The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems by pablo neruda

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

Who wouldn’t love Pablo Neruda?

My long-standing love affair with him started during Humanities class in college when my professor made us read and interpret “Tonight I Can Write”. I found it to be the saddest poem, but it was also hauntingly beautiful and enthralling and held a deeper connection with my own juvenile heartache. Since then, I never stopped getting moved by his poetry.

0 0 Reply

AnotherFreeSoul

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

I can write the saddest verses tonight

Write, for example, "The night is full of stars,
twinkling blue, in the distance."

The night wind spins in the sky and sings.

I can write the saddest verses tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like this I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times beneath the infinite sky.

She loved me, at times I loved her too.
How not to have loved her great still eyes.

I can write the saddest verses tonight.
To think that I don't have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the verse falls onto my soul like dew onto grass.

What difference that my love could not keep her.
The night is full of stars, and she is not with me.

That's all. In the distance, someone sings. In the
distance.

My soul is not at piece with having lost her.

Rumi inspires me. Rilke haunts me. Neruda picks me up by the nap of the neck and moves me around the room. All of a sudden I'm in and out of vivid imagery, situation, soulful connection. I love his work. Since Spanish is my second language I read the translations first, but then I read it once again just as he wrote it. So good.

0 0 Reply

toffee_bean

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

0 0 Reply

rdturbo

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

I'll say that this, my first dip into the Neruda universe, affected me more than any encounter with 20th century poetry I've yet had. But I also haven't had many. I'm still at a "greatest hits" level when it comes to poetry, especially modern poetry. Before Neruda, I would have said Yates was my fave 20th century poet, much more than Eliot, but Neruda eclipsed them by a lot.

There's a line in the editor's introduction that compares Neruda's style to red wine. The comparison really stuck with me as I read the poems. They're natural yet dark, the elements imbedded in them, even deteriorating, but becoming richer to the senses for the decline. He's writing about his experiences with love and revolution, yet it seems more than universal- positively elemental.

The poems are arranged on a, more than less, chronological level. I found it a bit depressing that the last poems, such as "The Egoist," found the man self-critical for his withdrawal from the world. I felt a bit angry at him for withdrawing, as he had so much power to engage, but also angry at him for being angry at himself. He had given so much of himself to progress, and, in the early 1970s, was sensing early on the decline of the Left's advancements in the world. Perhaps he could not help but take these set-backs personally.

0 0 Reply

Vicariun

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

The Chilean Pablo Neruda is officially the sexiest poet ever, which, like, do you think that worked out well for him? It sounds good, but remember - he's still a poet. Being the sexiest of all poets is like being the kindest of all cats, right?

I know what you're thinking, you're like what, are you crazy, people love poets, they get all kinds of horny for poets, read a girl/boy a poem and it's like guaranteed sploosh/sproing. But do they really? Ask yourself this: the situations you're thinking of when you say this, where some person or other was entranced by some romantic sexy dark brooding poet, did they happen in real life? Or did they happen in a book? Do you think it's possible that the person who wrote the book also wrote some poems? Are you thinking of Mary Shelley and that's all you got?

Here's what poets are like in real life: they are very poor and they want to talk all the fucking time. Also, homeboy looked like this

and if you're going to look like that you had better write some damn fine poetry just to get back to even.

But this is the dude who came up with this:

I want to do with you
what spring does with the cherry trees

so all bets are off at this point, and so are many of the panties.

That poem is from his first and most famous book, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, and it's not even in this collection, which is too bad, but there are others from it:

I went alone as a tunnel. Birds fled from me,
I was invaded by the power of the night

that make you grab the arms of your chair to hold you down, like you get vertigo, the lines are so strong. Here's that song of despair:

n
I no longer love her, it's true,
but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, and forgetting is so long.

Oh god, right, where did you dig up so much truth?

