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Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
This is one of the greatest collections of love poetry ever published. Inspired by Pablo Neruda's youthful relationships and injected with an expressive eroticism, these poems are as accomplished as they are evocative and sensual. First published in 1924 to international acclaim when Neruda was just nineteen, this book is still adored the world over for being one of the most memorable, intense and romantic works of poetry ever written.It is a work of poetry to be cherished by lovers old and new. The perfect Valentine's Day present.INTRODUCED BY LEO BOIX'The poems today remain as urgently gorgeous as freshly picked flowers' Carol Ann DuffyThe Vintage Classics Love Poems series brings together some of the most sensual, heart-breaking and romantic poetry ever written. Working in collaboration with Vintage Creative Director Suzanne Dean this edition has been created by Spanish illustrator Jesús Cisneros.
80 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1924
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About the author
Pablo Neruda
1,056 books9,564 followersPablo 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 4,823 reviews
March 14, 2008
Tonight I Can Write
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, "The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance."
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this is the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, "The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance."
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this is the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
November 16, 2023
Ew! Poetry!
Twenty short love poems by renowned Pablo Neruda. Coincidentally I think I must've read this like twenty years ago. My first poetry book, and sadly not my last.
I think Neruda is actually quite good, his fame precedes him; it's my issue, I just hate poetry. The only one I liked is number XVIII. “Here I Love You.”
And by like I mean it was the only one that didn’t make me barf uncontrollably.
-----------------------------------------------
PERSONAL NOTE :
[1924] [60p] [Poetry] [Conditional Recommendable]
-----------------------------------------------
Poesía ¡Pero qué asco!
Veinte poemas cortos de amor por el renombrado Pablo Neruda. Coincidentemente creo que leí esto casi veinte años atrás. Mi primer libro de poesía, y tristemente no el último.
De hecho creo que Neruda es bastante bueno, su fama lo precede; es mi problema, es sólo que yo odio la poesía. El único que me gustó es 18. “Aquí Te Amo.”
Y por gustar quiero decir que fue el único que no me hizo vomitar incontrolablemente.
-----------------------------------------------
NOTA PERSONAL :
[1924] [60p] [Poesía] [Recomendable Condicional]
-----------------------------------------------
Twenty short love poems by renowned Pablo Neruda. Coincidentally I think I must've read this like twenty years ago. My first poetry book, and sadly not my last.
I think Neruda is actually quite good, his fame precedes him; it's my issue, I just hate poetry. The only one I liked is number XVIII. “Here I Love You.”
And by like I mean it was the only one that didn’t make me barf uncontrollably.
-----------------------------------------------
PERSONAL NOTE :
[1924] [60p] [Poetry] [Conditional Recommendable]
-----------------------------------------------
Poesía ¡Pero qué asco!
Veinte poemas cortos de amor por el renombrado Pablo Neruda. Coincidentemente creo que leí esto casi veinte años atrás. Mi primer libro de poesía, y tristemente no el último.
De hecho creo que Neruda es bastante bueno, su fama lo precede; es mi problema, es sólo que yo odio la poesía. El único que me gustó es 18. “Aquí Te Amo.”
Y por gustar quiero decir que fue el único que no me hizo vomitar incontrolablemente.
-----------------------------------------------
NOTA PERSONAL :
[1924] [60p] [Poesía] [Recomendable Condicional]
-----------------------------------------------
June 24, 2011
3 THINGS ABOUT THIS BOOK
1. I went to Pablo Neruda's house once. Well, I went to one of his houses. He had three of them. I was teaching English in Santiago, Chile at the time. I went to Neruda's house in Valparaiso, which is a beach town. Weirdly enough, I visited on my twentieth birthday, on a lark, because I just happened to be vacationing in a nearby cabin with my host family.
The thing that I remember about Pablo Neruda's house is that it's set back in a grove of dark pine trees and that there's sand everywhere. The sky was dark that day and it was cold, even though it was in the summer.
What I remember most about the experience wasn't the house itself, or the tour, or the nationalistic trinkets that vendors were trying to sell, but rather the feeling that the pine trees around the house evoked. They were like a dark magic that still sits in my mind six years later. Curious. Because this is the thing that stands out to me most about Neruda's poetry: the magnetic feeling of nature. The dirt and the flesh and the elements and the cold, wet, hot, dry. His poetry is so sensual, so primal, so tied to the earth (I know I sound like a hippie, but its true). When I look at my journal entries from this period in my life they're full of this sort of talk. I wrote about stars and cloud formations and the consistency of mud and the shape of a cheekbone. Southern Chile does this to you. The land casts a spell on you. Neruda put this spell into words.
"Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
2. I read "Twenty Love Poems" about five years ago, but I thought it was corny at the time. The edition I read had all these terrible erotic etchings in it. I hate that. I almost threw up. I don't believe in illustration much, because it insults the reader's imagination. Especially illustration in poetry, a genre which usually uses abstract images.
This time when I read "Twenty Love Poems" I read it slowly. And it reminded me of southern Chile. It reminded me of gloomy mountains, and the beauty of the rivers and clouds and the darkness of the ocean. It reminded me of that period of time, when I turned twenty, right before my life changed in many ways.
This time when I read "Twenty Love Poems" it meant something to me, because now I have been in love. I have been in love and have experienced all of the sorrows and thrills of love. Mostly sorrows. But the hope of future thrills.
3. I found a musty Time/Life book about South America at a thrift store near my house. In the book there is a photograph of Mr. Neruda seated at a wooden desk at his house in Valparaiso. He is wearing a sweater and staring out the window. He has a pen and ink in front of him and he is holding his head as though he's deep in thought or distressed. Or both. I have hung this picture up in my apartment. It makes me want to write. It makes me remember all of the dark clouds. It makes me remember that "love is so short, forgetting is so long."
1. I went to Pablo Neruda's house once. Well, I went to one of his houses. He had three of them. I was teaching English in Santiago, Chile at the time. I went to Neruda's house in Valparaiso, which is a beach town. Weirdly enough, I visited on my twentieth birthday, on a lark, because I just happened to be vacationing in a nearby cabin with my host family.
The thing that I remember about Pablo Neruda's house is that it's set back in a grove of dark pine trees and that there's sand everywhere. The sky was dark that day and it was cold, even though it was in the summer.
What I remember most about the experience wasn't the house itself, or the tour, or the nationalistic trinkets that vendors were trying to sell, but rather the feeling that the pine trees around the house evoked. They were like a dark magic that still sits in my mind six years later. Curious. Because this is the thing that stands out to me most about Neruda's poetry: the magnetic feeling of nature. The dirt and the flesh and the elements and the cold, wet, hot, dry. His poetry is so sensual, so primal, so tied to the earth (I know I sound like a hippie, but its true). When I look at my journal entries from this period in my life they're full of this sort of talk. I wrote about stars and cloud formations and the consistency of mud and the shape of a cheekbone. Southern Chile does this to you. The land casts a spell on you. Neruda put this spell into words.
"Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
2. I read "Twenty Love Poems" about five years ago, but I thought it was corny at the time. The edition I read had all these terrible erotic etchings in it. I hate that. I almost threw up. I don't believe in illustration much, because it insults the reader's imagination. Especially illustration in poetry, a genre which usually uses abstract images.
This time when I read "Twenty Love Poems" I read it slowly. And it reminded me of southern Chile. It reminded me of gloomy mountains, and the beauty of the rivers and clouds and the darkness of the ocean. It reminded me of that period of time, when I turned twenty, right before my life changed in many ways.
This time when I read "Twenty Love Poems" it meant something to me, because now I have been in love. I have been in love and have experienced all of the sorrows and thrills of love. Mostly sorrows. But the hope of future thrills.
3. I found a musty Time/Life book about South America at a thrift store near my house. In the book there is a photograph of Mr. Neruda seated at a wooden desk at his house in Valparaiso. He is wearing a sweater and staring out the window. He has a pen and ink in front of him and he is holding his head as though he's deep in thought or distressed. Or both. I have hung this picture up in my apartment. It makes me want to write. It makes me remember all of the dark clouds. It makes me remember that "love is so short, forgetting is so long."
April 24, 2020
Sensual poetic beauty, with a lingering sadness, this collection of poems written when Chilean Neruda was only 19 is a remarkable feat, but was not received well for the intense and sexual content, this time being 1924 I can understand why, however, there is no explicit text it's more to do with imagery using the surrounding environment, charting oceanic movements of passion along with the changing weather, to tell of youthful love. " I have gone marking the atlas of your body / with crosses of fire. / My mouth went across: a spider, trying to hide. / In you, behind you, timid, driven by thirst.''. Becoming Neruda's best-loved work selling two million copies by the 1960s. Why? the imagery he conjures up is simply breathtaking but also painfully sad. ``On all sides I see your waist of fog, / and your silence hunts down my afflicted hours; / my kisses anchor, and my moist desire nests / in you with your arms of transparent stone.'' As irresistible as the sea, love is engulfing (``You swallowed everything, like distance. / . . . In you everything sank!''), but also departs as mysteriously as it arrived, leaving the poet's heart a ``pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.''
In terms of the intensity of romance and the tenderness of love, this collection encapsulates so much, each piece stands alone, but always remains close to the others.
Of the 20 poems on offer, not all made sense to me on first reading, but at only 70 pages in length, I will certainly be re-visiting in time. And then there's the seething "Song of Despair", a breakup song if I ever heard one, this for me was the highlight, words of such searing torment that were expressed with a heartbroken urgency. At such a young age, Neruda paints a mature picture of the abstract representations of life. To the contrary, the poems represent an open curiosity for different dimensions of life like sexuality, solitude, melancholy, and loss. Also, he does not idealize beauty and love, making his poetry far more authentically realistic. Nature is a constant presence throughout, with stars, rivers, wind, sky and sea reappearing in different contexts, lovers become nature itself. You can truly feel that each poem is reaching out to the other, sharing the same pleasure and plight.
In terms of the intensity of romance and the tenderness of love, this collection encapsulates so much, each piece stands alone, but always remains close to the others.
