"El Miedo" / "Fear" by Pablo Neruda, translated by Alistair Reid

Pablo Neruda writes this poem five or so years before his death, a death that took place mere days after the U.S.-backed coup installed dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Chileans suspected that Pinochet’s agents had killed the poet in his hospital bed. The official cause of Neruda’s death was cancer. But then, the official cause of Chile’s turn toward fascism wasn’t identified until U.S. meddling was revealed. Pinochet knew that in Chile poetry mattered, Neruda mattered, and his fear of Neruda’s influence drove him to station soldiers outside the poet’s home to keep it from becoming a rallying point of resistance. This poem’s concerns seem personal, psychological. The speaker’s enemy is himself. But history casts a second frame around the poem, helping its self-awareness verge on political anxiety such that his self-same “perfidious enemy” might name a nation that would soon, by U.S. design, be committed to the hell of terrorizing itself. Would that translation’s influence might outpace the influence of empire. —Farid Matuk

Pablo Neruda, translated by Alistair Reid. "El Miedo / Fear," from We Are Many. London: Grossman Publishers in association with Cape Goliard Press, 1967/1970.