Neruda does not play with the intangible. He does not waste words with the abstract. One simply needs to read and take in the pure and stark versification of the sensualities of life, both in love and lust.

Neruda’s distinct style in poetry is easily distinguishable.

First, his work is intuitive of the austere beauty of nature and his Chilean roots. The verses are reflective of the uncompromising beauty of the environment that he has witnessed in his formative years. The poems allude to the vastness of the pines, the heart of summer, sweet blue hyacinths, still ponds, barren lands, and white bees.

n  

“I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains,
bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic basket of kisses.”
(74, Poem XIV)

n

Second, Neruda also leads us to enjoy the sweetness existing in realm of the senses. He fearlessly incorporates love and lust in his verses.

n  “My somber heart searches for you, nevertheless,
And I love your joyful body, your slender and flowing voice.”
(75, Poem XIX)

“Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.”
(77, Poem XX)n

But to read and consume these two aspects of his poetry in a compartmentalized manner would be an affront to why Gabriel Garcia Marquez called Neruda n  “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language."n* Neruda combines the sensual experience of the individual with the beauty of the natural and the reader is treated to a union unlike any other.

n  “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.”
(3 Poem I)

“I go so far a to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains,
bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic basket of kisses.
I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”
(74, Poem XIV)n

notes:
* The fragrance of guava: Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez.

I did not give a short introduction on Neruda reserving most of my comments later on for a review on his memoirs.

My copy is bilingual, a Spanish-English translation by W.S. Wermin, which definitely polished my rusting Spanish speaking skills.

The same copy is infused with Pablo Picasso’s works like this,


You get the idea that it seeks to perhaps contribute to the general them of the book, but I have no sound knowledge if this was sanctioned or approved by Neruda in its first translated printing in 1969, five years before he died, or whether the same pictures accompanied the first print in Chile in 1924, or if it appeared only in this copy published by Penguin Books.





This book forms part of my remarkably extensive reading list on Nobel Prize for Literature Laureates

This review, along with my other reviews, has been cross-posted at imbookedindefinitely

Ahora me dieron ganas de abrazar...bueno les dejo el que más me "sacudió"...

n  Poema 20n

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Escribir, por ejemplo: "La noche esta estrellada,
y tiritan, azules, los astros, a lo lejos".
El viento de la noche gira en el cielo y canta.
Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Yo la quise, y a veces ella también me quiso.
En las noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos.
La besé tantas veces bajo el cielo infinito.
Ella me quiso, a veces yo también la quería.
Cómo no haber amado sus grandes ojos fijos.
Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Pensar que no la tengo. Sentir que la he perdido.
Oír la noche inmensa, más inmensa sin ella.
Y el verso cae al alma como al pasto el rocío.
Qué importa que mi amor no pudiera guardarla.
La noche está estrellada y ella no está conmigo.
Eso es todo. A lo lejos alguien canta. A lo lejos.
Mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.
Como para acercarla mi mirada la busca.
Mi corazón la busca, y ella no está conmigo.
La misma noche que hace blanquear los mismos árboles.
Nosotros, los de entonces, ya no somos los mismos.
Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero cuánto la quise.
Mi voz buscaba el viento para tocar su oído.
De otro. Será de otro. Como antes de mis besos.
Su voz, su cuerpo claro. Sus ojos infinitos.
Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero.
Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.
Porque en noches como esta la tuve entre mis brazos,
mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.
Aunque éste sea el último dolor que ella me causa,
y éstos sean los últimos versos que yo le escribo.

الحقيقة هناك أكثر من تقييم.
الأول للمترجم مروان حداد و الثاني لمحمود السيد علي و الذي تتفوق عليه بمراحل ترجمة قوقل الفورية! الترجمة الثالثة كانت للبطوطي و لم أعثر عليها حتى الآن. يمكن للترجمة أن تحط من قدر أكبر الشعراء و قد فعلها محمود السيد علي إذ صنع من نيرودا مشعوذاً يكتب الطلاسم لا الأشعار و المثالين التاليين بمقدورهما أن يوضحا الفكرة تماماً :

أرنوها نائية كلماتي / كلماتك أكثر منها كلماتي / تتسلق ألمي العتيق أشجار لبلاب* بينما يترجمها مروان حداد - شكراً جداً يا مروان - و أرى كلماتي بعيدة /وأبعد منها كلماتك / تتسلق كاللبلاب فوق آلامي القديمة. ما أعظم الفارق. فلنقرأ أيضاً هذه الترجمة الكارثية لمحمود : " أعالي البحار في قلب الأمواج/ جسدك بين ذراعي انسجام / سمكة إلى الأبد بروحي لصيقة / في يافع فلك السماء سريعة وئيدة " و هذا ما يذكرني بمراحل الدراسة الأولى و درس الجملة المفيدة و غير المفيدة. مروان ترجمها بهذا الشكل : "وسط الأمواج في المياه البعيدة / يستسلم جسدك الجميل بين ذراعيّ / مثل سمكة التصقت بروحي إلى الأبد / و أنا أسرع و أتمهل تحت زرقة السماء". ماهذه الأعمال البربرية التي يقوم بها المركز القومي للترجمة!

