Looking for the source of a poem in translation

June 23, 2020 12:56 PM

A friend of mine is trying to track down a poem she half-remembers. The difficulty is that she read it in translation. It was originally in Spanish, she believes. This was her message to her friends:

I thought it might have been a translation of Neruda, but it’s not in any of my books. Googling the line has not produced any results. The line I as I remember is “what courage did it take to fill the empty spaces of your map with bloodstains”.

Two or three of us have been looking but unfortunately none of us has a fluency in Spanish that exceeds conversational level; if the original writer used some vivid poetic imagery anywhere in there, there may be a word or three that none of us thinks to search for because we are simply unfamiliar with the word. A Chilean friend said she thought it might be in Canto General but a brief browse through did not turn it up.

Does the translation ring any bells?

posted by ricochet biscuit to Media & Arts (1 answer total)

Maybe Pablo Neruda's Ode to Federico Garcia Lorca? There's a stanza about filling town halls with soot and sobbing and [many other things, including what] this translation refers to "maps with blood." However, this other translation calls it "bloodstained maps."
posted by carmicha at 1:14 PM on June 23, 2020 [3 favorites]