Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

Actually, this book has a bit of a library backstory. My wife originally picked this up for me back in May, but I was unable to get through it in the three weeks I had it checked out. It should have renewed, but somehow the request missed by a day, which meant it had to be returned. Fine. But then, despite showing in the computer system, it didn’t make it back to the shelf. After a few attempts to find it on different days, we finally decided that it had to be ordered online so they would make the effort to locate it. Thus, after a few weeks, it finally appeared, and I could check it out again. By then, I was deep into a series of vacations, and it just took me a while to finish.

I am not fluent in Spanish, so I checked out a translation. This particular edition is translated by Ben Belitt, and contains the original Spanish on the opposing page, so that they can be compared.

This is both a good and a bad thing. Good, in that one can see the decisions that the translator made (I can read a number of Spanish words, and many others have common Latin roots); but bad, in that it is obvious that the sound of the original language is so much more melodious than the English version.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that this particular translation had some problems. In a couple of cases, I noted that the translator used rather large words to translate what looked like simpler words in the original. In others, it seemed as if he went out of his way to make the English version “sophisticated” rather than sticking to the more fluid and unpretentious original. Since this translation was done in 1961, one wonders if the translator were trying to make the poetry fit the style of the times.

Of course, all translation is a compromise. As I noted in my discussion of Inferno, the poetic feel and form and meaning often compete with each other. In that case, the prose translation conveyed the meaning of the words best, and preserved the terza rima form, but not the rhyme or rhythm. The older poetic translation also preserved the terza rima, and captured the rhyme and rhythm, but took great liberties with the meaning of the words, and often stretched syntax to the point where it became nearly unintelligible. Robert Pinsky’s translation was true to the words and story, and made the rhymes come out, but broke up the original tercets in order to do that. It’s all a compromise.

In a weird coincidence, a few days after I started this collection, the Chilean government announced that they would exhume Neruda’s body, and investigate whether he had been poisoned by the Pinochet regime. 

Huh? What’s that? Well, Neruda was a bit of a communist, and didn’t exactly keep his mouth shut about it. He was a friend of Salvador Allende, the socialist president of Chile, who was deposed (and probably murdered) by Augusto Pinochet during his coup d'état in 1973. Neruda had the audacity to criticize the new ruler, and was planning an escape to Mexico at the time of his death. (It is generally agreed that he died of advanced prostate cancer, but, obviously, others have other theories.) Whatever the case turns out to be, it was interesting to see his name in the news.

 Neruda recording his poems for the Library of Congress. Photo Public Domain.

This collection contains excerpts from Neruda’s major poetic works from 1925 through 1958. In general, I found that I enjoyed the later works more than the earlier ones. Neruda’s poems tend to focus on love and freedom, along with a hatred of inequality and oppression. Political issues find their way into some of the poems. (There was an interesting reference to the Spanish Civil War in “A Few Things Explained,” for example. His language evokes the same emotions that I felt reading The Cypresses Believe in God, a wonderful novel set in that period.) I loved his strikingly unusual metaphors, and attention to unusual details - the ones often overlooked.

Here are a few excerpts from the ones that stood out to me.

The opening of “Nocturnal Collection” from Residencia en la Tierra.

I had vanquished that angel of sleep, allegorical

mourner; but his travail went on and his ponderous footfall

came closer, sheathed with snails and cicadas,

sea-born, and brackish, smelling of fruits.

Also from that same early collection, “Ars Poetica.”

Between dark and the void, between virgins and garrisons,

with my singular hear and my mournful conceits

for my portion, my forehead despoiled, overtaken by pallors,

a grief-maddened widow bereft of a lifetime;

for every invisible drop that I taste in a stupor, alas,

for each intonation I concentrate, shuddering,

I keep the identical thirst of an absence, the identical chill

of a fever; sounds, coming to be; a devious anguish

as of thieves and chimeras approaching;

so, in the shell of extension, profound and unaltering,

demeaned as a kitchen-drudge, like a bell sounding hoarsely,

like a tarnishing mirror, or the smell of a house’s abandonment

where the guests stagger homeward, blind drunk, in the night,

and the reek of their clothes rises out of the floor, and absence of flowers-

could it be differently put, a little less ruefully, possibly?-

All the truth blurted out: wind strikes at my breast like a blow,

the ineffable body of night, fallen into my bedroom,

the roar of a morning ablaze with some sacrifice,

that begs my prophetical utterance, mournfully;

an impact of objects that call and encounter no answer,

unrest without respite, an anomalous name.

For some reason, I really liked Neruda’s poems on food. For example, this early one from the same collection.