كلمات نيرودا كحبات العنب و هو يشبه إلى درجة كبيرة مدينة فينيسيا حيث يتوجب أن لا تزورها وحدك.

Upon hearing the news that Pablo Neruda may have died by poisoning:

One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII
Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, one of the greatest poets of all time—one of the great love poets, surrealist poets, political poets, poets of odes to common things. Here's one:

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose
from the earth lives dimly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

The film The Postman featured a fictional Neruda in Italy giving advice to a postman about how to win the love of a woman. Do you tell her she is beautiful? No. Do you tell her she is nice? No. Wonderful? No. So what is the answer?! Men, young and old, are waiting for the answer, Don Pablo!

The answer: through metaphor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SMs8...

It is astonishing that Neruda published this collection when he was only 20. There is the passionate soul of a young poet but it could also have been penned by a poet in the twilight of his life. The verses are remarkably original, above all subtly sensuous, filled with passionate longings expressed with poignant lyricism and stunning imagery. No wonder that it is still one of the most beloved collections of love poetry. It's superbly translated by W. S. Merwin, a remarkable American poet in his own right.

VI. I Remember You As You Were

I remember you as you were in the last autumn.
You were the grey beret and the still heart.
In your eyes the flames of the twilight fought on.
And the leaves fell in the water of your soul.

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:
Grey beret, voice of a bird, heart like a house
Towards which my deep longings migrated
And my kisses fell, happy as embers.

Sky from a ship. Field from the hills:
Your memory is made of light, of smoke, of a still pond!
Beyond your eyes, farther on, the evenings were blazing.
Dry autumn leaves revolved in your soul.

and, after 20 poems of love—exalted, passionate, sensuous, and, yes, deserted too—there is a coda, “The Song of Despair”, with these two lines strongly imprinted on me, evoking “the anguish of departure” of de Chirico’s melancholy, one of my favorite paintings.

n  It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour
which the night fastens to all the timetables.n

I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.

In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.


worthy book for all the tragic romantikus outthere =P

كم هو قصير الحب و كم هو طويل النسيان

ديوان للشاعر التشيلي بابلو نيرودا و هو من أوائل أعماله الشعرية إذ كتبه و هو شاب في العشرينات من عمره
الكتاب يبدأ بمقدمة هي أجمل ما في الكتاب تحكي قصة نيرودا و مسيرته الأدبية و السياسية
وما في حياته من تقلبات و كيف ألتقى بالشاعر الاسباني الكبير لوركا
و ردة فعل نيرودا على أغتيال لوركا فيي الحرب الاهلية الاسبانية من قبل اتباع الجنرال فرانكو

بالنسبة للديوان لم تعجبني معظم الاشعار قد يكون للترجمة دور في ذلك

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

This is a collection of romantic poems by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. The poet was an unknown 19 year old when the book was published.

We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
while the blue night dropped on the world.

I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.

Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin between my hands.

I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.

Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?

The book fell that is always turned to at twilight
and my cape rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.

Always, always you recede through the evenings
towards where the twilight goes erasing statues.

3'5 / 5

Este libro seguro que es hermoso, pero la poesía nunca ha sido algo que haya entendido del todo.
Me gusta más la prosa; aunque eso no quiere decir que no lo haya disfrutado.

Oír la noche inmensa, más inmensa sin ella.
Y el verso cae al alma como al pasto el rocío.

*

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

This is musicality being butchered.
Always more interested in the song of despair, but I feel like giving this another try due to someone's review, and after many years.

April 24, 19

*

Sometimes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Again, three stars. A bit tragic, despite being able to appreciate - in a way I couldn't before - Neruda's lyricism and its natural voluptuousness, especially considering he wrote this collection when he was only 19.

Pensando, enredando sombras en la profunda soledad.
Tú también estás lejos, ah más lejos que nadie.
Pensando, soltando pájaros, desvaneciendo imágenes,
enterrando lámparas.