Of the 20 poems on offer, not all made sense to me on first reading, but at only 70 pages in length, I will certainly be re-visiting in time. And then there's the seething "Song of Despair", a breakup song if I ever heard one, this for me was the highlight, words of such searing torment that were expressed with a heartbroken urgency. At such a young age, Neruda paints a mature picture of the abstract representations of life. To the contrary, the poems represent an open curiosity for different dimensions of life like sexuality, solitude, melancholy, and loss. Also, he does not idealize beauty and love, making his poetry far more authentically realistic. Nature is a constant presence throughout, with stars, rivers, wind, sky and sea reappearing in different contexts, lovers become nature itself. You can truly feel that each poem is reaching out to the other, sharing the same pleasure and plight.
July 3, 2023
Despite the "read" date this book has on my Goodreads archives, in reality I read this before Goodreads existed, in my early teens. I loved Neruda to bits back then, I memorised some of my favourites, and was asked by teachers to recite them at school, for which I'd get great marks.
I also knew the same poem that Robin Williams recites in "Patch Adams" by rote, English and Spanish versions, and recorded a declamation to give to a former boyfriend as a gift.
I did all that as someone who doesn't like poetry, so that gives you an idea of how much I liked Neruda.
Then I read Neruda's memoirs, Confieso que he vivido, and never looked at his poetry the same way ever again.
Why? Because of something he confessed in that book, which I'm putting in spoilers; it's in Spanish, but you can use Google translate.
Yes, I know what some will say. Separate the artist from the work, his work speaks for itself, Nobel Prize for Literature, we all make mistakes, blah blah and etc. But I cannot in this case, this is , which is deeply revolting and runs contrary to my sense of right and wrong. And Neruda never paid for his crime, which makes it even worse.
So, no, I can't and I won't separate Neruda from his love poetry.
I also knew the same poem that Robin Williams recites in "Patch Adams" by rote, English and Spanish versions, and recorded a declamation to give to a former boyfriend as a gift.
I did all that as someone who doesn't like poetry, so that gives you an idea of how much I liked Neruda.
Then I read Neruda's memoirs, Confieso que he vivido, and never looked at his poetry the same way ever again.
Why? Because of something he confessed in that book, which I'm putting in spoilers; it's in Spanish, but you can use Google translate.
Yes, I know what some will say. Separate the artist from the work, his work speaks for itself, Nobel Prize for Literature, we all make mistakes, blah blah and etc. But I cannot in this case, this is , which is deeply revolting and runs contrary to my sense of right and wrong. And Neruda never paid for his crime, which makes it even worse.
So, no, I can't and I won't separate Neruda from his love poetry.
January 20, 2025
“Huntress of the depths of my eyes, your plunder stills your nocturnal regard as though it were water.”
There were some beautiful lines as you can see. But I must say there was a bit of cliché too. And lines that seemed heavy and awkward. (Translation issues?) I will need to read his non-romantic poems to get a better idea of his art. Still, as I mentioned at the outset, this poetry has its moments, which you can see in the highlights. Or below.
You are like nobody since I love you. Let me spread you out among yellow garlands. Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south? Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.
My words rained over you, stroking you. A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body. I go so far as to think that you own the universe. I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses. I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.
You are here. Oh you do not run away . You will answer me to the last cry . Cling to me as though you were frightened. Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes.
The rain takes off her clothes.
There were some beautiful lines as you can see. But I must say there was a bit of cliché too. And lines that seemed heavy and awkward. (Translation issues?) I will need to read his non-romantic poems to get a better idea of his art. Still, as I mentioned at the outset, this poetry has its moments, which you can see in the highlights. Or below.
You are like nobody since I love you. Let me spread you out among yellow garlands. Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south? Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.
My words rained over you, stroking you. A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body. I go so far as to think that you own the universe. I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses. I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.
You are here. Oh you do not run away . You will answer me to the last cry . Cling to me as though you were frightened. Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes.
The rain takes off her clothes.
July 26, 2024
I expected something extraordinary from an author so famous and admired. But, unfortunately, it spoils this effect of discovery. My first Neruda was a bilingual collection (where I also had fun reading the original version) consisting of three small clusters of different shapes. Elementary writing, but which reaches grandeur, where the woman is at the center; all types of women and metaphors. Neruda has managed to express himself around familiar topics such as love and women without falling into bad taste and missteps as if he were walking acrobatically on the blade of a knife. I fondly remember this reading; I enjoyed some metaphors and puns.
February 1, 2025
Upon hearing the news that Pablo Neruda may have died by poisoning:
One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII
Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, one of the greatest poets of all time—one of the great love poets, surrealist poets, political poets, poets of odes to common things. Here's one:
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose
from the earth lives dimly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.
The film The Postman featured a fictional Neruda in Italy giving advice to a postman about how to win the love of a woman. Do you tell her she is beautiful? No. Do you tell her she is nice? No. Wonderful? No. So what is the answer?! Men, young and old, are waiting for the answer, Don Pablo!
The answer: through metaphor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SMs8...
One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII
Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, one of the greatest poets of all time—one of the great love poets, surrealist poets, political poets, poets of odes to common things. Here's one:
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose
from the earth lives dimly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.
The film The Postman featured a fictional Neruda in Italy giving advice to a postman about how to win the love of a woman. Do you tell her she is beautiful? No. Do you tell her she is nice? No. Wonderful? No. So what is the answer?! Men, young and old, are waiting for the answer, Don Pablo!
The answer: through metaphor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SMs8...
April 29, 2018
How beautifully fragile we are, that so many things take but a moment to alter who we are, for forever. We are all, just an unforeseen encounter, an unexpected phone call, a diagnosis, a newly found love, or a broken heart away from becoming a completely different person. Our hearts betray us to the places we never thought be visiting, our reasons fail us to the most uninvited chasms we surrender ourselves into, knowingly. Our souls ripped open and raw, our hearts on display, Love leaves vulnerable at places, we never thought be touched. Neruda, explores love in many forms and stages. He writes about love that have been lost, love that replace solitude, and love that haunt lovers forever. At last, in the Song of Despair he encapsulates many of the concerns established through the sequence and offers a heightened emotional culmination: It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!
In you the wars and the flights accumulated.
From you the wings of the song bird rose.
You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like times. In you everything sank!
Love in Nerudian realms starts as the most intense of passions, the yet alone lover hastens to explore every pore, he aches to become one with the beloved, there’s nothing else but the yearning to be close to the other, the presence that is felt through a hand held, a voice heard, or a smile seen, leaves him battered with desire, as souls know no calendar, nor do they understand the time or distance, they strive to collide, to become one, even for a moment, that lives for eternity..
I was alone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me,
and night swamped me with its crushing invasion.
To survive myself I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling.
But the hour of vengeance falls, and I love you.
Body of skin, of moss, of eager and firm milk.
Oh the goblets of the breast! Oh the eyes of absence!
Oh the roses of the pubis! Oh your voice, slow and sad!
Lover is agitated to the point of uncertainty, the point where, we no longer are reader, but exchange roles, as if words are given to the choking thoughts we’ve long been weaving inside us, when I was reading them, I was filled with such longing and my heart sighed like it was in despair even when it wasn’t, or it truly was!
I like for you to be still, and you seem far away.
It souds as though you were lamenting, a butterfly cooing like a dove.
And you hear me from far away, and my voice does not reach you:
Let me come to be still in your silence.
And let me talk to you with your silence
that is bright as a lamp, simple as a ring.
You are like the night, with its stillness and constellations.
Your silence is that of a star, as remote and candid.
I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent,
distant and full of sorrow as though you had died.
One word then, one smile, is enough.
And I am happy, happy that it's not true.
Sensual Passion thaws into melancholy and melancholy weds despair, and we sense the tone of lover vicissitudes when faced with departure!
How terrible and brief was my desire of you!
How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.
Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,
still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.
Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,
oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.
Oh the mad coupling of hope and force
in which we merged and despaired.
And the tenderness, light as water and as flour.
And the word scarcely begun on the lips.
This was my destiny and in it was the voyage of my longing,
and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank!
In you the wars and the flights accumulated.
From you the wings of the song bird rose.
You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like times. In you everything sank!
Love in Nerudian realms starts as the most intense of passions, the yet alone lover hastens to explore every pore, he aches to become one with the beloved, there’s nothing else but the yearning to be close to the other, the presence that is felt through a hand held, a voice heard, or a smile seen, leaves him battered with desire, as souls know no calendar, nor do they understand the time or distance, they strive to collide, to become one, even for a moment, that lives for eternity..
I was alone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me,
and night swamped me with its crushing invasion.
To survive myself I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling.
But the hour of vengeance falls, and I love you.
Body of skin, of moss, of eager and firm milk.
Oh the goblets of the breast! Oh the eyes of absence!
Oh the roses of the pubis! Oh your voice, slow and sad!
Lover is agitated to the point of uncertainty, the point where, we no longer are reader, but exchange roles, as if words are given to the choking thoughts we’ve long been weaving inside us, when I was reading them, I was filled with such longing and my heart sighed like it was in despair even when it wasn’t, or it truly was!
I like for you to be still, and you seem far away.
It souds as though you were lamenting, a butterfly cooing like a dove.
And you hear me from far away, and my voice does not reach you:
Let me come to be still in your silence.
And let me talk to you with your silence
that is bright as a lamp, simple as a ring.
You are like the night, with its stillness and constellations.
Your silence is that of a star, as remote and candid.
I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent,
distant and full of sorrow as though you had died.
One word then, one smile, is enough.
And I am happy, happy that it's not true.
Sensual Passion thaws into melancholy and melancholy weds despair, and we sense the tone of lover vicissitudes when faced with departure!
How terrible and brief was my desire of you!
How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.
Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,
still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.
Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,
oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.
Oh the mad coupling of hope and force
in which we merged and despaired.
And the tenderness, light as water and as flour.
And the word scarcely begun on the lips.
This was my destiny and in it was the voyage of my longing,
and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank!
August 9, 2023
- القصائد حزينة ومعانيها عميقة جداً، وقد أجاد مروان حداد في ترجمتها بشكل ممتاز.
- مشكلتي مع الشعر المترجم هو الإيقاع، افقد الإيقاع المرتبط بالشعر في ذهني لكن هذا لا ينتقص من نيرودا على الإطلاق.