“Apogee of Celery”

From an innocent center never dinted

by sound, from the waxes’ perfection,

the linear lightnings break clear:

doves with a spiral’s propensities

whirled over indolent streets in a odor

of shadows and fishes.

These are the veins of the celery; the spray and the humors,

the hats of the celery!

This, the celery’s signature, its firefly

taste, its cartography

soaking in colors:

its head droops, angelically green,

its delicate scallops despair;

its celery feet range the market-stalls

in the day’s mutilation, sobbing:

doors close at its passing

and delectable horses kneel down.

Crop-footed, green-eyed, it flows

to all sides, and within it, the droplets,

the secret things, sunken forever:

the tunnels of ocean, whence arises

the stairway proscribed by the celery.

the disaster of shadows submerged,

the proofs in the middle of air,

the kiss in the depths of the stone.

At midnight, someone beats at my door

with drenched hands in the mist

and I hear a deep voice, a voice barbed

with prohibitive wind, the voice of the celery:

wounded, it rages against water and root

and plunges its bittering sheen in my bed;

the blades of its turbulent scissors strike at my breast

seeking a way to my heart under smothering water.

What would you have of me, crack-bodiced

guest in my funeral dwelling?

What ruinous ambit surrounds you?

Tissue of darkness and light and lugubrious fibers,

blind rivets, ringleted energies,

river of live, indispensable threads,

green branches beloved of the sun,

I am here, in the night, and I listen to deathwatches,

solitudes, secrets,

and you come in the midst of a lowering cloud-rack,

to root in my heard and grow great and make known to me

what is dark in the brightness, the rose of creation.

This is crazy and genius rolled up together. Who gets poetic about celery? (Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes maybe, but oatmeal was more his thing.) And yet, somehow, it becomes a metaphor for alienation and creative inspiration.

Much later, in his Odas Elementales (Elemental Odes), Neruda would find inspiration in a wide variety of simple, everyday objects and incidents. If I were to pick a favorite collection, it would be the Odes.

“Artichoke”

The artichoke

of delicate heart

erect

in its battle-dress, builds

its minimal cupola;

keeps

stark

in its scallop of

scales.

Around it,

demoniac vegetables

bristle their thicknesses,

devise

tendrils and belfries,

the bulb’s agitations;

while under the subsoil

the carrot

sleeps sound in its

rusty mustaches.

Runner and filaments

bleach in the vineyards,

whereon rise the vines.

The sedulous cabbage

arranges

its petticoats;

oregano

sweetens a world;

and the artichoke

dulcetly there in a gardenplot,

armed for a skirmish,

goes proud

in its pomegranate

burnishes.

Till, on a day,

each by the other,

the artichoke moves

to its dream

of a market place

in the big willow

hoppers:

a battle formation.

Most warlike

of defilades-

with men

in the market stalls,

white shirts

in the soup-greens,

artichoke

field marhals

close-order conclaves,

commands, detonations,

and voices,

a crashing of crate staves.

And

Maria

come

down

with her hamper

to

make trial

of an artichoke:

she reflects, she examines,

she candles them up to the light like an egg,

never flinching;

she bargains

she tumbles her prize

in a market bag

among shoes and a

cabbage head,

a bottle

of vinegar; is back

in her kitchen.

The artichoke drowns in an olla.

So you have it:

a vegetable, armed,

a profession

(call it an artichoke)

whose end

is millenial.

We taste of that

sweetness,

dismembering

scale after scale.

We eat of a halcyon paste:

it is green at the artichoke heart.

The original Spanish ending is better:

la pacifica pasta

de su corazón verde.

See what I mean about translations being a compromise? But still, an amazing picture. Really, after reading that, can you think of a cabbage as anything but sedulous?

One more from Odes.

“A Lemon”

Out of lemon flowers

loosed

on the moonlight, love’s

lashed and insatiable

essences,

sodden with fragrance,

the lemon tree’s yellow

emerges,

the lemons

move down

from the tree’s planetarium.

Delicate merchandise!

The harbors are big with it-

bazaars

for the light and the

barbarous gold.

We open

the halves

of a miracle,

and a clotting of acids

brims

into the starry

divisions:

creation’s

original juices,

irreducible, changeless,

alive:

so the freshness lives on

in a lemon,

in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,

the proportions, arcane and acerb.

Cutting the lemon

the knife

leaves a little

cathedral:

alcoves unguessed by the eye

that open acidulous glass

to the light; topazes

riding the droplets,

altars,

aromatic facades.

