„two nightingales dueling“

I wish I’d been on the street in Madrid on that night in 1934 when Pablo Neruda, who was then Chile’s consul to Spain, told Miguel Hernández that he had never heard a nightingale. It is too cold for nightingales to survive in Chile. Hernández grew up in a goat-herding family in the Spanish province of Alicante, and he immediately scampered up a high tree and imitated a nightingale’s liquid song. Then he climbed up another tree and created the sound of a second nightingale answering. He could have been joyously illustrating Boris Pasternak’s notion of poetry as „two nightingales dueling.“

I once told this story to the fiction writer William Maxwell, and he said that learning how to sing like nightingales in treetops ought to be a requirement for poets. It should be taught, like prosody, in writing programs.

In der Reihe „Poet’s Choice“ schreibt Edward Hirsch über das Gedicht „To the nightingale“ von Jorge Luis Borges (in dem Sappho, Heine, Keatsund andere(s) spuken). / Washington Post , Sunday, February 3, 2002; Page BW12