I have loved Pablo Neruda since I was fifteen years old and have fell in love with his beautiful expressions countless times. I believe his raw passion speaks to all of us on a universal level. It's so human and bare, it is his monument left to us. This is an amazing collection which begins with his early work to his retrospective years, it shows you this amazing evolution of his writing and how powerful it becomes.

"And because love battles
not only in its burning agricultures
but also in the mouth of men and women,
I will finish off by taking the path away
to those who between my chest and your fragrance
want to interpose their obscure plant.

About me, nothing worse
they will tell you, my love,
than what I told you.

I lived in the prairies
before I got to know you
and I did not wait love but I was
laying in wait for and I jumped on the rose.

What more can they tell you?
I am neither good nor bad but a man,
and they will then associate the danger
of my life, which you know
and which with your passion you shared.

And good, this danger
is danger of love, of complete love
for all life,
for all lives,
and if this love brings us
the death and the prisons,
I am sure that your big eyes,
as when I kiss them,
will then close with pride,
into double pride, love,
with your pride and my pride.

But to my ears they will come before
to wear down the tour
of the sweet and hard love which binds us,
and they will say: “The one
you love,
is not a woman for you,
Why do you love her? I think
you could find one more beautiful,
more serious, more deep,
more other, you understand me, look how she’s light,
and what a head she has,
and look at how she dresses,
and etcetera and etcetera”.

And I in these lines say:
Like this I want you, love,
love, Like this I love you,
as you dress
and how your hair lifts up
and how your mouth smiles,
light as the water
of the spring upon the pure stones,
Like this I love you, beloved..."
-Pablo Neruda

It was as if Neruda was using every word and piece of imagery for the first time, disintering it from some smouldering corner, cleaning and polishing until it shone. Breathtaking stuff.

O Grande Oceano

Se os teus dons e das tuas destruições,
Oceano, as minhas mãos
pudesse destinar uma medida, uma fruta, um fermento,
escolheria o teu repouso distante, as linhas do teu aço,
a tua extensão vigiada pelo ar e pela noite,
e a energia do teu idioma branco
que destroça e derruba as suas colunas
na sua própria pureza demolida.
Não é a última onda com o seu salgado peso
a que tritura costas e produz
a paz de areia que rodeia o mundo:
é o central volume da força,
a potência estendida das águas,
a imóvel solidão cheia de vidas.
Tempo, talvez, ou taça acumulada
de todo movimento, unidade pura
que não selou a morte,verde víscera
da totalidade abrasadora.

Do braço submerso que levanta uma gota
não fica senão um beijo do sal.Dos corpos
do homem nas tuas margens uma húmida fragrância
de flor molhada permanece. A tua energia
parece resvalar sem ser gasta,
parece regressar ao seu repouso.

A onda que desprendes,
arco de identidade, pena despedaçada,
quando se despenhou foi só espuma,
e regressou para nascer sem se consumir.
Toda a tua força volta a ser origem.
Só entregas despojos triturados,
cascas que separou o teu carregamento,
o que expulsou a acção da tua abundância,
tudo o que deixou de ser cacho.

Sua estátua é estendida além das ondas.

Vivente e ordenada como o peito e o manto
de um só ser e suas respirações,
na matéria da luz içadas,
planícies levantadas pelas ondas,
formam a pele nua do planeta.
Enches o teu próprio ser com a tua substância.

Tornas repleta a curvatura do silêncio.

Com o teu sal e o teu mel treme a taça,
a cavidade universal da água,
e nada falta em ti como na cratera
destampada, no copo rude:
cumes vazios, cicatrizes, sinais
que vigiam o ar mutilado.
As tuas pétalas palpitam contra o mundo,
tremem os teus cereais submarinos,
as suaves algas penduram a sua ameaça,
navegam e pululam as escolas,
e apenas sobe ao fio das redes
o relâmpago morto da escama,
um milímetro ferido na distância
das tuas totalidades cristalinas.

