Hermano Caminante

Welcome to the Barrio Vega. Welcome to Santiago’s famous neighborhood where merchants sell pisco and pirated books by the roadside, where men cook chicken by the fire in an empty oil drum. Welcome to this place in Chile’s capital city where the mercado offers swordfish and spiny fruits and shiny, smiling, silent swine. On your way home from work in the Barrio Vega you might stop and buy a fried snack from a vendor while walking to the bus stop. You might start eating and soon feel a prickling in your nose, an inflammation in your eyes, an urgent pain in your throat. You’ll be startled, of course, but before noticing that everyone around you is covering their face with a kerchief, before spying discarded protest signage on the ground, before recalling that the police suppressed a student insurrection with tear gas earlier in the day, all you can seem to ask is, "What on earth is wrong with this churro?"

In such fashion I spent the summer before sophomore year in South America. On the bus back from work most evenings I spent some time with a little red notebook and a tourist edition of Neruda’s earliest collection of poems, "Crepusculario." I had the fantastic idea to translate the collection into English and bring new eyes to the verses that were (swiftly and justifiably) dwarfed by his second volume, "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair" ("Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Cancion Desesperada"). The first poem of his first collection, appropriately titled “Inicial,” opens with the image of a farmer laboring silently, anxiously, diligently, over an empty garden. Nine lines. Fourteen syllables each. Paroxytone verse. But I couldn’t translate it. Every compromise of meter or meaning was unacceptable. The enterprise seemed criminal. So much for the summer project.

I’ve come a little way since then. I realize that you’ll get nowhere if you’re afraid of messing up or making a mess. You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take. You must break a few eggs to make an omelet. You must sacrifice the perfect beauty of an orange to buy fresh juice from a vendor in the Barrio Vega. The Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno memorably starts his novel "Niebla" with the observation that a closed umbrella is as elegant as an open umbrella is ugly. But a closed umbrella is no use at all when it’s raining.

So let’s make like Joyce’s young artist and sally forth to create something ugly or extraordinary. Let’s ignore our conventions and pick up the old Creationist Manifesto of the vanguard Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro when he declared “non serviam” nearly one hundred years ago. Let’s abandon our bubble to invent wicked new postures; let’s take to the streets with a leaping and tumbling, a hootin’ and hollerin’. Stretch your legs and embrace every awful gait between your House and the Yard: walking, racing, shuffling, swaggering, staggering. Limping. Falling down. Getting back up.

There’s no poverty of minor adventures for us at school. Making eye contact with a cop while you jaywalk in front of the Holyoke Center, registering another small victory for the People’s Republic of Cambridge. Going to the famous Falafel Corner by Brattle Square to eat the shavings from a shiny irregular pillar of lamb meat; a shawarma shaped like calculus; a solid of revolution. Or a frightfully cold evening in January, getting lost on the way back from a bat mitzvah in Wellesley: sighing in defeat and calling a cab, saying to yourself, "I’m so glad I have ways and means, and options, and shelter."

In Neruda’s “Walking Around,” the speakers declares that he is tired—of being a man, of his hair, of his nails and his shadow and his feet. Well, I’m not tired; if anything, my feet and my shoes are tired of me. I beat the hell out of my sneakers every day. I stomp and pirouette and tramp about till the rubber heaves a cry of exhaustion and leaps away from its man. I wear them through the mud and the crushed red velvet cake of Harvard’s 375th birthday party along with 10,000 other happy feet, tearing up the turf in Tercentenary Theater.

For this reason I will take my dog outside and let him brush gently with the minor perils of the world. If he might prick his nose on a cactus then I won’t stop him—how else should he learn? Augusto Perez, the protagonist of "Niebla," likewise instructs his pet: "Did you ever think about this, Orfeo? No, because you’re still too young and you haven’t experienced life. And furthermore you are a dog." And as long as I’m being too bold with my translations from Spanish, I’d like to close with the final image of Neruda’s "Inicial." The speaker, the farmer, can no longer keep his mouth shut. He finally shares his meager flowers with the reader, declaring that even if they’re not fragrant, "they are the first roses—walking brother—of my disconsolate, adolescent garden."

—Columnist David Grieder can be reached at davidgrieder@college.harvard.edu.