Fully Empowered

by Pablo Neruda

Fully Empowered was one of Neruda's favourites among his own works, and he specifically asked his finest translator, Alastair Reid, to translate it into English. Neruda loved this collection partly because it grew from the most fruitful period of his own life but also because it was a representative selection of the vast range of his poetry.

The thirty-six poems vary from short, intense lyrics, characteristic Neruda odes, whimsical addresses to friends, and his magnificent mediations on the role of the poet. Within Fully Empowered are many poems among the greatest of Neruda's work, including 'The People', his most celebrated later poem.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Literature, Latinx, 20th Century, Latin American Literature, Classics

Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Pablo Neruda, born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in 1904 in Parral, Chile, was a poet, diplomat, and politician, widely considered one of the most influential literary figures of the 20th century. From an early age, he showed a deep passion for poetry, publishing his first works as a teenager. He adopted the pen name Pablo Neruda to avoid disapproval from his father, who discouraged his literary ambitions. His breakthrough came with Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, 1924), a collection of deeply emotional and sensual poetry that gained international recognition and remains one of his most celebrated works.
Neruda’s career took him beyond literature into diplomacy, a path that allowed him to travel extensively and engage with political movements around the world. Beginning in 1927, he served in various consular posts in Asia and later in Spain, where he witnessed the Spanish Civil War and became an outspoken advocate for the Republican cause. His experiences led him to embrace communism, a commitment that would shape much of his later poetry and political activism. His collection España en el corazón (Spain in Our Hearts, 1937) reflected his deep sorrow over the war and marked a shift toward politically engaged writing.
Returning to Chile, he was elected to the Senate in 1945 as a member of the Communist Party. However, his vocal opposition to the repressive policies of President Gabriel Gonzalez Videla led to his exile. During this period, he traveled through various countries, including Argentina, Mexico, and the Soviet Union, further cementing his status as a global literary and political figure. It was during these years that he wrote Canto General (1950), an epic work chronicling Latin American history and the struggles of its people.
Neruda’s return to Chile in 1952 marked a new phase in his life, balancing political activity with a prolific literary output. He remained a staunch supporter of socialist ideals and later developed a close relationship with Salvador Allende, who appointed him as Chile’s ambassador to France in 1970. The following year, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, recognized for the scope and impact of his poetry. His later years were marked by illness, and he died in 1973, just days after the military coup that overthrew Allende. His legacy endures, not only in his vast body of work but also in his influence on literature, political thought, and the cultural identity of Latin America.

Reviews

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a dual language book. Nevertheless, it has taken me months to finish it. My typical pattern is to read a poem first in Spanish, understanding as much as I can; then I read it in English, looking back and forth to study vocabulary words or constructions I had not understood; then, finally, I read it in Spanish again. This works well on the shorter poems, but not as well on the ones that are several pages long. In either case, one poem a day is my maximum, because then I need time to think about them.

Like most collections, I found the quality somewhat uneven. Some of the poems I found to be silly or frivolous; most are quite good; and a select few are immensely powerful. But always, what shines through each poem are an appreciation for the power of nature in general and the sea in particular, and an affection for the people around him, both individually and collectively. This is what keeps drawing me back to Neruda.

[Milu♡ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me gané este libro en un concurso de poesía y me quedé encantada con todo lo que se puede ver en un verso de Neruda.

[João Moura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Colecção de poemas do grande Pablo, com temas variados, desde lugares a momentos, de animais a pessoas, do geral ao grão de areia, do universal ao particular, do passado ao poeta, uma leitura bastante agradável.

[Jessie (Zombie_likes_cake) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ooh, I am not sure how to judge and rate this. And not just because I always struggle a bit with that in poetry but because what I mostly liked was that I could use this book as a little translation exercise since it has the English translation next to the Spanish original. I might add, the exercise while hard work and slow going (with looking up a lot of vocabulary) was pretty successful but I cannot sit here and rate the icon that Neruda is on how much fun I had challenging my terrible Spanish with some poetry translation. That is somewhat disrespectful but a little bit of what happened here. I even thought on occasion that the Spanish sounded much better than what the English translator chose to write instead and that is definitely disrespectful and megalomaniac because I hardly speak the beautiful language of Spanish but here I am criticizing the choices by a renowned translator because I liked better what I jumbled together? Good grief.

So let's try this again. I think overall for my personal taste these poems sometimes got a little too descriptive. I chose it pretty much at random from the library because I wanted to try some Neruda after reading a lovely quote from him in Enriquez' novel "Our Share of Night" but maybe the subjects of this collection were not exactly what I was looking for. That quote was so much darker and more mysterious, I didn't quite find that vibe in these poems (despite hoping so with the cover). But there can be a sadness and thoughtfulness in these pieces that I often liked. While I was often distracted by my desire to work out the translation I also tried to sit back and just soak up the English side, really sit with what is being said here and I found a few that resonated. But I do think I need to try another collection where I entirely focus on the power of the words before I can form an opinion on Neruda and whether or not the two of us are meant for each other.

