هیچ‌چیز مرا به سمتت نمی‌آورد
همه‌چیزِ تو، مرا دور می‌کند،انگار تو همان نیمروزی
انگار تو جوانیِ شوریده‌وارِ زنبوری
مستیِ موجی،قدرت سنبله‌های گندمی
با این همه،قلب غمگینم تو را می‌جوید
و من بدن شاد و صدای سیال تو را دوست دارم
پروانه‌ی گندمگون شیرین و دل‌انگیز
تو چون گندمزاری و آفتاب،چون شقایق و آب.
____________________

first time reading poetry in spanish… that was religious. i went somewhere. will be chasing that feeling for a while

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!

Like many people, I first encountered the poetry of Pablo Neruda when I was 15 or 16, a romantic teenager on the lookout for love poetry that would speak to me or speak for me. Upon reading "The Captain's Verses" and "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair" for the first time as a rash young teenager, I rashly leapt to the conclusion that Neruda's poetry was the one to fit the bill. Looking back from the vantage point of adulthood, I now realize that Neruda's vision of love is starkly different from my own, and when I reread "Twenty Love Poems" these days, my dominant emotional response is one of bafflement. I feel baffled by the extent to which Neruda objectifies the woman he loves. Over and over, he likens her to a "toy doll" or a "snail," a field of wheat or a plot of earth waiting to be plowed; at times, I get the feeling that he considers her and her body to be one and the same. Casting his beloved as an inscrutable and sometimes terrifying force of nature, Neruda never seems to acknowledge her agency, her point-of-view, or the fact that she even has a mind. Similarly, when I reread Neruda's "Elemental Odes," I feel alienated by what strikes me as an anti-intellectual agenda lurking beneath the beautiful and vivid words: in "Ode to the Book," for example, he states, "My poems have not eaten poems....I'm on my way with dust in my shoes, free of mythology." Like his love poetry, these lines of Neruda's leave me feeling baffled, wondering what I am to make of this seemingly total rejection of centuries of mythological and literary tradition. I love Neruda, I really do, but reading his poetry sometimes leaves me with a sinking feeling that the world is opaque, and its opaqueness is sometimes dazzling, sometimes frightening, but it is never quite satisfying. I am left feeling a little suffocated, too.

Maybe I'll return to Neruda in a few years and feel differently. For now, my favorite Neruda poems are, curiously, the ones that interested me the least when I was first exposed to his works as a teenager: i.e., the bloody political poems, like the absolutely masterful "I'm Explaining a Few Things."

Cuando tenía quince años y vivía enamorada hasta del aire , las palabras que repetía constantemente siempre estaban relacionadas con la tristeza . Cada vez que vivía un amor apasionado no correspondido , me sumergía en depresiones eternas y me regocijaba recitando cosas como "Es tan corto el amor y tan largo el olvido" . Siempre que sentía que iba a morirme de amor y escuchaba mi historia en cada poema , Neruda era el más importante .

Después crecí .Hace poco , en la facultad -hogar de los arrogantes -, un profesor muy INTELECTUAL-de esos que saben tanto que de lo único que no dudan es de sus propias palabras - nos las hizo corta a todas las locas de amor por Neruda :

-El poeta ese no vale nada - dijo con palabras un poco más elegantes - Uno no puede sentirse identificado con palabras de amor que alguien en otro tiempo escribió para una persona en especial . Es como robar . Nadie puede tomar prestada una declaración de amor que nada deja a la imaginación ,no te podés apropiar de eso . No son tuyas . Además - terminó - es poesía mal escrita .

Para mi profesor , hombre de mundo , de letras y de varios idiomas ,la poesía de Neruda y de tantos como él estaba sobrevalorada , era más comercial que otra cosa . En cambio , con mucho entusiasmo , nos recomendaba un poeta olvidado llamada Emeterio Cerro - creo - que jugaba con los sonidos . La poesía de ese decía así:

Mondonará , Mondonará
Fluyido Lamosol .

El truco , decía mi profesor , estaba en darle nuestro significado . Buscar en el juego inentendible , algo que tuviese sentido para nosotros . De eso si nos podíamos apropiar , eso si lo podíamos tomar prestado .

