'the infinite beat of the sea and of doubt...' because. just because.

4.5/5 stars. A work of art. ♥️

This was my first dive into poetry. Therefore, some of it went over my head. As I went on, I found it easier to get into the rhythm of it. Some of the poems really moved me with their imagery. Some where a little more difficult for me to enjoy as much. I am eager to reread it and be absorbed in it better.

4/5 Stars (%77/100)

It was a really good collection of poems and this is the first time I'm properly meeting Neruda. I've heard so much about him and I can see why people like him so much. Even though I enjoyed listening to his poems (thanks to the narrator as well), I realized, after finishing it, that I don't really remember the names of the poems. If I already know the poet and their work, then the audiobook is more enjoyable for me. Since this is my first time with Neruda, I can't seem to remember anything, only the feeling of joy and calmness. I guess I'll have to get a physical copy of his poems. Still, I would recommend this audiobook to other people, especially the love poems of Neruda.

This beautifully written, side-by-side bilingual compilation of ‘essential’ poems by the Nobel Laureate poet of Chile makes for satisfying readings given their feeling, imagery, and creative originality conveyed to the reader, sometimes as though the poems are a one-sided dialogue with a person or place (Santiago). The selections are from works written between 1925 and Neruda’s death in 1973. The evocative love poems include odes, cantos, ‘sonetos,’ and others. They reflect his changing personal and political views over his lifetime. ‘Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion’ begins the book. It and the other ones inspired recitations and classical music compositions. Greg Predota at Interlude put together a sampling of the latter under the title The Music of Poetry Pablo Neruda: “Body of a Woman” (2021). Several translators worked on the poems, and it is said to be the best translation.

A superb collection from the poetic master and titan with a great collaboration of translators. I've read this in Spanish to friends from South America and it has connected every time. Inspiring and prolific work as well as a great introduction for someone seeking to discover a reflection of his soul.

Neruda is hard to pull off in English — best example I can think of from this collection is his famous “¡Venid a ver la sangre por las calles!” which becomes an awfully flat English “come see the blood in the streets!” His is a poetry of feeling, and his images are simple, more suggestive of emotions (which themselves are somewhat vague) than they are of any concrete. What carries them in Spanish is their cadence, Neruda’s almost saccharine melody, intoning, drawing out, almost wailing his words. This just doesn’t happen in the English translations here, with the exception of a few by Robert Hass which take a great deal of necessary liberties and fruitfully depart from the ‘original’ to make a good poem in English.

As for Neruda himself as a poet? I am most compelled by his Residence on Earth series and some of his last poems, Memorial de Isla Nega which are quite sober and introspective. The love poems are sweet but ultimately loose, I feel — just too many mixed metaphors and vague images, they’re gestures but they fan out over too broad a horizon, one wonders what was really said. Same goes for the residence poems but they seem to evoke a much more concrete state of dislocation.

Heights of Machu Picchu (which he famously misspelled) has me for the first few sections then loses me. The socialist triumphalism just does not satisfy (for this reader) the sorts of despair and solitude that the first part of the poem so lucidly portrays. I feel most of Neruda’s poems suffer from a surplus of rhetoric, which makes sense — he saw himself as one who spoke to ‘el Pueblo’ the people the crowd. Can the poet also be an orator? I’m not sure. For me, as Louise Gluck eloquently put in her Nobel lecture, poetry is just more private, secret even, a transmission between two solitudes. Not of the Public square but of the bedroom, the study. Neruda’s poems in Memorial de Isla Negra achieve this quality — before these poignant, introspective poems I never felt Neruda was speaking to me. He was speaking to himself, speaking over me, speaking to some idea or some grand vision. His last poems are limpid, they struggle with their words a bit — how to say all that one needs to say, that one would wish to say, as the dusk of one’s life approaches? Here it seems at last that Neruda becomes a great poet, not so much in the popular bombast for which he is so well known.

There was something so tangible in each of his poems that I could literally feel the poems physically between the pages and my eyes. Anywho Neruda is a genius. Hands down one of the greatest poets out there and this book sure did spark my interest in his other works. Also, this is a great starter for those who are not much familiar with Neruda's works. And as a side note, he (poems) made me understand why the Spanish language is so rich in words and expressions.

Pablo Neruda describes love and romance perfectly. When I am lost to explain how I feel, I turn almost always to Neruda, who seems to have all the words necessary to help me describe, and better understand, the things and people I love.

If you enjoy poetry, if you're prone to being knocked sideways by a simple group of words perfectly formed, expressing a thought or feeling - then you've got to stop what you're doing and get your hands on a copy of this book! This was a no-brainer for me, I LOVE Neruda, his twenty love poems rendered me speechless. But the poems in this collection are sublime. I guess so much is lost in translation (I'd nearly learn Spanish just to read Neruda's words exactly as he wrote them) but Mark Eisner, Alastair Reid et.al. have done outstanding work here. I have read some Neruda translations on-line that didn't have the same potency for me and I didn't understand why, until I read the same ones translated here, and once again I became spell-bound by Neruda's passion. You can't help but fall in love with him and with poetry in general. There are a handful of poems from Veinte Poemas - 'Leaning into the evenings I throw my sad nets to your ocean eyes' - beautiful. From Estravagario; Plenos Poderes and Memorial de Isla Negra which includes one of my all time favourites - 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' - magical! Honestly, if its possible to feel at home, to feel safe and secure and loved by a book, then this is the one, its like the great man is right there with you, helping you to inhabit every line.

Definitely the best place to start if you don't know Neruda's poetry. It's a beautiful selection from a lengthy career, allowing you to see and feel Neruda's movement from deeply personal lyricism to Whitmanesque celebration and grim political realism. The editors suggest reading the Spanish (on facing pages) even if you don't know the language and as someone whose Spanish isn't strong enough to claim anything like fluency, I strongly agree. It made me envy the musical possibilities opened by the incorporation of grammatical subject into the verb, and Neruda's sense of vowel flow is incomparable.

I love that this book is bilingual, that I can read the poems in both Spanish and English.

Neruda is a master at his craft, no one can write like that anymore, not without sounding forced, or dated, or overly dramatic.