Caballo Verde para la Poesia. When the War broke out, Neruda, like most of the other leading intellectuals then in Spain, sided with the Republicans. He moved to Paris and worked tirelessly to help Spanish refugess, even managing to send a group of them to Chile. Spain in the heart, written in 1937, is a vehement condemnation of fascism and a tribute to the people of Spain who struggled against tyranny. In it Neruda departs from the surrealist obscurantism that characterized much of his earlier verse and expresses clearly his solidarity with the masses.

In a recent speech at the Library of Congress in Washington, D. C., long-time Neruda translator Alastair Reid expounded on the difficulties of interpreting the poetry of the Chilean Nobel laureate in English. As exact translation of the words would fail to convey the richness of the verse, he explained, because English is too clipped to capture Neruda's musicality. Furthermore, Neruda's exquisite images of exotic places are sometimes perplexing for North American readers unfamiliar with the realities he describes. Neruda, said Reid, did not expect him to translate his verses word for word, but to "make them better," Thus, it is up to the translator to enhance the work, to make it intelligible and meaningful for foreign readers, to capture its tone, rhythm and melody, and yet to harness his own creativity so that he remains appropriately in the background.

Spain in the Heart presents particular obstacles, for it refers to events that occurred more than fifty years ago, when fascism and communism were on the rise and the Spanish Civil War was...