*

Thinking, tangling shadows in the deep solitude.
You are far away too, oh farther than anyone.
Thinking, freeing birds, dissolving images,
burying lamps.

from Poem XVII

The rest of the experience remains intact. But I sensed it. This is the kind of poetry I can relate to; the intensity and sentimentality I can bear:

Lo perdido
¿Dónde estará mi vida, la que pudo
haber sido y no fue, la venturosa
o la de triste horror, esa otra cosa
que pudo ser la espada o el escudo

y que no fue? ¿Dónde estará el perdido
antepasado persa o el noruego,
dónde el azar de no quedarme ciego,
dónde el ancla y el mar, dónde el olvido

de ser quien soy? ¿Dónde estará la pura
noche que al rudo labrador confía
el iletrado y laborioso día,

según lo quiere la literatura?
Pienso también en esa compañera
que me esperaba, y que tal vez me espera.

*

What is lost
I wonder where my life is, the one that could
have been and never was, the daring one
or the one of gloomy dread, that other thing
which could as well have been the sword or shield

but never was? I wonder where is my lost
Persian or Norwegian ancestor,
where is the chance of my not being blind,
where is the anchor, the ocean, where the forgetting

to be who I am? I wonder where the pure
night is that the unlettered working day
entrusts to the rough laborer so that he

can also feel the love of literature
I also think about a certain companion
who waited for me once, perhaps still waits.

Love poem by Jorge Luis Borges



April 26, 19
* Later on my blog.

n  
n   كم هو قصير الحب ... و كم هو طويل النسيان n  
n

ديوان مُرهف ، حالم ، عميق .. ، لكنه لا يقترب كثيراً من جمال (كتاب التساؤلات) ...



لا تشبهين أحداً منذ أحببتك ..

•

كنت أتذكرك وروحي تضيق
بهذا الحزن الذي تعرفين
أين كنت آنئذ؟
وبين أيّ ناس؟
أية كلمات كنت تقولين؟
لماذا يداهمني كل هذا الحب
عندما أشعر بالحزن وأشعر بك بعيدة؟

•

أحب أن أصوغ معك
ما يصوغه الربيع مع شجرات الكرز

•

أنت مثل الليل الصامت والمرصع بالنجوم
صمتك صمت نجمة بهذا البعد وهذه البساطة

•

إنها ساعة الرحيل
الساعة القاسية الباردة
التي يخضعها الليل لكل المواعيد

3 THINGS ABOUT THIS BOOK

1. I went to Pablo Neruda's house once. Well, I went to one of his houses. He had three of them. I was teaching English in Santiago, Chile at the time. I went to Neruda's house in Valparaiso, which is a beach town. Weirdly enough, I visited on my twentieth birthday, on a lark, because I just happened to be vacationing in a nearby cabin with my host family.
The thing that I remember about Pablo Neruda's house is that it's set back in a grove of dark pine trees and that there's sand everywhere. The sky was dark that day and it was cold, even though it was in the summer.
What I remember most about the experience wasn't the house itself, or the tour, or the nationalistic trinkets that vendors were trying to sell, but rather the feeling that the pine trees around the house evoked. They were like a dark magic that still sits in my mind six years later. Curious. Because this is the thing that stands out to me most about Neruda's poetry: the magnetic feeling of nature. The dirt and the flesh and the elements and the cold, wet, hot, dry. His poetry is so sensual, so primal, so tied to the earth (I know I sound like a hippie, but its true). When I look at my journal entries from this period in my life they're full of this sort of talk. I wrote about stars and cloud formations and the consistency of mud and the shape of a cheekbone. Southern Chile does this to you. The land casts a spell on you. Neruda put this spell into words.
"Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?


2. I read "Twenty Love Poems" about five years ago, but I thought it was corny at the time. The edition I read had all these terrible erotic etchings in it. I hate that. I almost threw up. I don't believe in illustration much, because it insults the reader's imagination. Especially illustration in poetry, a genre which usually uses abstract images.
This time when I read "Twenty Love Poems" I read it slowly. And it reminded me of southern Chile. It reminded me of gloomy mountains, and the beauty of the rivers and clouds and the darkness of the ocean. It reminded me of that period of time, when I turned twenty, right before my life changed in many ways.
This time when I read "Twenty Love Poems" it meant something to me, because now I have been in love. I have been in love and have experienced all of the sorrows and thrills of love. Mostly sorrows. But the hope of future thrills.

3. I found a musty Time/Life book about South America at a thrift store near my house. In the book there is a photograph of Mr. Neruda seated at a wooden desk at his house in Valparaiso. He is wearing a sweater and staring out the window. He has a pen and ink in front of him and he is holding his head as though he's deep in thought or distressed. Or both. I have hung this picture up in my apartment. It makes me want to write. It makes me remember all of the dark clouds. It makes me remember that "love is so short, forgetting is so long."