they dont make men like Neruda anymore

It's love poetry and life poetry and pure aesthetic rapture all wrapped together.

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...

I have found the meaning of love, and life, and death in Neruda's poems. That is all. I have never loved a poet's work as much as I love his. I have never felt affected by poetry before I read his poems. There is a memory: of watching the gray skies and autumn rain as the city flew by me. Neruda's haunting verse echoing in my mind: Love is so short, forgetting is so long . Indeed, forgetting... forgetting is far too long.

Pablo Neruda is a Spanish poet. I came across one of his poems on pintrest and since then have been absolutely obsessed with it. I have read it in Spanish and in English and it translate beautifully in Spanish. I have attached the poem below. The use of repetition in this poem really adds to the emotions behind it. It has such great details that describ the main idea of the poem. I really think that this poem was written to describe that the best kind of love is that love that one can't explain or describe where it comes from. The use of repetition on the poem really help the readers understand the poem. I think that very often poems are so complex that it is sometimes hard to understand, but Neruda's poem uses so much repetition that it is easy to understand exactly what the poem is about. I also really love how he starts his poem by using the words "I do not love you" I think that this part sets the flow of the poem because by reading those words we think the poem will be about something completely different than what it was. In every stanza of the poem Neruda uses repetition to emphasize on how much he loves this person. I also really enjoyed the similes and metaphors he uses in order to make the poem interesting. I would love to use poetry with repetition and metaphors in my classroom. I think that poetry is hard for children to understand and therefore is something that they don't like to do. I think that by showing children that poetry is simply about writing what they truly feel using great details I will be able to have a classroom full of poets.

Sonnet XVII

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

perso sullo shinkansen tokyo-hiroshima, spero che qualche giapponese l’abbia trovato e lo stia conservando

Kauniita / mielenkiintoisia runoja:

Olet avoin ja kutsuva kuin vanha tie.
Sinussa asuu kaikuja, kaipuun ääniä.
Havahtuessani joskus sielussasi nukkuneet linnut
saattoivat muuttaa, lähteä äkkiä pakoon.

Samean sinisiä äänettömyyden kuoria
kuin suljettujen apteekkien hämärästä kuultavia pulloja,
hiuksiin kiedottua hiljaisuutta

Jokainen valtameren päivä
toi minulle usvaa tai puhtaita turkoosivyöryjä,
tai pelkkää lakeutta, veden suoraa muuttumatonta viivaa,
sitä mitä pyysinkin, otsaani ahmivaa avaruutta.

Niin kului se yö,
pimeys ja avaruus, maa
ja aika,
jokin, joka virtaa ja putoaa
ja kulkee ohi.
Niin kulkevat kaikki yöt
yli maan
jättäen vain epäselvän
mustan tuoksun,
lehti,
pisara putoaa
maahan ja sen ääni häipyy,
nukkuu metsä, vedet,
niityt,
tiu'ut,
silmät.

talossani, yöllä, talvisen meren äärellä,
siellä minua odotti
perimmäisen ruusun
tuoksu,
maan aukaistu sydän,
jokin
joka humahti päin minua
kuin ajasta irronnut
aalto
ja katosi minuun
kun avasin
yön oven

Haluan että ihminen syntyessään
vetää henkeensä alastomia kukkia,
tuoretta multaa, puhdasta tulta, ei sitä mitä muut ovat jo hengittäneet.
Jättäkää syntyvät rauhaan!

tämä esinemeri on sinun,
että se on minun,
kaikki saappaat,
pyörät,
pienet
unohdetut aarteet,
viuhkat joiden laskoksiin
rakkaus hautasi
hassutuksensa,
pikarit, veitset,
sakset,
kaikkien niiden kahvoissa,
niiden ääriviivoissa
on joidenkin sormien
jäljet,
muisto jostain kaukaisesta
kadonneesta
kädestä
siellä missä unohdus on syvin

Asumattomia runoja taivaan ja syksyn välillä,
vailla henkilöitä, kuljetuskustannuksia,
hetkeen en halua kenenkään asuvan säkeitäni,
en nähdä tyhjillä hiekoilla ihmisen merkkejä,
jalanjälkiä, hylkypapereita

Myöhemmin, vuosien kuluttua
minä saavuin Suurlähettiläänä Puutarhoihin.
Runoilijat olivat jo lähteneet.
Eivätkä patsaat tunteneet minua.

Love that this book has the original Spanish for most of the poems, sadly, it is not good with offering up translations, they are kind of scattered about, but still a great read, Neruda is an amazing poet.

Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda's poems are lush, lusty, imaginative, sensual, beautiful, political at times, angry occasionally, and meditative. This is a huge collection with some poems in both Spanish and English. There is a lifetime of poetry here, so you see the growth of a poet over time. At the end of the collection there are about 45 pages of poems written by various other poets copying Neruda's style. I only read a few of these since I was only interested in reading and experiencing Neruda's work.

So, when I decided to read this book, I didn't really realize that it was going to be 1000 pages. I was overwhelmed at first, I thought to myself, why couldn't the editor just have included like 200 pages of poems, was 1000 pages really necessary? The answer is yes. Neruda's work is so broad and sweeping from his poems of revolution to an ode to an artichoke that 1000 pages are necessary to really explore and grip his work. I am sure that there are poems that would appeal to everyone in here. Themes that I really enjoyed were the that he could write about things like revolution and political unrest in the form of poems. I liked exploring everyday objects like stamps and artichokes and his writing about them with high verses and poetic language. And I liked his love poems that have an interesting duality between love and hate giving love so much more dimension then "oh how I love her." I thought that there was a really nice ratio of poems in their original Spanish with sometimes multiple translations into English vs the ones that just appear in English as well. This really was a deep dive into a very prolific poet!