- في العديد من الأماكن احسست اني اقرأ لمحمود درويش:
او نزار قباني:
او مظفر النواب:
او أدونيس:
وبذلك فقد كانت قراءة ممتعة جداً، ويبقى ان "أجمل من عينيك.. حبي لعينيك"
- مشكلتي مع الشعر المترجم هو الإيقاع، افقد الإيقاع المرتبط بالشعر في ذهني لكن هذا لا ينتقص من نيرودا على الإطلاق.
- في العديد من الأماكن احسست اني اقرأ لمحمود درويش:
كنت وحيداً مثل نفق، تجنبتني العصافير،
واخترقني الليل بإجتياحه الطاغي
كم هو قصيرٌ الحب، وكم هو طويلٌ النسيان.
او نزار قباني:
قبلك استوطنتُ وحدتي التي تحتلينها،
وتعودَت، أكثر منك، أحزاني.
أحببتها، وأحياناً هي أيضاً أحبّتني.
او مظفر النواب:
ﻓﻲ هذه الساعة النّدية، أتذكّرك وأغنّي لك
او أدونيس:
من الشمس يسقط عنقودٌ ﻓﻲ ثوبك القاتم.
من الليل تنمو الجذور الهائلة
فجأةً من روحك،
وتعود لتنطلقَ الأشياء التي تختبئ فيكِ،
وكأنّ شعباً واهناً وحزيناً
وُلد لتوِّه منكِ ينهل غذاءه.
وبذلك فقد كانت قراءة ممتعة جداً، ويبقى ان "أجمل من عينيك.. حبي لعينيك"
August 8, 2007
I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.
I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.
Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.
In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.
worthy book for all the tragic romantikus outthere =P
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.
I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.
Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.
In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.
worthy book for all the tragic romantikus outthere =P
July 25, 2019
Stephen Dobyns, in his forward to this edition, tells of what occurred at a poetry event in Venezuela, sometime in the ‘60’s. After Chilean poet Pablo Neruda concluded his prepared reading, he opened himself up to requests. The first request, from a member of this audience of six hundred, was for poem #20 from this book (“Tonight I could write the saddest lines”). When Neruda apologized, saying he had neglected to bring that particular poem, “four hundred people stood up and recited the poem to him.”
For a man like me from the United States, such a story sounds almost fantastic, but then it is hard for a citizen of the good ol’ USA to imagine what its like to live in a country with such a passion for beautiful verse. But then, Spanish speakers do love their poetry, and this little book is one of the most popular of all time. Since Neruda published it in 1924 (when he was nineteen!), it has sold over 20 million copies.
This book is justly famous for its eroticism, but it should be praised for the richness of its natural images too. The images of trees, streams, and animals of all kinds never seem forced or automatic, but rather seem to be part of an ancient and effortless vocabulary, as if either Nature herself had written these passionate lines, or she were the lover to be praised.
This translation by W.S. Merwin—a distinquished poet in his own right—is the best known English version. It is simple, eloquent, and natural—as any good translation of this book must be.
I love “Tonight I could write the saddest lines,” but I won’t reproduce it here. It is rather long, and, besides, it is the best known poem from the book. Instead, I’ll share with you two of its shorter poems that I like almost as much:
III: AH VASTNESS OF PINES
Ah vastness of pines, murmur of waves breaking
slow play of lights, solitary bell,
twilight falling in your eyes, toy doll,
earth-shell, in whom the earth sings!
In you the rivers sing and my soul flees in them
as you desire, and you send it where you will.
Aim my road on your bow of hope
and in a frenzy I will free my flock of arrows
On all sides I see your waist of fog,
and your silence hunts down my afflicted hours;
my kisses anchor, and my moist desire nests
In you with your arms of transparent stone.
Ah your mysterious voice that love tolls and darkens
in the resonant and dying evening!
Thus in deep hours have I seen, over the fields,
the ears of wheat tolling in the mouth of the wind.
X: WE HAVE LOST EVEN
We have lost even this twilight
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
whiole the blue night dropped on the world.
I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.
Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin between my hands.
I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.
Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on my suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?
The book fell that is always turned at twilight
and my cape rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.
Always, always you recede through the evenings
towards where the twilight goes erasing statues.
May 19, 2018
I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
-Pablo Neruda
Neruda was accomplished in a variety of styles ranging from erotically charged love poems like his collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, surrealist poems, historical epics, and overtly political manifestos. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is an amazing collection of poetry. His words caress the senses; imagery so delicious and fulfilling you can not only see it but smell and taste and feel it, this is a great collection of passionate poetic imagery with a tinge of sadness but, sadly though, it was scandalized due to its sexual content which shows limited understanding of human beings in general.
Pablo Neruda brings love and rebellion to mind as soon as you think about him, he is considered to be synonym of love and strong emotions. Though I'm not a great fan of love poetry- I may have some preconceived notions- however I was spellbound and taken aback with pleasant surprise when I read Neruda. Time stops and modern life, with all its hustle and bustle, disappears. The weary reader, beaten to death by the speed at which today’s life is going, will be transported to a differently-paced world where time is not dictated by the rules of the clock but instead by the cadence of Neruda’s poetry. The city disappears and is replaced by mountains; the honking of cars is replaced by the singing of birds; and the indifference and cynicism that you feel will be replaced by a sense of longing. Such are the power of Neruda’s words. This is the world created by poetic artistry of Neruda.
Here I Love You
Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain.
I love you still among these cold things.
Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels
that cross the sea towards no arrival.
I see myself forgotten like those old anchors.
The piers sadden when afternoon moors there.
My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.
I love what I do not have. You are so far.
My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.
But night comes and starts to sing to me,
The moon turns its clockwork dream.
I like For You To Be Still
I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent,
and you hear me from far away and my voice does not touch you.
It seems as though your eyes had flown away
and it seems that a kiss had sealed your mouth.
Neruda's ballads exemplify an enchanting surrender that invigorates the helplessness of new love and evacuates the disgrace out of the advances that are only a toll before the music. Love as we know it is a dangerous passion, it makes human beings vulnerable to be deceived, it brings with it anguish which keeps on haunting them till eternity, however some of the passions may not be as demanding as Neruda so aptly congeals the parts of nature with that of a human body. But even that innocuous seeming passion brings the feeling of despair, for these parts of nature reminds one of one's lover and the vulnerability associated with love encircles the person.
So That You Will Hear me
The wind of anguish still hauls on them as usual.
Sometimes hurricanes of dreams still knock them over.
You listen to other voices in my painful voice.
Lament of old mouths, blood of old supplications.
Love me, companion. Don't forsake me. Follow me.
Follow me, companion, on this wave of anguish.
Every Day You Play
Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water,
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands
The tone in these ballads is steady, through these poems you can feel that these lyrics are addressing each other, having a similar anguish and joy. Be that as it may, in The Song of Despair there is an obvious change in the tone, the speaker is edgy as the memory of a sweetheart frequents him. The symbolism in these ballads is of wreck and misfortune: pit of garbage, furious give in of the shipwreck and substance. He likewise rehashes the line In you everything six times and each time its significance changes as the ballad develops in passionate power and agony. Additionally this reiteration gives the sonnet a melodic quality that relates with his want to title the ballad a song.
A Song of Despair
The memory of you emerges from the night around me.
The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.
Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!
........
It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour
which night fastens to all the timetables.
The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore.
Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate.
Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
Only the tremulous shadow twists in my hands.
Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything.
It is the hour of departure. Oh abandanoed one!
It may look to a casual reader that these poems are about love between man and woman (the preconceived notions about the writer would also help) but it would be naive of a reader to think so, for the poems magnificently unwraps the anguish, uncertainty, longing and despair which are so elegantly weaved with the disguise of love.
-Pablo Neruda
Neruda was accomplished in a variety of styles ranging from erotically charged love poems like his collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, surrealist poems, historical epics, and overtly political manifestos. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is an amazing collection of poetry. His words caress the senses; imagery so delicious and fulfilling you can not only see it but smell and taste and feel it, this is a great collection of passionate poetic imagery with a tinge of sadness but, sadly though, it was scandalized due to its sexual content which shows limited understanding of human beings in general.
Pablo Neruda brings love and rebellion to mind as soon as you think about him, he is considered to be synonym of love and strong emotions. Though I'm not a great fan of love poetry- I may have some preconceived notions- however I was spellbound and taken aback with pleasant surprise when I read Neruda. Time stops and modern life, with all its hustle and bustle, disappears. The weary reader, beaten to death by the speed at which today’s life is going, will be transported to a differently-paced world where time is not dictated by the rules of the clock but instead by the cadence of Neruda’s poetry. The city disappears and is replaced by mountains; the honking of cars is replaced by the singing of birds; and the indifference and cynicism that you feel will be replaced by a sense of longing. Such are the power of Neruda’s words. This is the world created by poetic artistry of Neruda.
Here I Love You
Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain.
I love you still among these cold things.
Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels
that cross the sea towards no arrival.
I see myself forgotten like those old anchors.
The piers sadden when afternoon moors there.
My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.
I love what I do not have. You are so far.
My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.
But night comes and starts to sing to me,
The moon turns its clockwork dream.
I like For You To Be Still
I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent,
and you hear me from far away and my voice does not touch you.
It seems as though your eyes had flown away
and it seems that a kiss had sealed your mouth.
Neruda's ballads exemplify an enchanting surrender that invigorates the helplessness of new love and evacuates the disgrace out of the advances that are only a toll before the music. Love as we know it is a dangerous passion, it makes human beings vulnerable to be deceived, it brings with it anguish which keeps on haunting them till eternity, however some of the passions may not be as demanding as Neruda so aptly congeals the parts of nature with that of a human body. But even that innocuous seeming passion brings the feeling of despair, for these parts of nature reminds one of one's lover and the vulnerability associated with love encircles the person.
So That You Will Hear me
The wind of anguish still hauls on them as usual.
Sometimes hurricanes of dreams still knock them over.
You listen to other voices in my painful voice.
Lament of old mouths, blood of old supplications.
Love me, companion. Don't forsake me. Follow me.
Follow me, companion, on this wave of anguish.