What happens with Neruda is that there's a shift, and from the poet of sex he becomes the poet of revolution. Everything changes for him. People are mad. Where's the sexy stuff? they ask. He explains some things, in a poem called "I explain some things."

n
Through the streets the blood of the children
ran simply, like children's blood.
...
Facing you I have seen the blood
of Spain rise up
to drown you in one single wave
of pride and knives!
...
You will ask why his poetry
doesn't speak to us of dreams, of the leaves,
of the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets,
come and see
the blood in the streets,
come and see the blood
in the streets!

So that's pretty straightforward. The blood of children in the streets is not sexy and his poetry became less sexy. He became a Marxist and a revolutionary, and he was eventually assassinated by Pinochet, not before winning the Nobel Prize and firmly establishing himself as one of the greatest poets of the century. Here are lines he wrote for his daughter, mortally ill:

n
You stand your ground, chock full
of teeth and lightning

These are dazzling things to say. Neruda's daughter died when she was eight.

I like this edition for its variety of translators, and its selection of poems from his whole life. Others will tell you to just go with 20 Love Songs because honestly, we just want the sexy stuff, right? I'm going to memorize some of this in Spanish and whisper it into someone's ear and then I'm gonna have seeeeeeeex, is what you're thinking. This edition has the Spanish on facing pages, so you will be able to do that, but listen: it will not work. You'll seem pretentious, and anyway that person will already have decided whether you're going to fuck or not, based almost entirely on how much they were in the mood to have sex before you even met. It was never about you at all.

0 0 Reply

syndel

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

I see your dry currents moving,
broken-off hands I see growing,
I hear your oceanic plants
creaking, shaken by night and fury,
and I feel leaves drying inwards,
amassing green materials
to your desolate stillness.

- - -

I leaned my head into the deepest waves,
I sank through the sulfuric peace,
and, like a blind man, returned to the jasmine
of the exhausted human springtime.

- - -

Your petals pound the surface of the world,
your underwater grains are always trembling,
the smooth green algae dangle their menace,
the schools of fish swim in their teeming swarms,
and all that comes up in the threaded nets
is the dead lightning of their scales,
a wounded millimeter in the distance
of all your crystalline totalities.

- - -

In the night, in your hand
my watch glowed
like a firefly.
I heard
its ticking:
like a dry whisper
it arose
from your invisible hand.
Then your hand
returned to my dark breast
to gather my sleep and its pulse.

- - -

And I, tiny being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars.
My heart broke loose with the wind.

0 0 Reply

Caller_of_Void

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

5.0
Some books are so good that they deserve to be given a place of prominence in a library, or book store. The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems was so beautiful, so haunting and so breathtakingly well written that it should be displayed only in the most prestigious of art galleries. Every word in this collections of poems, that covers a wide array of topics such as death, love, the Spanish Civil War, and worker's rights, feels as if it is a gift. This is why I love poetry!

0 0 Reply

Sadboy74

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 17,2025

Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks

All those men were there inside,
when she came in totally naked.
They had been drinking: they began to spit.
Newly come from the river, she knew nothing.
She was a mermaid who had lost her way.
The insults flowed down her gleaming flesh.
Obscenities drowned her golden breasts.
Not knowing tears, she did not weep tears.
Not knowing clothes, she did not have clothes.
They blackened her with burnt corks and cigarette stubs,
and rolled around laughing on the tavern floor.
She did not speak because she had no speech.
Her eyes were the colour of distant love,
her twin arms were made of white topaz.
Her lips moved, silent, in a coral light,
and suddenly she went out by that door.
Entering the river she was cleaned,
shining like a white stone in the rain,
and without looking back she swam again
swam towards emptiness, swam towards death.

u never cant have enuff neruda's books >:D<

0 0 Reply

Leave a Review

You must be logged in to rate and post a review. Register an account to get started.

The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

pablo neruda lawrence ferlinghetti robert hass stephen mitchell alastair reid

This edition

More editions

About the author

pablo neruda

Readers also enjoyed

Community Reviews