Demás está decir que odié el Mondonará tanto como odiaba las peliculas de Lynch . Estaba fuera de mi comprensin y requería mucha movilización de neuronas .

Sin embargo , Con el tiempo entendí lo que quería decir . Neruda es poesía popular . Cualquiera puede entenderla , cualquiera . Eso era lo que le molestaba a este intelectual de elite . El quería hacernos entrar en un círculo de poca gentey trataba a ese estilo de poetas como "la chusma" . Le daba fastidio , más que nada , que un popular hubiese sido premiado con el premio Nobel y a Borges se lo hubiera dejado de lado .

Nunca me dejó de gustar Pablito , pero si capté lo que quiso decir el profe . No es poesía muy complicada , no es Shakespeare ni Borges pero no deja de ser hermosa , no deja de contar una historia de vida , de amores y revoluciones.

كم هو قصير الحب
وكم هو طويل النسيان. :'))

Breve pero intenso. Destaco especialmente el poema 15 y el 20 (que aunque suene típico, es simplemente una obra de arte).

[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

Beautiful! Profusion of sweet and tender emotions poured at will.
Sensual, poetic, nostalgic and melancholy.

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 n  nightn and n  watern.

n  I have said that you sang in the wind
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.n

Throughout 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.

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. n  

In the moist night my garment of kisses trembles
charged to insanity with electric currents,
heroically divided into dreams
and intoxicating roses practicing on me.

n His 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.n  

Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,
still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.

n

Pablo Neruda. Nghe danh nhà thơ người Chi-lê này đã lâu và cuối cùng thì bây giờ mình cũng đã đọc được thơ của ông ấy. Không có mỹ từ nào trên đời mình có thể dùng để miêu tả hay khen tặng chất thơ của ông ấy nữa, vì đơn giản là vần thơ nào của Neruda đối với mình cũng là một mỹ từ, một kiệt tác, một khối kết tinh hoàn hảo nét đẹp của ngôn ngữ thơ ca. Thấu triệt. Tràn đầy mỹ cảm. Rung động. Giàu hình ảnh và gợi tả đến mức nghẹt thở.

Thơ của Neruda ra đời giữa thời điểm châu Âu đang trải qua một cuộc chuyển mình và những cuộc cách mạng làm lung lay những thể chế và hệ thống các niềm tin/trật tự xã hội vốn đã tồn tại khá bền vững từ trước đến nay ở lục địa già. Tư duy con người, khoa học, chế độ cai trị… và tỉ tỉ thứ khác ở châu Âu đang bị thách thức bởi sự thay đổi, và thơ của Neruda cũng phản ánh điều đó, phản ánh thay đổi trong cuộc sống, đồng thời buộc độc giả cũng trải nghiệm sự thay đổi ấy như cái cách tự nhiên thay đổi theo thời gian.

Thơ của Neruda mang đến một trường phái cảm thụ thơ ca hoàn toàn mới mẻ và không giống nhà thơ nào trước đó. Một trường phái vừa siêu thực vừa thực tế, trường phái tôn vinh và bày tỏ tình cảm, niềm trân trọng, sự tôn thờ với những thứ trần trụi nhất, gần gũi nhất, gợi tình nhất: cơ thể đàn bà, tình yêu xác thịt.... Những vần thơ không bóng bẩy, màu mè, tráng lệ, những con người bình thường nhất cũng có thể hiểu và cảm được. Nhưng nó cũng siêu thực trong cái cách mà ông miêu tả những điều trần trụi, gần gũi, gợi tình ấy bằng cách liên hệ, so sánh chúng với những yếu tố của thế giới tự nhiên rộng lớn, hùng vĩ: hoa, mây, trời, đồi, núi, ánh trăng, biển cả… Thiên nhiên của xứ sở Chi-lê là một chủ thể rất được Neruda trân quý và đứa vào những bài thơ của mình; có bài thơ mình đếm không biết bao nhiêu loài hoa đã xuất hiện trong đó.