There is a lot on working class, describing city and work life and societal issues but also nature writing and observing his surroundings, some poems on grief and saying goodbye. It feels awkward rating this anything else but 3* given this experience but it is also all I can give: my experience.

My favorites: Planeta/ En la torre/ Adioses/ La Noche en Isla Negra/ El Pueblo

[Emina · Rating 4 out of 5]

“y no hablar es morir entre los seres:
se hace lenguaje hasta la cabellera,
habla la boca sin mover los labios:
los ojos de repente son palabras”

[Helena Rodrigues · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

"En plena calle me pregunto, dónde
está la ciudad? Se fue, no ha vuelto.
Tal vez ésta es la misma, y tiene casas,
tiene paredes, pero no la encuentro.
No se trata de Pedro ni de Juan,
ni de aquella mujer, ni de aquel árbol,
ya la ciudad aquella se enterró,
se metió en un recinto subterráneo
y otra hora vive, otra y no la misma,
ocupando la línea de las calles,
y un idéntico número en las casas.

El tiempo entonces, lo comprendo, existe,
existe, ya lo sé, pero no entiendo
cómo aquella ciudad que tuvo sangre,
que tuvo tanto cielo para todos,
y de cuya sonrisa a mediodía
se desprendía un cesto de ciruelas,
de aquellas casas com olor a bosque
recién cortado al alba con la sierra,
que seguía cantando junto al agua
de los aserraderos montañosos,
todo lo que era suyo y era mío,
de la ciudad y de la transparencia,
se envolvió en el amor como un secreto
y se dejó caer en el olvido."

[Frankie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first time reading a collection by Neruda, and it's beautiful even in translation. And this is a good translation by Alastair Reid, a Scots professor and poet who also translated the illusive Borges. I don't think people realize how delicate a job it is to translate poetry. I'm not referring to matching rhymes, which is ridiculous. Anyway, Neruda's poems are rhyme and meter free. But to choose each word's connotative, contextual and phonetic equivalent is quite a task.

An example of Reid's skill can be seen on page 14-15 "The Sea": on the Spanish page the poem ends with the word "movimiento" but on the English side the word is repeated "movement, movement." I imagine this is because the English pronunciation is only two syllables, compared to the Spanish four syllables. Thus the "movement, movement" is truer to the original cadence of the line. A good translator can make a huge difference in poetry.

Some of the works are too brief and episodic for me. "Ocean", "Spring", "Thistle" - for example, seem flat and naive. But "The Word" on page 5, "Goodbye" page 55, and "To Don Asterio…" page 63 - are all fascinating and inventive. There are also a few leftist poems ("To the Dead…" and "The People") devoted to the proletariat, which are not bad but not as purely inspired as the others.

My favorite "To Acario Cotapos" (page 69-75) is dedicated to a fellow author, but also could be considered self-reflective. This stanza is particularly evocative of Neruda's calling:

You, poet without books,
brought together in life irreverent song,
and the word that sprang from the cave
where it lay dreamless,
and for me you turned language
into a landslide of glass houses.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a mediocre offering from the usually reliable, shit, the usually sublime, Neruda. I think I've figured it out, though. Some poets who wander outside of their best stuff, in Neruda's case, love, are often discomfiting to some readers. I'm reaching, here, but, come on, who's going to read this? I guess, in short, what I'm saying is: his romantic poetry is better. His "secular" stuff, like this collection, is uninspired and a little dull.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautiful collection of poetry. I have Harold Bloom’s book The Western Canon to thank for calling my attention to Pablo Neruda. Fully Empowered is varied, earthy, and intimate, at least in Alastair Reid’s English translation. I was especially impressed by the poem “The People,” appearing on page 133:

“That man I remember well, and at least two centuries
have passed since I last saw him;
he travelled neither on horseback nor in a carriage,
always on foot
he undid
the distances,
carrying neither sword nor weapon
but nets on his shoulder,
ax or hammer or spade;
he never fought with another of his kind–
his struggle was with water or with earth,
with the wheat, for it to become bread,
with the towering tree, for it to yield wood,
with walls, to open doors in them,
with sand, to form it into walls,
and with the sea, to make it bear fruit.

I knew him and he goes on haunting me.

The carriages splintered into pieces,
war destroyed the doorways and walls,
the city was a fistful of ashes,
all the dresses shivered into dust,
and for me he persists,
he survives in the sand,
when everything previously
seemed durable except him.