3.5/5

n  I love you as one loves certain dark things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
-One Hundred Love Sonnets, XVIIn

Ah, Neruda. There's many a dead poet that survives in the form of an oddly robust cult these days, but name one other than this one who hailed from Latin America and achieved that level on the Anglo side of the language barrier. Part of it is right place, right time, as the 20th century was ripe with battles against fascism, against Anglo imperialism, against the incipient US think tanks and CIA divide and conquers that rule via disaster capitalism today. Perfect, then, for Neruda's outrage for the common man, his disdain for the murderously highfalutin, and a humble sense of righteousness that to this day has a great deal of mileage with those who are just marginalized enough to not make it into Wikipedia but not so that they don't have time to write poetry while another cleans the house and cooks the meals. If I read Spanish, I might have found a sufficient amount to distract me from the inconsistently applied compassion and cloying sense of machismo, where all the men are human and all the women are waists, that largely set the tone of all of these pieces, regardless of whether the structure was ode or experiment or closely set sonnet. As it stands, I do not. So, while I deeply appreciate the Neruda shaped imprint on the scope of human history, the acclamatory cacophony that continues to cluster around his name and his works is not for me. A shame after nearly 1000 pages, but with the sheer scope of Neruda works (32 poetry collections, at least) and quality translations that said near 1000 pages pulled from, at least I can safely say that I won't be needing to give the poet a second try anytime soon.

There's nearly 600 poems in this collection, all told. You commit to something like that, it's expected to want your money's worth. In my case, I was extremely fortunate to have not given into purchasing this collection ($40 w/out tax) until I started librarianing at a place that actually has a copy, and when 2023 came around, it seemed like the best work to lug with me during holiday family visits and start off the new year with. The chronological ordering means once can pick up on the shifting narratology qualities and historical contexts decently enough, and I was rather relieved that the youthful reliance on 'biting' and 'eyelashes' fell by the wayside for most of the 1000ish pages. Of the ones I went through, "Ode to the Artichoke" of 'Elemental Odes,' "Stones for Maria" of 'The Stones of Chile,' and "Man" of 'Canto General' stood out the most, and I even managed to find the pair of lines, quoted above, that set me on my quest to read this edition so many years ago. As I said, though, regardless of the noted year or the themed collection, there is a blinkered quality to the poems, which may not have reveled in lily-white metaphysics but certainly gloried in that certain not quite status quo, not quite intersectional paradigm that many men of color of the 20th century committed to, more often than not on the backs of the women in their respective communities. This isn't a character judgment, or even a psychoanalytic one, but a simple observation of how much further Neruda could have gone in his subject matter and his politics, given his opportunities and cumulative life experience. So, I won't deny the indescribable and (largely) positive impact he had on both artistry and history. But he's not the first of his milieu and his time to take the relatively easy gendered way out while trumpeting his social justice on high, and I can't rate him higher in light of that.

This massive collection of poetry by a single writer is done, and from the looks of the rest of my 2023 reading plans, it may end up being the longest read I conduct this year. It wasn't as awe inspiring as I was led to believe (you need only check the comments of this review to see evidence of such), but having worked to be immune to hype in all its forms for years now, this is hardly a heartbreaking, never-trust-again moment. Rather, I prefer to ponder what poets have come in the last fifty years of post-Neruda, especially in the areas where his shadow reigns supreme. In this world where no one wants to cultivate artists and yet, take away art, and 75% of the world population kills itself by the next day, I have to wonder whether it'll take an apocalypse to wrest the control of common sense away from the tech bros and the capitalists and give it back to those who make life worth living. All in all, if there are any who profess to love Neruda but also disdain unions, frown on nationalization, and feel the patriotic need to rescue foreign countries from them not exploiting their natural resources into an early grave, well. May you live in interesting times.

n  When I wrote love lyrics, which sprouted, from all my pores, and I pined away,
aimless, forlorn, gnawing the alphabet,
they told me: "How great you are, O Theocritus!"
I'm not Theocritus: I took life,
stood before it, kissed it until I conquered it,
and then I went through the mine galleries
to see how other men lived.
And when I emerged with my hands stained with filth and grief
I raised and displayed them on gold chains,
and I said: "I'm not an accomplice to this crime."
They coughed, became very annoyed, withdraw their welcome,
stopped calling me Theocritus, and ended up
insulting me and sending all the police to imprison me,
because I didn't continue to be preoccupied exclusively with metaphysical matters.
-"Letter to Miguel Otero Silva, in Caracas (1949)", 'Canto General'n

This massive volume should be a model for collecting a single poet's oeuvre. I'm sure not every single work was included but this 900 page door stop is certainly able to please fans of poetry and Neruda specifically. What's amazing about Neruda's work is he is able to write about essentially any topic, as spoken in a blurb on the back cover as well. But no matter what the topic, whether grandiose or mundane, Neruda writes about it skillfully and makes it interesting to read about. My personal favorites are the love poems, the language and feeling in those are enchanting. But that's simply a personal preference. Any of the many other subjects (war, country, nature, etc.) are rendered just as skillfully. I'd highly recommend this book to poetry readers, Neruda fans, or fans of comprehensive poetry collections.

Empece a leer a Pablo Neruda porque me encontré con el poema “de la casa”, poema que me encantó. Mi problema es que ninguno otro le llego ni a loa talones a ese único destacable.