Every Day You Play
Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water,
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands
The tone in these ballads is steady, through these poems you can feel that these lyrics are addressing each other, having a similar anguish and joy. Be that as it may, in The Song of Despair there is an obvious change in the tone, the speaker is edgy as the memory of a sweetheart frequents him. The symbolism in these ballads is of wreck and misfortune: pit of garbage, furious give in of the shipwreck and substance. He likewise rehashes the line In you everything six times and each time its significance changes as the ballad develops in passionate power and agony. Additionally this reiteration gives the sonnet a melodic quality that relates with his want to title the ballad a song.
A Song of Despair
The memory of you emerges from the night around me.
The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.
Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!
........
It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour
which night fastens to all the timetables.
The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore.
Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate.
Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
Only the tremulous shadow twists in my hands.
Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything.
It is the hour of departure. Oh abandanoed one!
It may look to a casual reader that these poems are about love between man and woman (the preconceived notions about the writer would also help) but it would be naive of a reader to think so, for the poems magnificently unwraps the anguish, uncertainty, longing and despair which are so elegantly weaved with the disguise of love.
February 10, 2017
Tempting as it may appear to wrap the poetic pearls from this collection of Neruda’s heartbeats into a warm shawl of erotic wool, do resist it and pause.
These loquacious verses that assemble at the nape of a lover or ripple playfully across the soft mountains of a beloved’s waist, magnify when viewed through the dual lenses of night and water .
Neruda’s poems personify a charming surrender that fortifies the vulnerability of new love and removes the shame out of the advances that are nothing but a chime before the music.
These loquacious verses that assemble at the nape of a lover or ripple playfully across the soft mountains of a beloved’s waist, magnify when viewed through the dual lenses of night and water .
I have said that you sang in the windThroughout this collection, there are elements that sprout from these two shores, taking their own boundless attire once left to the ocean of the author’s imagination. I found it interesting to note that Neruda wrote these poems when he was just 19, implying the failures of his political aspirations and love relationships, besides his daughter’s premature death were still far away. Despite none of the later-years’ blackness charring his soul, his propensity to hinge his ode on night and water mirrors a certain yearning that isn’t a slave of reciprocity or longevity. Like the night and the nocturnal swagger, arousal is a reality and yet a mirage, something that will come in certainty but will be short-lived. Like the adaptability and slightness of water, love can superimpose rebuttals and tide over long leaps of unrequited love to reach a state where it will be nothing but itself, complete and calm.
like pines and like masts.
Like them you are tall and taciturn,
and you are sad, all at once, like a voyage.
You gather things to you like an old road.
You are peopled with echoes and nostalgic voices.
I awoke and at times birds fled and migrated
that had been sleeping in your soul.
Neruda’s poems personify a charming surrender that fortifies the vulnerability of new love and removes the shame out of the advances that are nothing but a chime before the music.
In the moist night my garment of kisses tremblesHis hero gets high on the flowers and seasons, on the days and the night, on proximity and distance, on silence and chatter – his hero is the quintessential lover who refuses to let the flame of his emotion die, shielding it with verses after verses of untamable urgency. And with the final poem, one can almost imagine him slumping to the ground, dropping his gaze from his object of love and yet, not allowing the humming of his heart to lay still.
charged to insanity with electric currents,
heroically divided into dreams
and intoxicating roses practicing on me.
Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,
still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.
October 26, 2019
Oír la noche inmensa, más inmensa sin ella.
Y el verso cae al alma como al pasto el rocío.
*
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
This is musicality being butchered.
Always more interested in the song of despair, but I feel like giving this another try due to someone's review, and after many years.
April 24, 19
*
Sometimes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Again, three stars. A bit tragic, despite being able to appreciate - in a way I couldn't before - Neruda's lyricism and its natural voluptuousness, especially considering he wrote this collection when he was only 19.
Pensando, enredando sombras en la profunda soledad.
Tú también estás lejos, ah más lejos que nadie.
Pensando, soltando pájaros, desvaneciendo imágenes,
enterrando lámparas.
*
Thinking, tangling shadows in the deep solitude.
You are far away too, oh farther than anyone.
Thinking, freeing birds, dissolving images,
burying lamps.
from Poem XVII
The rest of the experience remains intact. But I sensed it. This is the kind of poetry I can relate to; the intensity and sentimentality I can bear:
Lo perdido
¿Dónde estará mi vida, la que pudo
haber sido y no fue, la venturosa
o la de triste horror, esa otra cosa
que pudo ser la espada o el escudo
y que no fue? ¿Dónde estará el perdido
antepasado persa o el noruego,
dónde el azar de no quedarme ciego,
dónde el ancla y el mar, dónde el olvido
de ser quien soy? ¿Dónde estará la pura
noche que al rudo labrador confía
el iletrado y laborioso día,
según lo quiere la literatura?
Pienso también en esa compañera
que me esperaba, y que tal vez me espera.
*
What is lost
I wonder where my life is, the one that could
have been and never was, the daring one
or the one of gloomy dread, that other thing
which could as well have been the sword or shield
but never was? I wonder where is my lost
Persian or Norwegian ancestor,
where is the chance of my not being blind,
where is the anchor, the ocean, where the forgetting
to be who I am? I wonder where the pure
night is that the unlettered working day
entrusts to the rough laborer so that he
can also feel the love of literature
I also think about a certain companion
who waited for me once, perhaps still waits.
Love poem by Jorge Luis Borges
April 26, 19
* Later on my blog.
June 30, 2024
Achingly beautiful and haunting - words that transition from falling stars to fireflies as you are lost in wanting. One of the best books of poetry I have ever read. If you have ever lost someone you were in love with (romantically) you will not be able to stop the memories from coming back to you, even as you wonder how they are, and how your life could have been with them. Highest recommendation.
November 10, 2024
When it comes to poetry, my interest is centered on the British Romantic era, the only exception being epic poetry. Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair took me completely by surprise. I was simply blown away. I never thought I could find such lyrical beauty in 20th-century poetry, but I was wrong, and Neruda proved me wrong.
This collection has some of the best love poems that I have ever read. Blending nature and nature's greatest creation - the woman, in perfect harmony, Neruda's lyrical genius highlights love, sensuality, solitude, grief, and loss.
Every Day You Play celebrates love and sensuality.
"Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit every day between my hands.
You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.
Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes.
The birds go by fleeing.
The wind. The wind.
I can contend only against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.
You are here. Oh, you do not run away.
You will answer me to the last cry.
Cling to me as though you were frightened.
Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes.
Now, now too, little one you bring me honeysuckle
and even your breasts smell of it.
While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies
I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.
How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me
my savage solitary soul my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the grey light unwind in turning fans.
My words rained over you stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains
bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees."
In Leaning into the Afternoon, Neruda speaks of solitude in heartbreaking beauty.
"Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad nets
towards your oceanic eyes.
There in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens and flames,
its arms turning like a drowning man's.
I send out red signals across your absent eyes
that move like the sea near a lighthouse.
You keep only darkness, my distant female,
from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges."
Loss and Grief are best captured in The Song of Despair
"The memory of you emerges from the night around me.
The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.
Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!
Cold flower heads are raining over my heart.
Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.
In you the wars and the flights accumulated.
From you the wings of the song birds rose.
You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank!
It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.
The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.
Pilot's dread, fury of a blind diver,
turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!
In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.
Lost discoverer, in you everything sank!
You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,
sadness stunned you, in you everything sank!
I made the wall of shadow draw back,
beyond desire and act, I walked on.
Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost,
I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.
Like a jar you housed the infinite tenderness.
and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.
There was the black solitude of the islands,
and there, woman of love, your arms took me in.
There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and the ruins, and you were the miracle.
Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me
in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms!
How terrible and brief was my desire of you!
How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.
Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,
still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.
Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,
oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.
Oh the mad coupling of hope and force
in which we merged and despaired.
And the tenderness, light as water and as flour.
And the word scarcely begun on the lips.
This was my destiny and in it was the voyage of my longing,
and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank!
Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you,
what sorrow did you not express,
in what sorrow are you not drowned!
From billow to billow you still called and sang.
Standing like a sailor in the prow of a vessel.
You still flowered in songs, you still broke in currents.
Oh pit of debris, open and bitterwell.
Pale blind diver, luckless slinger,
lost discoverer, in you everything sank!
It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour
which the night fastens to all the timetables.
The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore.
Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate.
Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
Only the tremulous shadow twists in my hands.
Oh farther than everything.
Oh farther than everything.
It is the hour of departure.
Oh abandoned one!"
In Neruda's time, these sensual utterances were regarded as too vulgar for social sensitivity, but it is not a secret that he influenced the later writers with his openness, for his poetry is no objective idolization of love and beauty, but subjective experience - his own feelings and emotions. And that gives Neruda, authenticity, and also a sense of realism. That is why these poems resonate so much with the readers.
More of my reviews can be found at http://piyangiejay.com/
This collection has some of the best love poems that I have ever read. Blending nature and nature's greatest creation - the woman, in perfect harmony, Neruda's lyrical genius highlights love, sensuality, solitude, grief, and loss.
Every Day You Play celebrates love and sensuality.
"Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit every day between my hands.
You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.
Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes.
The birds go by fleeing.
The wind. The wind.
I can contend only against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.
You are here. Oh, you do not run away.
You will answer me to the last cry.
Cling to me as though you were frightened.
Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes.
Now, now too, little one you bring me honeysuckle
and even your breasts smell of it.
While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies
I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.
How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me
my savage solitary soul my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the grey light unwind in turning fans.
My words rained over you stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains
bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees."
In Leaning into the Afternoon, Neruda speaks of solitude in heartbreaking beauty.
"Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad nets
towards your oceanic eyes.
There in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens and flames,
its arms turning like a drowning man's.
I send out red signals across your absent eyes
that move like the sea near a lighthouse.
You keep only darkness, my distant female,
from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges."
Loss and Grief are best captured in The Song of Despair
"The memory of you emerges from the night around me.
The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.
Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!
Cold flower heads are raining over my heart.
Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.
In you the wars and the flights accumulated.
From you the wings of the song birds rose.
You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank!
It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.
The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.
Pilot's dread, fury of a blind diver,
turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!
In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.
Lost discoverer, in you everything sank!
You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,
sadness stunned you, in you everything sank!
