Ode to the Liver
Modest,
organized
friend,
underground
worker,
let me give you
the wing of my song,
the thrust
of the air,
the soaring
of my ode:
it is born
of your invisible
machinery,
it flies
from your tireless
confined mill,
delicate
powerful
entrail,
ever alive and dark.
While
the heart resounds and attracts
the music of the mandolin,
there, inside,
you filter
and apportion,
you separate
and divide,
you multiply
and lubricate,
you raise
and gather
the threads and the grams
of life, the final
distillate,
the intimate essences.
Submerged
viscus,
measurer
of the blood,
you live
full of hands
and full of eyes,
measuring and transferring
in your hidden
alchemical
chamber.
Yellow
is the matrix
of your red hydraulic flow,
diver
of the most perilous
depths of man,
there forever hidden,
everlasting,
in the factory,
noiseless.
And every feeling
or impulse
grew in your machinery,
received some drop
of your tireless
elaboration,
to love you added
fire or melancholy,
let one tiny cell
be in error
or one fiber be worn
in your labor
and the pilot flies into the wrong sky,
the tenor collapses in a wheeze,
the astronomer loses a planet.
Up above, how
the bewitching eyes of the rose
and the lips
of the matinal carnation
sparkle!
How the maiden
in the river laughs!
And down below,
the filter and the balance,
the delicate chemistry
of the liver,
the storehouse
of the subtle changes:
no one
sees or celebrates it,
but, when it ages
or its mortar wastes away,
the eyes of the rose are gone,
the teeth of the carnation wilted
and the maiden silent in the river.
Austere portion
or the whole
of myself,
grandfather
of the heart,
generator
of energy:
I sing to you
and I fear you
as though you were judge,
meter,
implacable indicator,
and if I can not
surrender myself in shackles to austerity,
if the surfeit of
delicacies,
or the hereditary wine of my country
dared
to disturb my health
or the equilibrium of my poetry,
from you,
dark monarch,
giver of syrups and of poisons,
regulator of salts,
from you I hope for justice:
I love life: Do not betray me! Work on!
Do not arrest my song.
Pablo Neruda, 1904?1973
Nobel Laureate in Literature, 1971
Translation by Oriana Josseau Kalant
?Oda al Higado,? by Pablo Neruda, translated by Oriana Josseau Kalant, as published in Alcohol Liver Pathology (J.M. Khana, Y. Israel, and H. Kalant, editors) © 1975. Reprinted with permission of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto.
Prepared: September 29, 2004