Và như thế, thơ của Neruda trở thành một dạng bình-thường-nhưng-không-tầm-thường; hoa mỹ nhưng không quá sến súa hay sáo rỗng; hấp dẫn, gợi cảm nhưng không hề dung tục một chút nào. Có ai ngờ sex lại có thể được miêu tả đẹp đến dường này qua thơ của Neruda:

“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.”

(from “Body of a Woman”)

Và có ai có thể thực sự tôn thờ cơ thể, sức sống, nét đẹp khỏe mạnh của người phụ nữ như đang tôn thờ thiên nhiên như Neruda cơ chứ:

“Girl lithe and tawny, nothing draws me towards you.
Everything bears me farther away, as though you were noon.
You are the frenzied youth of the bee,
the drunkenness of the wave, the power of the wheat-ear.

My somber heart searches for you, nevertheless,
and I love your joyful body, your slender and flowing voice.
Dark butterfly, sweet and definitive
like the wheat-field and the sun, the poppy and the water.”

(from “Girl Lithe and Tawny”)

Thơ của Neruda mang đến cho mình đủ mọi cảm giác, cảm xúc và gợi nên trong mình những tưởng tượng khác nhau mà mình không sao giải thích được. Như thể ông đã nhấc mình ra khỏi cái hiện tại phàm trần mà mình đang sống để thoát ly đến với thế giới siêu thực mà ông đã tạo dựng nên. Và giá trị đích thực của những vần thơ Neruda đã viết ra có thể được tóm tắt một cách trọn vẹn nhất mà cũng bao hàm nhất bằng đoạn văn này trong phần Lời giới thiệu của Cristina García:

n  “He reminded readers that even if they'd been to hell and back, they could still fall in love, experience beauty and rapture, nurse their indignities and personal tragedies, and still appreciate that "the best poet is the man who delivers our daily bread." Neruda poignantly rendered the world of the common man and connected him, through the redolent details of his natural world, to forces larger than himself, forces untainted by human crassness and ambition. His poetry challenged readers to less static lives, lives susceptible to transformation, like nature itself.”n

Sau đây là một số những đoạn thơ trích từ các bài thơ mà mình yêu thích nhất trong tập thơ này. Những câu từ được mình bold đậm là những câu, những từ mình tâm đắc nhất trong những đoạn thơ đó. Ôi mẹ ơi hay đến chết mất thôi!!!! Bản pdf mình down về đọc còn có cả tranh minh họa của Pablo Picasso nữa OMG!!!

“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.”

(from "Every Day You Play")


“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.
The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.
And as I love you, the pines in the wind
want to sing your name with their leaves of wire.”

(from "Here I Love You")


“The morning is full of storm
in the heart of summer.

The clouds travel like white handkerchiefs of good-bye,
the wind, traveling, waving them in its hands.

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.”

(from "The Morning Is Full")


“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.”

(from "Almost out of the Sky")


“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.

But my words become stained with your love.
You occupy everything, you occupy everything.

! am making them into an endless necklace
for your white hands, smooth as grapes.”

(from “So that You Will Hear Me”)


“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.

I feel your eyes traveling, and the autumn is far off:
gray beret, voice of a bird, heart like a house
towards which my deep longings migrated
and my kisses fell, happy as embers.”

(from “I Remember You As You Were”)


“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.

Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets
to that sea that beats on your marine eyes.

The birds of night peck at the first stars
that flash like my soul when I love you.

The night gallops on its shadowy mare
shedding blue tassels over the land.”

(from “Leaning into the Afternoon”)


“I who lived in a harbor from which I loved you.
The solitude crossed with dream and with silence.
Penned up between the sea and sadness.
Soundless, delirious, between two motionless gondoliers.

Between the lips and the voice something goes dying.
Something with the wings of a bird, something of anguish and oblivion.
The way nets cannot hold water.
My toy doll, only a few drops are left trembling.
Even so, something sings in these fugitive words.
Something sings, something climbs to my ravenous mouth.
Oh to be able to celebrate you with all the words of joy.”

(from “I Have Gone Marking”)


“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 be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.”

(from “Tonight I Can Write”)


n  “There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and the ruins, and you were the miracle.”n

(from “The Song of Despair”)

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?