I made the wall of shadow draw back,
beyond desire and act, I walked on.
Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost,
I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.
Like a jar you housed the infinite tenderness.
and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.
There was the black solitude of the islands,
and there, woman of love, your arms took me in.
There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and the ruins, and you were the miracle.
Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me
in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms!
How terrible and brief was my desire of you!
How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.
Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,
still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.
Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,
oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.
Oh the mad coupling of hope and force
in which we merged and despaired.
And the tenderness, light as water and as flour.
And the word scarcely begun on the lips.
This was my destiny and in it was the voyage of my longing,
and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank!
Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you,
what sorrow did you not express,
in what sorrow are you not drowned!
From billow to billow you still called and sang.
Standing like a sailor in the prow of a vessel.
You still flowered in songs, you still broke in currents.
Oh pit of debris, open and bitterwell.
Pale blind diver, luckless slinger,
lost discoverer, in you everything sank!
It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour
which the night fastens to all the timetables.
The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore.
Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate.
Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
Only the tremulous shadow twists in my hands.
Oh farther than everything.
Oh farther than everything.
It is the hour of departure.
Oh abandoned one!"
In Neruda's time, these sensual utterances were regarded as too vulgar for social sensitivity, but it is not a secret that he influenced the later writers with his openness, for his poetry is no objective idolization of love and beauty, but subjective experience - his own feelings and emotions. And that gives Neruda, authenticity, and also a sense of realism. That is why these poems resonate so much with the readers.
More of my reviews can be found at http://piyangiejay.com/
October 29, 2019
[Note on edit: This is not a review. These are peals of pleasure of a man drunk on Neruda wine, blurting out extempore, when he finished reading this poetry collection]
Pablo Neruda – the name evokes romance and revolution in my consciousness, a riot of metaphors impregnated with sui generis imagery, a dark and intense celebration of love and beauty, a flood of high emotions that assails my senses and then dulls them, such that in that state of mind I'm receptive to nothing in the world except Neruda's poetry. Everything else blacks out and I’m transported to a world I have never seen before – and it's beautiful, it is magnificent, it is dancing with the joy of love!
I had never desired to learn Spanish, but after reading Neruda I wished I could find a way to experience him in the original, just as I wish I could improve my Persian to read Hafez and Rumi without the medium of translation. I really don't know how much of Neruda's Spanish is lost in translation, but whatever that has come down to us in English is more than sufficient to adore him.
There is no one who so brilliantly marries nature's metaphors of earth, sea, wind, trees, moon, stars with the enchanting anatomy of the beloved. Every line testifies to Neruda's unique way of perceiving nature; he likens the beloved to nature, his beloved becomes nature. It is through meditations on the vast agricultural richness of his land that he finds the beloved, in the form of liberty, or in shape of an elusive woman, sometimes as an inextricable amalgamation of the two. They are inseparable.
It is hard to make selections from this book; every poem is a work of wonder. Instead of copying many full-length poems, I am sampling some lines to show the luxuriant quality of imagery and the thunderous motion of his poems, the finesse of his thought, and the intensity of his style. Below are some of my favourite, quotable lines:
The simple, fast and action-packed eroticism of the first lines of the opening poem, Body of a woman.
"Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,
you look like a world, lying in surrender.
My rough peasant’s body digs in you
and makes the son leap from the depth of the earth."
And see how, later on, from the 'white hills, white thighs', on which he gambols about with pleasure, she is transformed into a 'weapon' that offers him protection and provides him succor, through a process that remains a mystery to the poet and the reader:
"I was alone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me,
and night swamped me with its crushing invasion.
To survive myself I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling."
In 'Almost Out of the Sky' we have a 'cloudless girl', who shines like a clear sky, antithesis of greyness, an omniscient being whose presence is felt everywhere. But she is unknown and mysterious - she is a 'question of smoke', that appears and dissolves the next moment, without giving him a moment to regroup perceptions. She is as soft and silky as a 'corn tassel'. You can appreciate the finesse of this metaphor if you have pressed a corn tassel between your fingers!
In this poem the beloved is cast into a formidable natural force that envelops and dominates the small and insignificant existence of the lover. He is in awe of her. This poem is asking to be quoted in full, without omission. So here it is:
"Almost out of the sky, half of the moon
anchors between two mountains.
Turning, wandering night, the digger of eyes.
Let’s see how many stars are smashed in the pool.
It makes a cross of mourning between my eyes,
and runs away.
Forge of blue metals, nights of still combats,
my heart revolves like a crazy wheel.
Girl who have come from so far, been brought from so far,
sometimes your glance flashes out under the sky.
Rumbling, storm, cyclone of fury,
you cross above my heart without stopping.
Wind from the tombs carries off, wrecks, scatters your
sleepy root.
The big trees on the other side of her, uprooted.
But you, cloudless girl, question of smoke, corn tassel.
You were what the wind was making with illuminated leaves.
Behind the nocturnal mountains, white lily of conflagration,
ah, I can say nothing! You were made of everything.
Longing that sliced my breast into pieces,
it is time to take another road, on which she does not smile.
Storm that buried the bells, muddy swirl of torments,
why touch her now, why make her sad.
Oh to follow the road that leads away from everything,
without anguish, death, winter waiting along it
with their eyes open through the dew."
From Every day you play, Neruda finds the beloved in the most unlikely places. Holding a cluster of fruit is like holding beloved’s head:
"Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.
You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars
of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.
Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes."
And further on:
"You are here. Oh, you do not run away.
You will answer me to the last cry.
Cling to me as though you were frightened.
Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes.
How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the grey light unwind in turning fans."
Neruda ends the poem with a striking image:
"I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees."
--
Originally posted 30/12/14
Pablo Neruda – the name evokes romance and revolution in my consciousness, a riot of metaphors impregnated with sui generis imagery, a dark and intense celebration of love and beauty, a flood of high emotions that assails my senses and then dulls them, such that in that state of mind I'm receptive to nothing in the world except Neruda's poetry. Everything else blacks out and I’m transported to a world I have never seen before – and it's beautiful, it is magnificent, it is dancing with the joy of love!
I had never desired to learn Spanish, but after reading Neruda I wished I could find a way to experience him in the original, just as I wish I could improve my Persian to read Hafez and Rumi without the medium of translation. I really don't know how much of Neruda's Spanish is lost in translation, but whatever that has come down to us in English is more than sufficient to adore him.
There is no one who so brilliantly marries nature's metaphors of earth, sea, wind, trees, moon, stars with the enchanting anatomy of the beloved. Every line testifies to Neruda's unique way of perceiving nature; he likens the beloved to nature, his beloved becomes nature. It is through meditations on the vast agricultural richness of his land that he finds the beloved, in the form of liberty, or in shape of an elusive woman, sometimes as an inextricable amalgamation of the two. They are inseparable.
It is hard to make selections from this book; every poem is a work of wonder. Instead of copying many full-length poems, I am sampling some lines to show the luxuriant quality of imagery and the thunderous motion of his poems, the finesse of his thought, and the intensity of his style. Below are some of my favourite, quotable lines:
The simple, fast and action-packed eroticism of the first lines of the opening poem, Body of a woman.
"Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,
you look like a world, lying in surrender.
My rough peasant’s body digs in you
and makes the son leap from the depth of the earth."
And see how, later on, from the 'white hills, white thighs', on which he gambols about with pleasure, she is transformed into a 'weapon' that offers him protection and provides him succor, through a process that remains a mystery to the poet and the reader:
"I was alone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me,
and night swamped me with its crushing invasion.
To survive myself I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling."
In 'Almost Out of the Sky' we have a 'cloudless girl', who shines like a clear sky, antithesis of greyness, an omniscient being whose presence is felt everywhere. But she is unknown and mysterious - she is a 'question of smoke', that appears and dissolves the next moment, without giving him a moment to regroup perceptions. She is as soft and silky as a 'corn tassel'. You can appreciate the finesse of this metaphor if you have pressed a corn tassel between your fingers!
In this poem the beloved is cast into a formidable natural force that envelops and dominates the small and insignificant existence of the lover. He is in awe of her. This poem is asking to be quoted in full, without omission. So here it is:
"Almost out of the sky, half of the moon
anchors between two mountains.
Turning, wandering night, the digger of eyes.
Let’s see how many stars are smashed in the pool.
It makes a cross of mourning between my eyes,
and runs away.
Forge of blue metals, nights of still combats,
my heart revolves like a crazy wheel.
Girl who have come from so far, been brought from so far,
sometimes your glance flashes out under the sky.
Rumbling, storm, cyclone of fury,
you cross above my heart without stopping.
Wind from the tombs carries off, wrecks, scatters your
sleepy root.
The big trees on the other side of her, uprooted.
But you, cloudless girl, question of smoke, corn tassel.
You were what the wind was making with illuminated leaves.
Behind the nocturnal mountains, white lily of conflagration,
ah, I can say nothing! You were made of everything.
Longing that sliced my breast into pieces,
it is time to take another road, on which she does not smile.
Storm that buried the bells, muddy swirl of torments,
why touch her now, why make her sad.
Oh to follow the road that leads away from everything,
without anguish, death, winter waiting along it
with their eyes open through the dew."
From Every day you play, Neruda finds the beloved in the most unlikely places. Holding a cluster of fruit is like holding beloved’s head:
"Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.
You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars
of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.
Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes."
And further on:
"You are here. Oh, you do not run away.
You will answer me to the last cry.
Cling to me as though you were frightened.
Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes.
How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the grey light unwind in turning fans."
Neruda ends the poem with a striking image:
"I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees."