In the comings and goings of families,
sometimes he was my father or my relative
or almost was, or, if not, perhaps
the other one who never came back home
because water or earth swallowed him,
a machine or a tree killed him,
or he was that funeral carpenter
who walked behind the coffin, dry-eyed,
someone who never had a name
except as metal or wood have names,
and on whom others looked from above,
not noticing the ant,
only the ant-hill;
so that when his feet no longer moved
because, poor and tired, he had died,
they never saw what they were not used to seeing–
already other feet walked in his footsteps.

The other feet were still him,
the other hands as well.
The man persisted.
When it seemed he must be spent,
he was the same man over again;
there he was once more, digging the ground,
cutting cloth, but without a shirt,
he was there and he wasn’t, just as before
he had gone away and replaced himself;
and since he never had cemetery
or tomb, or his name engraved
on the stone that he sweated to cut,
nobody ever knew of his arrival
and nobody knew when he died,
so only when the poor man was able
did he come back to life, unnoticed.

He was the man all right, with no inheritance,
no cattle, no coat of arms,
and he did not stand out from others,
others who were himself;
from above he was gray, like clay,
he was drab, like leather,
he was yellow harvesting wheat,
he was black down in the mine,
stone-coloured in the castle,
in the fishing boat the colour of tuna,
horse-coloured on the prairies–
how could anyone distinguish him
if he were inseparable from his element,
earth, coal, or sea in a man’s form?

Where he lived, everything
the man touched would grow–
the hostile stones
broken
by his hands
took shape and line
and one by one assumed
the sharp forms of buildings;
he made bread with his hands,
set the trains running;
the distances filled with towns,
other men grew,
the bees arrived,
and though the man’s creating and multiplying,
spring wandered into the marketplace
between bakeries and doves.

The father of the loaves was forgotten,
the one who cut and trudged, beating
and opening paths, shifting sand;
when everything came into being, he no longer existed.
He gave away his existence, that was all.
He went somewhere else to work and ultimately
he went toward death, rolling like a river stone;
death carried him off downstream.

I who knew him saw him go down
until he existed only in what he was leaving–
streets he could scarcely be aware of,
houses he never would inhabit.

And I come back to see him, and every day I wait.

I see him in his coffin and resurrected.

I pick him out from all
the others who are his equals
and it seems to me that this cannot be,
that this way leads us nowhere,
that to continue so has no glory.

I believe that heaven must encompass
this man, properly shod and crowned.

I think that those who made so many things
ought to be owners of everything.
That those who make bread ought to eat.

That those in the mine should have light.

Enough now of gray men in chains!

Enough of the pale lost ones!

Not another man should pass except as a ruler.

Not one woman without her diadem.

Gloves of gold for every hand.

Fruits of the sun for all the shadowy ones!

I knew that man, and when I could,
when I still had eyes in my head,
when I still had a voice in my throat,
I sought him among the tombs and I said to him,
pressing his arm that was still not dust:

‘Everything will pass, you will still be living.

You set fire to life.

You made what is yours.’

So let no one be perturbed when
I seem to be alone and am not alone;
I am not without company and I speak for all.

Someone is hearing me without knowing it,
but those I sing of, those who know,
go on being born and will overflow the world.”

***************************************************************************

[Image: Book Cover]

Citation:
Neruda, P. (1995). Fully empowered (A. Reid, Trans.). New Directions. (Original work published 1962)

Title: Plenos Poderes, English translation: Fully Empowered
Author(s): Pablo Neruda, Alastair Reid (1995 translation)
Year: 1962
Genre: Poetry
Page count: 136 pages
Date(s) read: 6/1/25 - 6/3/25
Book 116 in 2025
***************************************************************************

[Sankar · Rating 4 out of 5]

My interests in poetry is selective based on the theme and genre. I have immensely enjoyed the works of Kahlil Gibran, Faust by Goethe, selected works of Shakespeare, and parts of Dante. However when it comes to collection of poems, i let my whim and the subject of poetry decide if i like them or not. There are many poems of Wordsworth, Robert Frost...that i love. Similarly, in this collection of Pablo Neruda's work, i like many. However, a few poems in this collection needs a certain rigorous devotion to poetry that i do not possess.

- Poet's Obligation, The Word, In the Tower, Births, To the dead poor man, Goodbyes, Thistle, The past, Sadness, The People - These i like a lot.

Neruda's poems stay close to Humans and hence carry a certain depth of emotion and poignancy. In that way, they differ from the other collections i have read of Frost, for example, which tends to lean more towards nature and its beauty. This is a good introduction to Neruda's work for me and would like to read more of him later. (As i have come to understand, he is more of a 'Love/Romatic' poet - That is not reflected in this collection).

