Neruda and Ted Williams: A Fantasy

Ted Williams

Ted Williams

Sports Saturday

My colleague Israel Ruiz in our Spanish Department is an enthusiastic baseball fan. He is also Puerto Rican and I have learned a lot about the Puerto Rican love of baseball from him. For instance, did you know that Puerto Rico is

Neruda

second only to the Dominican Republic in providing active Latin American players to the major leagues? (There are over 200 currently playing.) Among the greats have been Orlando Cepeda, Pudge Rodriguez, and the Alomar family (Sandy, Sandy Jr., and Roberto).

I’ve asked Israel, who is a poet, to keep an eye out for Latino baseball poetry. He came up with the following lyric by Martin Espada, currently a teacher at the University of Massachusett at Amherst. The Neruda in the poem is the great Chilean poet whose leftist politics in 1948 caused him to flee for his life following a military coup. His escape from Chile was somewhat miraculous, and the poem imagines Neruda showing up at Fenway Park. Espada indicates that both Neruda and Williams had a similar irreverence for authority.  Note the working class images throughout the poem, which are integral to Neruda’s poetry.  And of course, Espada must also make a reference to Fenway Park’s famous “green monster,” the left field wall against which many doubles have been hit.

Here’s the poem:

The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park

— Boston, MA, 1948

The Chilean secret police
searched everywhere
for the poet Neruda: in the dark shafts
of mines, in the boxcars of railroad yards,
in the sewers of Santiago.
The government intended to confiscate his mouth
and extract the poems one by one like bad teeth.
But the mines and boxcars and sewers were empty.

I know where he was. Neruda was at Fenway Park,
burly and bearded in a flat black cap, hidden
in the kaleidoscope of the bleachers.
He sat quietly, chomping a hot dog
when Ted Williams walked to the crest of the diamond,
slender as my father remembers him,
squinting at the pitcher, bat swaying in a memory of trees.

The stroke was a pendulum of long muscle and wood,
Ted’s face tilted up, the home run
zooming into the right field grandstand.
Then the crowd stood together, cheering
for this blasphemer of newsprint, the heretic
who would not tip his cap as he toed home plate
or grin like a war hero at the sportswriters
surrounding his locker for a quote.

The fugitive poet could not keep silent,
standing on his seat to declaim the ode
erupted in crowd-bewildering Spanish from his mouth:

Praise Ted Williams, raising his sword
cut from the ash tree, the ball
a white planet glowing in the atmosphere
of the right field grandstand!

Praise the Wall rising
like a great green wave
from the green sea of the outfield!

Praise the hot dog, pink meat,
pork snouts, sawdust, mouse feces,
human hair, plugging our intestines,
yet baptized joyfully with mustard!

Praise the wobbling drunk, seasick beer
in hand, staring at the number on his ticket,
demanding my seat!

Everyone gawked at the man standing
on his seat, bellowing poetry in Spanish.
Anonymous no longer,
Neruda saw the Chilean secret police
as they scrambled through the bleachers,
pointing and shouting, so the poet
jumped a guardrail to disappear
through a Fenway tunnel,
the black cap flying from his head
and spinning into center field.

This is true. I was there at Fenway
on August 7, 1948, even if I was born
exactly nine years later
when my father
almost named me Theodore.

One other note on Neruda. In 1973 Neruda, just weeks away from dying, found himself once again the target of military officials who had launched a coup, this one against the socialist government of Salvador Allende. As soldiers were ransacking his house, he told them, “Look around—there’s only one thing of danger for you here—poetry.”

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