--
Originally posted 30/12/14
August 12, 2018
تا به من گوش دهی،
کلماتم
گاه نازکی میگیرند
چون رد گاکیان بر ساحل
دستبندی، از زنگولههای مست
برای دستهای چون انگورْ نرمت
و من نظاره میکنم از دور به کلماتم
- بیشتر از آن تو هستند، تا از آن من -
که از درد کهن من بالا میروند، چون پیچک
بالا میروند، همچنان که از دیوارهای نمور
گناه این بازی بی رحم به گردن توست
میگریزند از کنام تاریکم
هر چه را میآکنی تو، هر چه را میآکنی
پیش از تو، آنان پر میکردند انزوایی را که تو پر کردی
و آشناترند از تو به اندوهم
حال میخواهم برایت بگویند
آنچه من میخواهم بگویمت
تا گوش دهی، همان گونه که من میخواهم گوش دهی
باد اضطراب بر آنها هنوز میخزد
گردباد رؤیاها هنوز گاهی از پا درشان میافکند
به صداهای دیگری گوش میدهی در صدای دردناک من
لیک کلمات من از عشق تو لکهدار میشود
هر چه را میانباری تو، هر چه را میانباری
من آنها را
میکشم به رشتهٔ دستبندی بیپایان
برای دستهای سفیدِ چون انگورْ نرمت
کلماتم
گاه نازکی میگیرند
چون رد گاکیان بر ساحل
دستبندی، از زنگولههای مست
برای دستهای چون انگورْ نرمت
و من نظاره میکنم از دور به کلماتم
- بیشتر از آن تو هستند، تا از آن من -
که از درد کهن من بالا میروند، چون پیچک
بالا میروند، همچنان که از دیوارهای نمور
گناه این بازی بی رحم به گردن توست
میگریزند از کنام تاریکم
هر چه را میآکنی تو، هر چه را میآکنی
پیش از تو، آنان پر میکردند انزوایی را که تو پر کردی
و آشناترند از تو به اندوهم
حال میخواهم برایت بگویند
آنچه من میخواهم بگویمت
تا گوش دهی، همان گونه که من میخواهم گوش دهی
باد اضطراب بر آنها هنوز میخزد
گردباد رؤیاها هنوز گاهی از پا درشان میافکند
به صداهای دیگری گوش میدهی در صدای دردناک من
لیک کلمات من از عشق تو لکهدار میشود
هر چه را میانباری تو، هر چه را میانباری
من آنها را
میکشم به رشتهٔ دستبندی بیپایان
برای دستهای سفیدِ چون انگورْ نرمت
June 9, 2023
“
The light wraps you in its mortal flame.
Abstracted pale mourner, standing that way
against the old propellers of twilight
that revolves around you. ”
Neruda is one of the poets who taught me to love poetry the way it is; without over-analysing or trying to critically delve deeper below the words, as we were taught in school. The first collection that I read of him, he wrote this at the age of 17, and that’s 2 years younger than me, now. When I read this collection for the first time, and, even before I read it, I was actually startled by the audacity of Neruda. And I’m not exaggerating. Neruda was actually one of the first poets to explore sexual imagery and eroticism in his work and become accepted for it. Luckily he wasn’t born in India, though his path wasn’t what you call easy.
“ To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture. ”
In this rather short collection of twenty-one poems, Neruda quite masterfully amalgamated the quaint Chilean panorama with his personal reminiscences and the product is a dazzlingly amorous verse, which on the whole, delineates desire and despair as opposite sides of the same coin. One of the recurring themes, undoubtedly is a tinge of unadulterated passion, which also is the main reason behind the controversies among critics and readers alike.
Get down to the subject matter, and ask a teen of 19 what the book is about, except the aphrodisiac charm (the sad part is actually that a poet of such a calibre came renowned due to the scandal and controversies that his poems gave rise to, and among most of the precocious youth he’s an overrated author of erotica). One guy, who categorises anyone reading books as pseudo-intellectual, says:
“Well, the love poems ain’t that special, they are just tales of infatuation: the guy talkin’ bout his lover’s beauty over and over until you get bored. He speaks of white bees…he says: “Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs”… actually he teaches to flirt. “The Song of Despair” is basically he, talking about how sad he is for having lost his woman, and comparing her to the sea. The lone-lorne creature stands on the shore, feeling lonely because all the ships have set sail, and remembers his long-lost love. He also describes how hot and heavy their relationship was and compares her to the sea because everything sank into her. He’s actually trying not to sulk after being dumped.”
I will leave that to you to think. (I didn’t create that, just removed the slanguage.)
As for Neruda himself, he admitted himself to be astounded at the success of this book in specific. He brooded on “why this book, a book of love-sadness, of love-pain, continues to be read by so many people, by so many young people”. According to him, maybe it was that “Perhaps this book represents the youthful posing of many enigmas; perhaps it represents the answers to those enigmas.” (Eric Guibert, 2015)
I personally consider this one to be a delightful introduction to the legendary poet. Definitely not his best, but to use the common phrase, best served as hors d’oeuvre. Just don’t go in there expecting just erotic thrills. And try it with the Spanish parallel text, if you can.
Clasping my arms like a climbing plant
the leaves garnered your voice, that was slow and at peace.
Bonfire of awe in which my thirst was burning.
Sweet blue hyacinth twisted over my soul.
Abstracted pale mourner, standing that way
against the old propellers of twilight
that revolves around you. ”
Neruda is one of the poets who taught me to love poetry the way it is; without over-analysing or trying to critically delve deeper below the words, as we were taught in school. The first collection that I read of him, he wrote this at the age of 17, and that’s 2 years younger than me, now. When I read this collection for the first time, and, even before I read it, I was actually startled by the audacity of Neruda. And I’m not exaggerating. Neruda was actually one of the first poets to explore sexual imagery and eroticism in his work and become accepted for it. Luckily he wasn’t born in India, though his path wasn’t what you call easy.
“ To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture. ”
In this rather short collection of twenty-one poems, Neruda quite masterfully amalgamated the quaint Chilean panorama with his personal reminiscences and the product is a dazzlingly amorous verse, which on the whole, delineates desire and despair as opposite sides of the same coin. One of the recurring themes, undoubtedly is a tinge of unadulterated passion, which also is the main reason behind the controversies among critics and readers alike.
Get down to the subject matter, and ask a teen of 19 what the book is about, except the aphrodisiac charm (the sad part is actually that a poet of such a calibre came renowned due to the scandal and controversies that his poems gave rise to, and among most of the precocious youth he’s an overrated author of erotica). One guy, who categorises anyone reading books as pseudo-intellectual, says:
“Well, the love poems ain’t that special, they are just tales of infatuation: the guy talkin’ bout his lover’s beauty over and over until you get bored. He speaks of white bees…he says: “Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs”… actually he teaches to flirt. “The Song of Despair” is basically he, talking about how sad he is for having lost his woman, and comparing her to the sea. The lone-lorne creature stands on the shore, feeling lonely because all the ships have set sail, and remembers his long-lost love. He also describes how hot and heavy their relationship was and compares her to the sea because everything sank into her. He’s actually trying not to sulk after being dumped.”
I will leave that to you to think. (I didn’t create that, just removed the slanguage.)
As for Neruda himself, he admitted himself to be astounded at the success of this book in specific. He brooded on “why this book, a book of love-sadness, of love-pain, continues to be read by so many people, by so many young people”. According to him, maybe it was that “Perhaps this book represents the youthful posing of many enigmas; perhaps it represents the answers to those enigmas.” (Eric Guibert, 2015)
I personally consider this one to be a delightful introduction to the legendary poet. Definitely not his best, but to use the common phrase, best served as hors d’oeuvre. Just don’t go in there expecting just erotic thrills. And try it with the Spanish parallel text, if you can.
Clasping my arms like a climbing plant
the leaves garnered your voice, that was slow and at peace.
Bonfire of awe in which my thirst was burning.
Sweet blue hyacinth twisted over my soul.
July 16, 2015
I adore Neruda's poetry. The only reason that I am giving 4 stars and not 5, is because the "woman as a doll" imagery that he seems fond of using put me off every time I came across it...
December 19, 2020
One of the most beautiful collection of love poems ever (and followed by one which will bring tears to your eyes), Neruda is clearly a master of language and feeling and I always derive comfort from every time I read this book.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her.
How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
To think I don’t have her. To feel that I’ve lost her. To hear the immense night, more immense without her. And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.
Kind of speaks for itself, don't you think?
She loved me, sometimes I loved her.
How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
To think I don’t have her. To feel that I’ve lost her. To hear the immense night, more immense without her. And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.
Kind of speaks for itself, don't you think?
January 17, 2013
الحقيقة هناك أكثر من تقييم.
الأول للمترجم مروان حداد و الثاني لمحمود السيد علي و الذي تتفوق عليه بمراحل ترجمة قوقل الفورية! الترجمة الثالثة كانت للبطوطي و لم أعثر عليها حتى الآن. يمكن للترجمة أن تحط من قدر أكبر الشعراء و قد فعلها محمود السيد علي إذ صنع من نيرودا مشعوذاً يكتب الطلاسم لا الأشعار و المثالين التاليين بمقدورهما أن يوضحا الفكرة تماماً :
أرنوها نائية كلماتي / كلماتك أكثر منها كلماتي / تتسلق ألمي العتيق أشجار لبلاب* بينما يترجمها مروان حداد - شكراً جداً يا مروان - و أرى كلماتي بعيدة /وأبعد منها كلماتك / تتسلق كاللبلاب فوق آلامي القديمة. ما أعظم الفارق. فلنقرأ أيضاً هذه الترجمة الكارثية لمحمود : " أعالي البحار في قلب الأمواج/ جسدك بين ذراعي انسجام / سمكة إلى الأبد بروحي لصيقة / في يافع فلك السماء سريعة وئيدة " و هذا ما يذكرني بمراحل الدراسة الأولى و درس الجملة المفيدة و غير المفيدة. مروان ترجمها بهذا الشكل : "وسط الأمواج في المياه البعيدة / يستسلم جسدك الجميل بين ذراعيّ / مثل سمكة التصقت بروحي إلى الأبد / و أنا أسرع و أتمهل تحت زرقة السماء". ماهذه الأعمال البربرية التي يقوم بها المركز القومي للترجمة!
كلمات نيرودا كحبات العنب و هو يشبه إلى درجة كبيرة مدينة فينيسيا حيث يتوجب أن لا تزورها وحدك.
October 22, 2018
"Amé desde hace tiempo tu cuerpo de nácar soleado".
3.5🌟 en realidad.
Entiendo por qué hay tanta gente que es fan de Pablo Neruda. Leyendo estos poemas recordé que en la secundaria también leímos algunos, en especial el poema 20, me lo sé de memoria y es precioso..
Aunque mis favoritos fueron el 14, el 18 y el 20.
