Bravo to Copper Canyon Press for bringing these twenty-one beautiful poems to press with their recent Kickstarter campaign. Forrest Gander, the translator has seen this several times, "The last thing we need is another Neruda translation." So a new book published some 40 years after his death may seem like, at worst, a cash cow; at best, something unique. Maybe this is somewhere in the middle, although being a big Neruda fan, I have been excited about this new book.
First, the book. Sized almost like a bound notebook with some copies of the actual poems written on the actual notebooks, or in one case, a menu, makes it nice to hold. The text and fonts are beautiful to read and although it's a bilingual edition, the English and Spanish are in separate sections. A most useful notes section by Darío Oses, director of the Pablo Neruda Foundation, details everything from where they found the poems, to poetical references and other interesting points. I really liked this section. There is a donor list as well as two good introductions essays the translator and Darío Oses.
Forrest Gander does an excellent translation but I went to the heart of the poems, Neruda's Spanish. Simple, clean, elegant, playful and insightful. The poems span from the fifties to the seventies and themes range from his great muse and third wife Matilde, to simply being a Chilean - love, politics and everything in between.
Neruda believed in the simple things, so bread (pan), wheat (trigo), as well as many natural images, bees (abejas), rocks (piedras) and fire (fuego) are abound. But so are odd things like telephones - an abominable, black instrument (instrumento abominable y negro, 20) and cosmonauts (Estos dos hombres solos, 21). Guess this dates him (and myself).
Most poems are short, a couple of pages, but the longest poem reflecting about life when he turned 60 (4) is pure beauty.
Quién eres amigo, enemigo de mi paz errante?
Who are you friend, enemy of my wandering peace?
Or beautiful in design such as 15 "A los Andes" which is a long, narrow poem reflecting of his native Chile:
Cordilleras
nevadas,
Andes,
blancos,
paredes
de mi patria,
cuánto
silencio,
rodea
la voluntad, las luchas
de mi pueblo.
(it carries on...)
Mountains,
snowy
Andes
white
walls
of my homeland,
how much silence
Rounds
the will, the fight
of my people.
For a small book, the poems pack a small punch. Something for everyone. Something beautiful to read in a world that often seems like ugly things keep happening. Neruda is timeless.