"The sad wind goes on slaughtering butterflies..." The word "butterfly" is such a beautiful word in almost all the languages I know. In Spanish "mariposa", French "papillon", Danish "sommerfugl" and Swedish "fjäril". Only in Germany could they call it Schmetterling and then on top of it give the name to a fighter plane...

note to self: maybe do not read Spanish love poetry when you're on your period. maybe don't do that, next time. okay?

My soul is empty carousel at sunset.
*
I copy out mountains, rivers, clouds.
I take my pen from my pocket. I note down
a bird in its rising

or a spider in its little silkworks.
Nothing else crosses my mind. I am air,
clear air, where the wheat is waving,
where a bird’s flight moves me, the uncertain
fall of a leaf, the globular
eye of a fish unmoving in the lake,
the statues sailing in the clouds,
the intricate variations of the rain.

Nothing else crosses my mind except
the transparency of summer. I sing only of the wind,
and history passes in its carriage,
collecting its shrouds and medals,
and passes, and all I feel is rivers.
I stay alone with the spring.

Romance and War

I walked into Coalesce Bookstore in the quaint town of Morro Bay, CA and ended up in their poetry section. I saw Pablo Neruda’s name written on a book and pulled it off the shelf and began reading his poems on war, on politics. I put the book back on the shelf and began to walk out of the store. When I got to the door, I stopped, turned around and went back to read some more of his poems. I put it back on the shelf and began to walk away again. I stopped, grabbed the book and bought it. It was my introduction to Pablo Neruda, who won the Noble Prize for poetry.

Over the years I have picked up this book to read a few poems, but I never really read them all. I did it now, but I am finding that they were more meaningful when I read only a few at a time.

I began at the beginning of the book this time, with his love poems. It appeared to me that his love poems are as passionate as those of his on war and death. Either he is bursting with passionate love or in the deep despair of war. The love poems are filled with a touch of erotica. I felt that this man was more interested in making love to a woman than in knowing her soul. Perhaps, I should not judge, but at least I saw the beauty in each poem. I had never read them before, because I was only interested in his politics.

As to his poems on war, they were depressing to me as I kept reading one after another. He must have written about every invasion in the in South America and in Spain.

I wish to share one with you that contains both love and war:

“…I have not left you when I go away.
Now I am going to tell you:
My land will be yours,
I am going to conquer it,
Not just to give it to you,
But for everyone,
for my people…
You will come with me to fight
face to face
because your kisses live
like red banners,
and if I fall, not only
Will earth cover me
but also this great love
that you brought me
and that lived circulating
in my blood.
You will come with me,
at that hour I wait for you,
at that hour and at every hour
I wait for you…
because I am a soldier…
My love, I wait for you in the
harshest desert
and next to the flowing
lemon tree,
in every place where
there is life,
where spring is being born…”

Neruda knew how to love a woman. There's such a sensuous, tactile quality to his poetry that makes you think he just might have been one hell of a lover. And mixed in with this earthy prose is an appreciation for the subtle, fleeting moments that last only in quick impressions and memories of wanting and desire. In one moment he tells us of the heavy weight and feel as he cups the rounded breasts of his mistress and the next he sighs his longing for the ability to devour the parts of her that linger in his memory whole.

One thing I will say about this particular copy though is that while it is certainly the most comprehensive edition available to English speakers, it is not, perhaps, the best translated. Kudos to the editors for managing to put it all together though - and I do believe credit is due for not sticking to one translator for the whole thing. However when comparing certain works against others it becomes apparent that not all translators do their transcribing equally. Oh well, I suppose you have to go with what's available to you at the time. Obviously not all my favorites have done every single poem and I do appreciate the effort to use the superior translation when available.

I Liked Pablo Neruda's writing, I believe his raw passion speaks to all of us on a universal level. It's so human and bare, it is his monument left to us. This is an amazing collection which begins with his early work to his retrospective years, it shows you this amazing evolution of his writing and how powerful it becomes. Some poems really hit home where some of them really confused me. These poems really made this book a quite interesting read for me.