Sin dudas la pluma de este autor es bellísima, su vocabulario para expresar lo que siente es cautivador,es atrapante y intenso.
Usa palabras que nunca leí, y las mezcla con otras que de verdad me encantaba como quedaban, ya que eso te dice bien lo que siente.
Por lo que entendí los poemas son de desamor, y si bien algunos me gustaron, otros no me hicieron sentir nada,pero la mayoría si.Y la canción desesperada también me gustó.
Leeré más de este autor.
3.5🌟 en realidad.
Entiendo por qué hay tanta gente que es fan de Pablo Neruda. Leyendo estos poemas recordé que en la secundaria también leímos algunos, en especial el poema 20, me lo sé de memoria y es precioso..
Aunque mis favoritos fueron el 14, el 18 y el 20.
Sin dudas la pluma de este autor es bellísima, su vocabulario para expresar lo que siente es cautivador,es atrapante y intenso.
Usa palabras que nunca leí, y las mezcla con otras que de verdad me encantaba como quedaban, ya que eso te dice bien lo que siente.
Por lo que entendí los poemas son de desamor, y si bien algunos me gustaron, otros no me hicieron sentir nada,pero la mayoría si.Y la canción desesperada también me gustó.
Leeré más de este autor.
April 14, 2017
"Speechless, my friend,
alone in the loneliness of this hour of the dead
and filled with the lives of fire,
pure heir of the ruined day. "
It was glorious one ! ! !
As I had seen recently in some friend's review and Crossing my other books, I've chosen to read it first which had been waiting for me so long in my shelf.
Well, It's classic poetry with all the poetic devices were glittering in so wonderful form of words along in thread of rhythmic poetry. However, I'm keen reader of profound and deeply influenced kind of poetry, This book was given me same taste for me. I'm glad and ecastic with motion of calm words of poet.
Some of Great lines-
*The numberless heart of the wind beating
above our loving silence.
Orchestral and divine, resounding among the trees
like a language full of wars and songs.
*There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit. There were grief and the ruins, and you were the miracle. Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms!
*I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe ! love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long. Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her
*Between the lips and the voice something goes dying.
Something with the wings of a bird,
something of anguish and oblivion
*Upstream, in the midst of the outer waves, your parallel body yields to my arms like a fish infinitely fastened to my soul, quick and slow, in the energy under the sky.
"Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets
to that sea that beats on your marine eyes."
"The water walks barefoot in the wet streets.
From that tree the leaves complain as though they were sick"
*So that 'You Will Hear Me
But my words become stained with your love.
You occupy everything, you occupy everything.
I am making them into an endless necklace
for your white hands, smooth as grapes
alone in the loneliness of this hour of the dead
and filled with the lives of fire,
pure heir of the ruined day. "
It was glorious one ! ! !
As I had seen recently in some friend's review and Crossing my other books, I've chosen to read it first which had been waiting for me so long in my shelf.
Well, It's classic poetry with all the poetic devices were glittering in so wonderful form of words along in thread of rhythmic poetry. However, I'm keen reader of profound and deeply influenced kind of poetry, This book was given me same taste for me. I'm glad and ecastic with motion of calm words of poet.
Some of Great lines-
*The numberless heart of the wind beating
above our loving silence.
Orchestral and divine, resounding among the trees
like a language full of wars and songs.
*There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit. There were grief and the ruins, and you were the miracle. Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms!
*I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe ! love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long. Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her
*Between the lips and the voice something goes dying.
Something with the wings of a bird,
something of anguish and oblivion
*Upstream, in the midst of the outer waves, your parallel body yields to my arms like a fish infinitely fastened to my soul, quick and slow, in the energy under the sky.
"Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets
to that sea that beats on your marine eyes."
"The water walks barefoot in the wet streets.
From that tree the leaves complain as though they were sick"
*So that 'You Will Hear Me
But my words become stained with your love.
You occupy everything, you occupy everything.
I am making them into an endless necklace
for your white hands, smooth as grapes
April 13, 2022
Beautiful and sensual with a touch of lingering sadness.
One of my favs:
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example,'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.
Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
One of my favs:
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example,'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.
Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
May 24, 2022
أستطيع أن أكتب الأشعار الأكثر حزنًا هذه الليلة.
أكتب، مثلًا: "الليلة ملأى بالنجوم،
وترتعش الكواكب، زرقًا، من البعيد".
رياح الليل تدوّم في السماء وتغنّي.
أستطيع أن أكتب الأشعار الأكثر حزنًا هذه الليلة.
أحببتها، وأحيانًا هي أيضًا أحبّتني.
في ليالٍ مثل هذه أخذتها بين ذراعيّ.
قبّلتها مرّاتٍ كثيرة تحت السماء اللامتناهية.
أحبّتني، وأحيانًا أنا أيضًا أحببتها.
كيف لا أحب عينيها الواسعتين العميقتين.
أستطيع أن أكتب الأشعار الأكثر حزنًا هذه الليلة.
أن أفكر بأنّها ليست لي، أن أشعر بأنّي فقدتها.
لم أعُد أُحبها، صحيح، لكنْ ربّما أحبها.
كم هو قصيرٌ الحب، وكم هو طويلٌ النسيان.
***
أنت لي، أنت لي، سأصرخ مع نسيم المساء،
والريح تجرف صوتيَ الأرمل.
***
روحي وُلدتْ على ضفّة عينيكِ الحزينتين.
وفي عينيكِ الحزينتين يبدأ وطن الحلم.
***
كان العطش والجوع، وكنتِ أنتِ الفاكهة.
كان الأسى والدمار، وكنتِ أنتِ المعجزة.
أكتب، مثلًا: "الليلة ملأى بالنجوم،
وترتعش الكواكب، زرقًا، من البعيد".
رياح الليل تدوّم في السماء وتغنّي.
أستطيع أن أكتب الأشعار الأكثر حزنًا هذه الليلة.
أحببتها، وأحيانًا هي أيضًا أحبّتني.
في ليالٍ مثل هذه أخذتها بين ذراعيّ.
قبّلتها مرّاتٍ كثيرة تحت السماء اللامتناهية.
أحبّتني، وأحيانًا أنا أيضًا أحببتها.
كيف لا أحب عينيها الواسعتين العميقتين.
أستطيع أن أكتب الأشعار الأكثر حزنًا هذه الليلة.
أن أفكر بأنّها ليست لي، أن أشعر بأنّي فقدتها.
لم أعُد أُحبها، صحيح، لكنْ ربّما أحبها.
كم هو قصيرٌ الحب، وكم هو طويلٌ النسيان.
***
أنت لي، أنت لي، سأصرخ مع نسيم المساء،
والريح تجرف صوتيَ الأرمل.
***
روحي وُلدتْ على ضفّة عينيكِ الحزينتين.
وفي عينيكِ الحزينتين يبدأ وطن الحلم.
***
كان العطش والجوع، وكنتِ أنتِ الفاكهة.
كان الأسى والدمار، وكنتِ أنتِ المعجزة.
June 20, 2022
دوستانِ گرانقدر، این کتاب از اشعار «پابلو نرودا» تشکیل شده و شامل بیست و یک شعر میباشد که در میان این اشعار، نقاشی هایی از «پیکاسو» نیز به چشم میخورد... متأسفانه ترجمۀ نه چندان خوب، از لذتِ خواندنِ این اشعارِ عاشقانه میکاهد
به انتخاب جملاتی از میان این اشعار را برایتان در زیر مینویسم
---------------------------------------------
من نظاره میکنم از دور به کلماتم
بیشتر ازآنِ تو هستند تا ازآنِ من
از دردِ کهنۀ من بالا میروند چون پیچکها
**********************
خمشده رویِ عصرها، تورها می آویزم، تورهایِ غمگینی
به دریا که تکان ها دارد به چشمهایِ اقیانوسیِ تو
**********************
پاهایِ تو را چراغِ جانِ من برافروخته میسازد
شرابِ ترشِ من به لبانِ تو شیرین است
آه.. اِی دروگرِ آوازِ شامگاهیِ من
خواب هایِ عزلت زده ام، چه تو را ازآنِ من میدانند
**********************
راهِ مرا با کمانِ امیدِ خود نشانه بگیر
و من، در هذیان، فوجِ تیرهایم را رها خواهم کرد
همه سو، میانِ مه گونِ تو را میبینم
و سکوتِ تو ساعتِ غمزدهِ مرا میگیرد
و در تو با بازوانِ سنگیِ شفافت
بوسه هایم لنگر میفکند، آرزویِ نمورم آشیان میگیرد
**********************
دوستش ندارم دیگر، مسلّم است، امّا
شاید که دوستش دارم
چه کوتاهست عشق
چه درازست فراموشی
---------------------------------------------
امیدوارم این انتخابها را پسندیده باشید
«پیروز باشید و ایرانی»
به انتخاب جملاتی از میان این اشعار را برایتان در زیر مینویسم
---------------------------------------------
من نظاره میکنم از دور به کلماتم
بیشتر ازآنِ تو هستند تا ازآنِ من
از دردِ کهنۀ من بالا میروند چون پیچکها
**********************
خمشده رویِ عصرها، تورها می آویزم، تورهایِ غمگینی
به دریا که تکان ها دارد به چشمهایِ اقیانوسیِ تو
**********************
پاهایِ تو را چراغِ جانِ من برافروخته میسازد
شرابِ ترشِ من به لبانِ تو شیرین است
آه.. اِی دروگرِ آوازِ شامگاهیِ من
خواب هایِ عزلت زده ام، چه تو را ازآنِ من میدانند
**********************
راهِ مرا با کمانِ امیدِ خود نشانه بگیر
و من، در هذیان، فوجِ تیرهایم را رها خواهم کرد
همه سو، میانِ مه گونِ تو را میبینم
و سکوتِ تو ساعتِ غمزدهِ مرا میگیرد
و در تو با بازوانِ سنگیِ شفافت
بوسه هایم لنگر میفکند، آرزویِ نمورم آشیان میگیرد
**********************
دوستش ندارم دیگر، مسلّم است، امّا
شاید که دوستش دارم
چه کوتاهست عشق
چه درازست فراموشی
---------------------------------------------
امیدوارم این انتخابها را پسندیده باشید
«پیروز باشید و ایرانی»
Read
September 21, 2020دعونا اذن من العشرين قصيدة حب والأغنية اليائسة ولنكتفي من " نيرودا" بهذا البيت ..
