One of the most beautiful poems I have ever read by Neruda.


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 of 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 peace with having lost her.

As if to bring her closer, my gaze searches for her,
My heart searches for her, and she is not with me.

The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, of then, now are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, it's true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched for the wind that would touch her ear.

Another's. She will be another's. As before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

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

Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is not at peace with having lost her.

Though this may be the final sorrow she causes me,
and these the last verses I write for her.

super interesting to have the english and spanish side by side here because I took away a much different meaning from the spanish text than the translations (which were not amazing imo??) i lovee reading spanish text because i think the language is so beautiful so getting to experience it through such a lush medium was such a lovely experience.

I loved the way neruda described chile in the poems insomnio y sí camarada, es hora de jardín

“delgada es nuestra patria
y en su desnudo filo de cuchillo
arde nuestra bandera delicada”

(thin is our homeland // and in the naked edge of her knife // our fragile flag burns)

My first Neruda, and I'm in love. Will be reading everything I can get my hands on

I feel like the translation or maybe the poetry itself was lacking.

I've always been a Neruda fan, reading his works in English. Now that I'm learning Spanish, I thought it would be a great idea to read one of my favourite poets in his native language along with the English translation.

Oh, my word. How to make the language come alive rather than to be just floppy dead grammar, hand it to Pablo to craft into beauty. A genius! I am in love with his writings all over again.

"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 mans"




2021: god I fucking love Neruda. so much. "were you to ask where I come from, I would have to talk with shattered things" - "why so many places, why does one day cling to another? why does a nights blackness drain into the mouth?" - "I toil deafly, circling above myself, like a raven above death"- like CMON man. he really did that huh. I'll be here on the floor if you need me.

Great bilingual collection of Pablo Neruda's poetry. I especially enjoy his love poems and bought the book initially to read those. However, there are a few included in this volume on other topics that I also found intriguing and beautiful as well.

"...Μου κόστισε πολύ, ώσπου να μάθω
ότι δε ζουν τα πάντα μόνο απ' έξω,
πως δεν πεθαίνουνε όλα εκ των ένδον
και πως ο χρόνος γράφει επιστολές
με πέτρες και νερό, μα για κανέναν,
για να μην ξέρει πια κανένας πού,
να μην προσμένει πια κανείς μας τίποτα."

These are poems to be sipped and savored, like thirty-year-old Madeira. They sing best, taste best, enroot themselves best when read late at night, accompanied by old, sharp, pungent cheese, olives and black bread. At one end of Neruda’s spectrum lie his sensuous, lyrical love poems — and at the other extremity are works such as “UNITED FRUIT CO.“; or “I EXPLAIN SOME THINGS”, bitter denunciations of foreign exploitation or the Spanish Civil War. He has a remarkable ability to merge concrete reality with abstract concepts, thereby creating something else—a state of mind that is neither concrete nor abstract, as in “ODE TO A WATCH IN THE NIGHT”:
“The watch
went on cutting time
with its little saw . . .”
Particularly impressive is “THE PEOPLE”, his celebration of Everyman:
“. . . he never fought with another of his kind—
his struggle was with water or with earth,
with the wheat, for it to become bread,
with the towering tree, for it to yield wood,
with walls, to open doors in them,
with sand, to form into walls,
and with the sea, to make it bear fruit.”
But above all, what sets Neruda apart from all the poets I know is his sensuous love poetry, such as in his “ODE TO WINE” that includes lines such as:
“My love, suddenly
your hip
is the curve of the wineglass
filled to the brim . . .”
Delightful.

This is my first reading of Neruda and I was a little underwhelmed. I know that reading translated poetry is often an unsatisfactory experience, but I don't read Spanish. Some of the poems were a bit "clunky" and I don't know if the rhythms and word choices of the translators are to blame, or if Neruda had his clunky moments.

Anyway, a less than transcendent reading experience for me.

A new collection of Neruda poems with some new translations. I loved the introduction to this collection. The editor describes how he came about with the idea of creating a book with new and updated translations of Neruda. This book was a work of love by the editor...the love of Neruda, the love of the Spanish language, the love of poetry.

My favorite books of Neruda are those with dual translations (Spanish on one side and English on the facing page). Although my Spanish is fairly limited, there is something magical about seeing Neruda's words in their original language.

I enjoyed the cross-section of poems that the editor selected and have only one complaint that I would have liked to see the poems separated in sections, perhaps by publishing dates/books they were originally published in/themes.

This would be a great addition to anyone's Neruda collection or a wonderful introduction to someone new to Neruda.

Having the untranslated poems right next to the English versions made this extra-glorious for me.