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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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<

Leaning into the evenings I throw my sad nets
to your ocean eyes.

There my loneliness stretches and burns in the tallest bonfire,
arms twisting like a drowning man's.

I cast red signals over your absent eyes
which lap like the sea at the lighthouse shore.

You guard only darkness, my distant female,
sometimes the coast of dread emerges from your stare.

Leaning into the evenings I toss my sad nets
to that sea which stirs your ocean eyes.

The night birds peck at the first stars
that twinkle like my soul as I love you.

Night gallops on her shadowy mare
scattering blue wheat stalks over the fields.

So glad I read this in both English and Spanish.

This bilingual book of poems was published in 2004, the centennial celebration of Pablo Neruda's birth. The collection gives an overview of his writing over the lifetime of this great Latin American poet. The editor chose eight poets to do the translations. The poems presented include some sensual love poems, and some political poems about both Chile and the Spanish Civil War. He wrote earthy poems about vineyards, gardens, the sea, and the ruins of Macchu Picchu. Death was prominent in some of his works, especially one written as his daughter was terminally ill. He also wrote a series of odes to various objects. I wish I knew more than a few words of Spanish since the original Spanish poems seemed to flow more musically. This is the beginning of Neruda's poem about his vocation in "Poetry":

"And it was at that age...poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river
I don't know how or when,
no, they weren't voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street it called me,
from the branches of the night,
abruptly from the others,
among raging fires
or returning alone,
there it was, without a face,
and it touched me."

Awesome, inspiring, picturesque, soothing, thought provoking, challenging, mystified, saddening - Neruda takes his reader through a plethora of the feelings, all the while never leaving his hand. And the reader would cling to it like a kid, fascinated to explore this new world full of wonders. Sometimes he makes you chuckle on the trivial detail looked from such an angel you'd never ever have imagined. Sometimes he leaves us in a mystified fog in heart or a rising smoke of craters of lava. The ocean and his lady love are the recurring visitors in his world. Many of the poems are subtly erotic and one couldn't help but feel how much in love he must be; for following his praise comes his vivid feelings full of love.

Intrigued I searched for him and was shocked to know he became politician in later part of life. And that his famous book was published when he was mere 19 years old. Well, I couldn't find the immaturity in the poems. I read other random poems online and would re-read them.
I had so much hoped to share some excerpts I had bookmarked but syncing my iPad, I lost many of my books including this one. I'm just short of crying in despair; there were so many books and so much highlighting job I did. I'd recover them eventually but it's a huge loss :(