" لا تشبهين أحداً منذ أحببتك " ....
" لا تشبهين أحداً منذ أحببتك " ....
February 14, 2024
This is a bilingual review: English first, then Spanish./Esta es una reseña bilingüe: inglés, luego español. (Muchas gracias, Miquel.)
"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres." - 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 by Paul of Tarsus.
"You know that language changes over a thousand years, and words that were then in use now seem strange to us; but they really did talk that way, and they spoke as eloquently about love as anyone did in any age or country." - Modern paraphrase from book 2 of Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer.
"Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs;
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes;
Being vex'd a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears:
What is it else? a madness most discreet,
A choking gall and a preserving sweet." - Romeo and Juliet Act 1, scene 1 by William Shakespeare.
"Just as time knew to move on since the beginning
And the seasons know exactly when to change
Just as kindness knows no shame
Know through all your joy and pain
That I'll be loving you always." - From the song "As" by Stevie Wonder.
As the above quotes show, humans have been trying to define "love" forever. It is a concept that we contemplate on in some way, shape, or form, constantly with varying levels of success or basic understanding. I was content long ago to let St. Paul have the definitive word on this topic...until I met Señor Pablo Neruda. I did not think it was possible to really be able to define love more than once. Pablo Neruda successfully does it...twenty times! The edition of this book I read is a dual-translation, but my quotes from it will be in english and from the poem that made me pick it up: "Juegas Todos Los Días":
"How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the grey light unwinds in turning fans.
My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
Until I even believe that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees." -Poema XIV
Desde siempre el hombre ha intentado definir el "amor". Es un concepto que contemplamos constantemente de muchas maneras, formas o figuras, con diferentes grados de éxito o de comprensión. Hace tiempo estaba contento con la manera en qué San Pablo definía este este tema... hasta que conocí el señor Pablo Neruda. No creía que fuera posible o capaces de definir el amor más de una vez. En cambio Pablo Neruda lo hace con éxito veinte veces! La edición de este libro que leí es una doble traducción, pero mis citas del poema "Juegas Todos Los Días" que recojo a continuación son en español:
Este poema me golpeó como un ladrillo y quería saber más y aprender sobre el hombre que lo escribió. Pablo Neruda fue un poeta casi desconocido de Chile que saltó a la fama instantánea cuando publicó este volumen de poesía. Él sería el segundo escritor sudamericano más conocido internacionalmente después del vecino argentino Jorge Luis Borges. También fue un socialista que desarrolló un estrecho vínculo con el primer presidente marxista elegido democráticamente en el mundo, Salvador Allende. Neruda moriría días después de la muerte de Allende y las consecuencias del golpe de Estado contra Allende por el general Augusto Pinochet.
Estos poemas son tan desvergonzados y directos que es casi chocante pensar que se publicaron en 1924. Pero Neruda no siente en absoluto vergüenza al hablar sobre el amor y una gran felicidad y alegría se transmite en cada uno de sus poemas. Su uso de imágenes daría T.S. Eliot un plazo para su dinero y él no le da un poema débil en el pelotón. Incluso la "canción desesperada" al final se encuentra todavía en el mismo nivel de intensidad apasionada como los 20 poemas anteriores. Si estás enamorado o lo has estado (éste es mi caso), podrás apreciar este libro de sincera y devota declaración a este concepto tan antiguo pero a la vez tan nuevo.
"Cuanto te habrá dolido acostumbrarte a mí, a mi alma sola y salvaje, a mi nombre que todos ahuyentan. Hemos visto arder tantas veces el lucero besándonos los ojos y sobre nuestras cabezas destorcerse los crepúsculos en abanicos girantes.
Mis palabras llovieron sobre ti acariciándote. Amé desde hace tiempo tu cuerpo de nácar soleado. Hasta te creo dueña del universo. Te traeré de las montañas flores alegres, copihues, avellanas oscuras, y cestas silvestres de besos.
Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos." - Poema XIV
"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres." - 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 by Paul of Tarsus.
"You know that language changes over a thousand years, and words that were then in use now seem strange to us; but they really did talk that way, and they spoke as eloquently about love as anyone did in any age or country." - Modern paraphrase from book 2 of Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer.
"Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs;
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes;
Being vex'd a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears:
What is it else? a madness most discreet,
A choking gall and a preserving sweet." - Romeo and Juliet Act 1, scene 1 by William Shakespeare.
"Just as time knew to move on since the beginning
And the seasons know exactly when to change
Just as kindness knows no shame
Know through all your joy and pain
That I'll be loving you always." - From the song "As" by Stevie Wonder.
As the above quotes show, humans have been trying to define "love" forever. It is a concept that we contemplate on in some way, shape, or form, constantly with varying levels of success or basic understanding. I was content long ago to let St. Paul have the definitive word on this topic...until I met Señor Pablo Neruda. I did not think it was possible to really be able to define love more than once. Pablo Neruda successfully does it...twenty times! The edition of this book I read is a dual-translation, but my quotes from it will be in english and from the poem that made me pick it up: "Juegas Todos Los Días":
"Every day you play with the light of the universe.This poem hit me like a brick and I wanted to hear more and learn about the man who wrote it. Pablo Neruda was an almost unknown poet from Chile who shot to instant stardom when he published this volume of poetry. He would be the second internationally known South American writer after neighboring Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges. He was also a socialist who developed a close bond with the world's first democratically-elected Marxist president Salvador Allende. Neruda would die days after Allende's death and the aftermath of the coup against Allende by General Agusto Pinochet.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water,
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a bunch of flowers, every day, between my hands.
You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.
Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes."
"The birds go by, fleeing.These poems are so unashamed and forthright that it is almost shocking to think this collection was published in 1924. Neruda is not at all embarrassed to talk about love and he feels the utmost happiness and joy in each of his poems. His use of imagery would give T.S. Eliot a run for his money and he does not give you a weak poem in the bunch. Even the "Song of Despair" at the end is still at the same high passionate intensity as the preceding 20 poems. Whether you are in love or use to be in love (speaking for myself), you will appreciate this book's honest devotion and declaration to this ancient and yet new concept.
The wind. The wind.
I alone can contend against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.
You are here. Oh, you do not run away.
You will answer me to the last cry.
Curl round me as though you were frightened.
Even so, a strange shadow once ran through your eyes.
Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle,
and even your breasts smell of it.
While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies
I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth."
"How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the grey light unwinds in turning fans.
My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
Until I even believe that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees." -Poema XIV
Desde siempre el hombre ha intentado definir el "amor". Es un concepto que contemplamos constantemente de muchas maneras, formas o figuras, con diferentes grados de éxito o de comprensión. Hace tiempo estaba contento con la manera en qué San Pablo definía este este tema... hasta que conocí el señor Pablo Neruda. No creía que fuera posible o capaces de definir el amor más de una vez. En cambio Pablo Neruda lo hace con éxito veinte veces! La edición de este libro que leí es una doble traducción, pero mis citas del poema "Juegas Todos Los Días" que recojo a continuación son en español:
"Juegas todos los días con la luz del universo. Sutil visitadora, llegas en la flor y en el agua. Eres más que esta blanca cabecita que aprieto como un racimo entre mis manos cada día.
A nadie te pareces desde que yo te amo. Déjame tenderte entre guirnaldas amarillas. Quién escribe tu nombre con letras de humo entre las estrellas del sur? Ah déjame recordarte cómo eras entonces, cuando aún no existías.
De pronto el viento aúlla y golpea mi ventana cerrada. El cielo es una red cuajada de peces sombríos. Aquí vienen a dar todos los vientos, todos. Se desviste la lluvia."
Este poema me golpeó como un ladrillo y quería saber más y aprender sobre el hombre que lo escribió. Pablo Neruda fue un poeta casi desconocido de Chile que saltó a la fama instantánea cuando publicó este volumen de poesía. Él sería el segundo escritor sudamericano más conocido internacionalmente después del vecino argentino Jorge Luis Borges. También fue un socialista que desarrolló un estrecho vínculo con el primer presidente marxista elegido democráticamente en el mundo, Salvador Allende. Neruda moriría días después de la muerte de Allende y las consecuencias del golpe de Estado contra Allende por el general Augusto Pinochet.
"Pasan huyendo los pájaros. El viento. El viento. Yo sólo puedo luchar contra la fuerza de los hombres. El temporal arremolina hojas oscuras y suelta todas las barcas que anoche amarraron al cielo.
Tú estás aquí. Ah tú no huyes. Tú me responderás hasta el último grito. Ovíllate a mi lado como si tuvieras miedo. Sin embargo alguna vez corrió una sombra extraña por tus ojos.
Ahora, ahora también, pequeña, me traes madreselvas, y tienes hasta los senos perfumados. Mientras el viento triste galopa matando mariposas yo te amo, y mi alegría muerde tu boca de ciruela."
Estos poemas son tan desvergonzados y directos que es casi chocante pensar que se publicaron en 1924. Pero Neruda no siente en absoluto vergüenza al hablar sobre el amor y una gran felicidad y alegría se transmite en cada uno de sus poemas. Su uso de imágenes daría T.S. Eliot un plazo para su dinero y él no le da un poema débil en el pelotón. Incluso la "canción desesperada" al final se encuentra todavía en el mismo nivel de intensidad apasionada como los 20 poemas anteriores. Si estás enamorado o lo has estado (éste es mi caso), podrás apreciar este libro de sincera y devota declaración a este concepto tan antiguo pero a la vez tan nuevo.
"Cuanto te habrá dolido acostumbrarte a mí, a mi alma sola y salvaje, a mi nombre que todos ahuyentan. Hemos visto arder tantas veces el lucero besándonos los ojos y sobre nuestras cabezas destorcerse los crepúsculos en abanicos girantes.
Mis palabras llovieron sobre ti acariciándote. Amé desde hace tiempo tu cuerpo de nácar soleado. Hasta te creo dueña del universo. Te traeré de las montañas flores alegres, copihues, avellanas oscuras, y cestas silvestres de besos.
Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos." - Poema XIV
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