[Tomás Nery · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Bela é a incerteza do orvalho,
cai na manhã
separando
a noite da aurora
e a sua fria dádiva
permanece
indecisa, aguardando o árduo sol
que a ferirá mortalmente.”

…

“Não se sabe
se fechamos os olhos ou a noite
abre em nós olhos refulgentes ,
se escava na parede do nosso sonho
até abrir uma porta.
Porém o sonho
é o veloz vestido dum minuto:
consumiu-se num latejo
da sombra
e caiu a nossos pés, desabitado,
quando se movimenta o dia e nos navega.
Esta é a torre donde vejo
entre a luz e a água silente
o tempo com a sua espada
e apresso-me então a viver,
respiro todo o ar,
transtorna-me o deserto
que se constrói sobre a cidade
e falo comigo sem saber com quem
desfolhando o silêncio
das alturas.”

[Peggy Heitmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like most poetry books, you love some-wish you had written the poems you love first. Then there are those that are mediocre, and those that do not appeal at all. Fully Empowered has all 3. But I can never read Neruda without being inspired to write poetry. So that in itself is genius as far as I am concerned. And no matter what I love the sea imagery. Of course, Neruda's work, especially in this book is full of ocean imagery.

[C · Rating 3 out of 5]

I usually struggle a bit getting into poetry books, but I enjoyed this one. I couldn't give it a higher rating however, because no one particular poem really stuck with me that I can remember. I think I'll try Neruda's love sonnets next, and I think I'll prefer those, but his writing style in general won me over even in this collection which featured poems surrounding some pretty random/niche themes.

I wanna write poetry just like Neruda.

[Blanca Ruiz · Rating 3 out of 5]

My rating mainly comes from the fact that I don't read poetry so it doesn't flow easy on me. I decided to read this book because I am trying to explore a little bit more the genra of poetry and was curious about Pablo Neruda's writings. Every night I read a poem or two and I have to say that none of the poems really clicked with me. Still every night I found myself looking forward to opening the book to read a poem, somehow I found in his words a certain peace and delight.

[Mike Futcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good quick read; it's always refreshing to dip into some of Pablo Neruda's poetry from time to time. His poems achieve that rare balance of being both multi-layered and yet simple, and so they are appropriate regardless of whether you want to relax or be challenged. They are accessible to all, as befitting Neruda's status as a champion of the common people. Indeed, Fully Empowered contains perhaps his greatest commentary on the working man, 'The People'.

[Su Yadanar · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I write these words down in my book, thinking
that this naked farewell, with him not present,
this simple letter, which cannot be answered,
is nothing more than dust, cloud, inks and words
and the only truth is that my friend is dead”

no collection of poems has made me feel this much, made my heart ache so much, god.

[Sukriti · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 to 3 stars. Some of his poems flowed beautifully, whereas in the case of others I could not really make sense of the context - lost in translation perhaps? Can't wait to read some more of his poems though!

[Hanna Abi Akl · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great work by a master wordsmith. Neruda's poetry is raw, timid, gentle, kind, empowering, frustrated and angry. He conveys the world the way it is shaped in his mind and his thoughts.
A masterful book that should leave the most enthusiastic poetry readers licking their lips in delight.

[Benjamin Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Several poems in this collection utterly floored me.

How in the hell can someone be so good? So tapped into the universe?

Pablo Neruda.. I'll read every word you ever wrote, and it won't be enough. I still won't be enough.

[Jimmy Donaruma · Rating 3 out of 5]

My rating is largely based on my own lack of education and understanding of poetry in general.

I’m positive as I engage this more, my rating will change... but as of now, I’m a 3 star poetry reader🤷🏻‍♂️

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

“A mi pecho
devuelvele la llave de la puerta cerrada,
destruida.

Por un minuto, por
una corta vida,
quitame luz y déjame
sentirme
perdido y miserable,
temblando entre los hilos
del crepúsculo,
recibiendo en el alma
las manos
temblorosas
de
la lluvia.”

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

" the petal fell, falling
until the only flower was the falling itself."

mmmm mmmm mmmm

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a keeper.

[Stephen Byrne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not a bad poem in this book by the master. Beautiful.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

such a beautiful poet.

[Wesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply a perfect book.

[Manisha Blaskevitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, moving, touching.

"The only thing you remember is your life."

How true this is brought me to tears. Neruda is, and will always be my favourite poet.

[Bella C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dulce y corto.

[AS · Rating 5 out of 5]

— Represents South America (Chile 🇨🇱) in my reading challenge Poetry from Seven Continents 🌎

Amazing! Wonderful! I want to read more
from Neruda and reread the ones in this book ❤️

[Bonnie Chaney · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite poetry books. There are many poems about the ocean in existence, but Neruda’s ocean poems are my favorites.