And I in these lines say:
Like this I want you, love,
love, Like this I love you,
as you dress
and how your hair lifts up
and how your mouth smiles,
light as the water
of the spring upon the pure stones,
Like this I love you, beloved..."
-Pablo Neruda

n  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. Like my kisses before.
Her voice. Her bright body. Her inifinite 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.n

"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."

n  You discovered
His thoughts,
His words, his love,
His passionate
Intensity
In a tiny book
That's now
Well-fingered.
Then you added your own
Unique voice, your arms
Your legs, your body
And your love,
So that in turn
You might be loved
And you were
And still, my heart,
Again, you are.n

This is definitely my first book of Pablo's but not the last. I am looking forward to his writing. Highly Recommended to poetry & Classic Lovers.

An anthology of Pablo Neruda's poems translated into English.

With over 600 poems, this is a large and fairly representative collection covering sonnets, odes, cantos and free verse drawn from across the poet's entire career. I have been reading it on and off for a fairly long time but I still have not finished reading all of it, having skimmed through some parts and skipped others altogether primarily for two reasons: the difficulty, sometimes, in establishing the context, and the problems associated with the language barrier.

There's always this thing about poetry and the milieu in which it is written- some poems draw only on shared human experience and so need little by way of a background- as with a great deal of love poetry, while for others, the entire meaning can hinge on the reader's awareness or ignorance of its context; the former therefore tends to be more durable and has broader appeal. Neruda's love poetry is no exception - it is exquisite and extremely accessible; but I struggled with his epic poetry for I do not know enough of the context or the details of the provenance for quite a bit of it.

The problem is persistent; even for a poem that purely describes nature, when we read '..and it is here that the world ends.' we can infer from the context that it is a place that is being spoken of and not a moment in time; but we do not know what place that is. Pedantic as it may seem, it matters whether the place the poet had in mind was off Cape Horn or the middle of the Atacama desert, especially because the verse is rooted so deeply in the land, its people and their traditions- often, both history and geography are intertwined to inform the narrative, so this isn't poetry that describes a continent as much as defines it:

The poisonous skin of the copper, the nitrate salt spread out
like a statue, crumbled and snowy: they're mine, but not
only them: also the vineyards, the cherries the spring rewards,

they are mine too, and I belong to them, like a black atom
in the arid land, in the autumn light on the grapes,
in this metallic homeland lifted by towers of snow.

Bards of course, are the bearers of literary ambrosia, but it is not merely when they concern themselves with the heroic canon that poets have the power to grant immortality; they can take everyday experiences and imbue them with deep significance, distill the wistful and extract the poignant, transform the merely special to the truly magical and in so doing make our ordinary lives a little less so.

It is said of Neruda that he caresses words, and that there is great beauty in his use of the language; and doubtless this must be true, but though the original poem in Spanish often appears along with the English translation here, for those of us who do not understand both languages, there is no way to really appreciate it. And not knowing just how much the spirit of the original is captured in the translation can be frustrating too; but this is not to take away from the quality of the translations - even in the English versions there is no denying the moments when the breath comes unstitched and the heart misses a beat.

The oeuvre of the poet who was the 'voice of the voiceless' is immensely prolific, yet incredibly versatile and so defies easy analysis. It goes through the entire spectrum- passionate, sad, tender, political, ornate, erotic, whimsical - witness the 'Ode to the Artichoke'- and at times dull and prosaic, but it is always original, and there are gems to be found even in his lesser known works. There is something charming about his politically motivated poetry too; quaint the anti-capitalistic tirades, Nixon-bashing and the Marxist espousal may seem now, but there is no mistaking the emotional intensity, the earnestness of feeling, the conviction of belief and the love of the utopian ideal that underlies it.

This is a good book to pick up on a lazy afternoon and dip into at random, and I intend to revisit it again -and often, in the future; yo volveré - as the poet says.

This book was a gift from Jared, who quoted this from it in his inscription:

"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."