That extra one percent was at first, apparently, untenable. A sticking point was that the union wanted a four per-cent raise in salary, but Wal-Mart Chile stood at three. The store I happened to walk by off the Los Leones metro station had maybe a dozen people milling around out front, a few of them holding signs: “They Make Millions, We Get Crumbs,” “Fight for Dignified Salaries,” “No More Abuse,” and “The Union is in the Street Demanding Dignity.” As I learned later, it was the biggest private sector strike in the country’s history. They wanted better wages, better working conditions, and some retention measures as the supermarket chain enhanced automation. On July 10th, a deal between the workers’ union and the owners had still not been reached, so over 17,000 workers walked out. That didn’t make as much news, but it’s something that has stuck with me ever since. I was also in Santiago in July of 2019, when workers at the Líder supermarket-now owned by Wal-Mart-went on strike and walked out. I’ve come to realize that I have been there for a few noteworthy events-I was there in 2006 when General Pinochet died and the country elected its first female president, Michelle Bachelet there in 2010 trembling through an ugly earthquake there for our daughter Isabel’s birth in 2011 (for me a bit more than noteworthy) and here now in 2020 for the protests, an ominous drought thanks to climate change, and everybody’s coronavirus.

So we’ve managed a way to live between my work by Lake Erie and the capital of Chile. Her family, her friends, the language (Chileans speak their own sort of Spanish), the 9:00 news every evening. She’s Chilean, and she needs Santiago: the inclination of the Andes, an easy drive to the sea, the world’s driest desert up north, the fiords and glaciers (or what’s left of them) down south. She said it was the weather, but it was more than that. Roberto Bolaño My wife, Sonia, could never get used to living in Ohio.

Its flickering shadow… rising as if it were climbing a hill on a fossil planet. A dead body rising from the bottom of the sea or from the bottom of a gully.

Sun.And little by little the truth begins to rise like a dead body. MLA style: Pablo Neruda – Banquet speech. I render my thanks and return to my work, to the blank page which every day awaits us poets so that we shall fill it with our blood and our darkness, for with blood and darkness poetry is written, poetry should be written.įrom Les Prix Nobel en 1971, Editor Wilhelm Odelberg,, Stockholm, 1972 Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1971 I also thank this country with the mighty forests and the deep snows, whose feeling for equality and whose love for peace, whose balance and generosity impress the world. In the name of all these peoples and in my own name I thank the Swedish Academy for the honour which has been shown me today for my work as a poet. I am proud to belong to this great mass of humanity, not to the few but to the many, by whose invisible presence I am surrounded here today. You will pardon me if I have extended my gratitude to cover all those who belong to me, even to the forgotten ones of this earth who in this happy hour of my life appear to me more real than my own phrases, higher than my mountain chains, wider than the ocean. I am a representative of these times and of the present struggles which fill my poetry. And if the beams from this festive hall cross land and sea to light up my past, they also light up the future of our American peoples, who are defending their right to dignity, to freedom and to life. I return to the streets of my childhood, to the winters of South America, to the lilac gardens of Araucania, to the first girl I held in my arms, to the mud on the streets which knew no paving, to the Indians mourning-clad left to us by the Conquest, to a country, a dark continent seeking for the light. For us, the laureates, it is a question both of a joy and a pain.īut before I render thanks and before I take breath I must gather myself, if you will pardon me, to take myself far from this place, to return to my country and once more to go wandering in the night and the dawn of my native land. We come from the darkness of our laboratories, to meet a light which honours us and, for the moment, dazzles us. We have come from chemistry, from the microscopes, from cybernetics, from algebra, from the barometers, from poetry in order to be assembled here. Here we are assembled in Stockholm, which this evening is the centre of the world. We come from far away, from that which is behind us and within us, from different languages, from countries that love one another. Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, Pablo Neruda’s speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1971

Towards the splendid city pablo neruda