So, while the hand

holds the cut of the lemon,

half a world

on a trencher,

the gold of the universe

wells

to your touch:

a cup yellow

with miracles,

a breast and a nipple

perfuming the earth;

a flashing made fruitage,

the diminutive fire of a planet.

As a child, I used to eat lemons right of our tree, much to my mother’s consternation. (My teeth actually survived pretty well. Apparently, despite common belief, sugar is worse for teeth than lemons...)

It wasn’t just flora, however. Fauna inspired this one, from Canto General.

“Some Beasts”

It was the twilight of the iguana:

From a rainbowing battlement,

a tongue like a javelin

lunging in verdure;

an and heap treading the jungle,

monastic, on musical feet;

the guanaco, oxygen-fine

in the high places swarthy with distances,

cobbling his feet into gold;

the llama of scrupulous eye

that widens his gaze on the dews

of a delicate world.

A monkey is weaving

a thread of insatiable lusts

on the margins of morning:

he topples a pollen-fall,

startles the violet flight

of the butterfly, wings on the Muzo.

It was the night of the alligator:

snouts moving out of the slime,

in original darkness, pullulations,

a clatter of armor, opaque

in the sleep of the bog,

turning back to the chalk of the sources.

The jaguar touches the leaves

with his phosphorous absence,

the puma speeds to his cover

in the blaze of his hungers,

his eyeballs, a jungle of alcohol,

burn in his head.

Badgers are raking the river beds,

nuzzling the havens

for their warm delectation,

red-toothed, for assault.

And below, on the vastness of water,

like a continent circled,

drenched in the ritual mud,

rapacious, religious

gigantic, the coiled anaconda.

“The Twilight of the Iguana” sounds like an excellent title for a B movie, actually. Fun stuff.

I won’t quote it in full, but as a cat person, I enjoyed “Oda al Gato.” Here is the best part:

Men wish they were fishes or birds;

the worm would be winged,

the dog is a dispossessed lion;

engineers would be poets;

flies ponder the swallow’s perogative

and poets impersonate flies -

but the cat

intends nothing but cat:

he is cat

from his tail to his chin whiskers:

from his living presumption of mouse

and the darkness, to the gold of his irises.

Like many poets, Neruda was also interesting his choice of objects of derision. “Poets Celestial” takes a direct swipe at Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and the whole idea “pure beauty” as idolized by the Europeans of the Fin de siècle. I liked what little Rilke I have read, so this whole thing smacks a bit of the feud between the partisans of Brahms and those of Wagner. Both were masters, and their works in retrospect have more in common than either would have admitted.

More understandable was Neruda’s hatred for dictators. Given Latin America’s bloody history of megalomania, to say nothing of the slaughters elsewhere in the world throughout the 20th century and millennia before, I can’t say I disagree.

“The Dictators”

An odor stayed on in the cane fields:

carrion, blood, and a nausea

of harrowing petals,

Between coconut palms lay the graves, a stilled

strangulation, a festering surfeit of bones.

A finical satrap conversed

with wineglasses, collars, and piping.

In the palace, all flashed like a clock-dial,

precipitate laughter in gloves, a moment

spanning the passageways, meeting

the newly killed voices and the buried blue mouths. Out of sight,

lament was perpetual and fell, like a plant and its pollen,

forcing a lightless increase in the blinded, big leaves.

And bludgeon by bludgeon, on the terrible waters,

scale over scale in the bog,

the snout filled with silence and slime

and vendetta was born.

In many ways, I found myself agreeing with Neruda, rather than disagreeing, despite my general distaste for communism (and Stalinism in particular). Perhaps it is because Neruda, as a poet, rather than a politician, reacts to and writes about injustice. In his world, the dichotomy was between the military dictator and the more democratic socialism. I suspect he would have had plenty of scorn for Hugo Chavez and his ilk as well, given his belief in basic freedoms.

One final quote made a big impression. This is from “The Poet.”

I ranged in the markets of avarice

where goodness is bought for a price, breathed

the insensate miasmas of envy, the inhuman

contention of masks and existences.

I am reminded of a few things with this quote. First and obviously, the sale of indulgences in the Middle Ages. One could buy “holiness” or even escape eternal punishment for a price. (This practice was one of the main causes of Luther’s break with the Catholic church.)

Second, and beyond the scope of this post, is the present association in Evangelical circles of certain middle class privileges with “godliness.” (I’m thinking particularly of the veneration of the stay-at-home mom, but there are many others. I’m hoping to do a future blog post on this subject.)

Anyway, I did enjoy my exploration of Neruda. Thanks to my English teacher cousin-in-law Jennifer for suggesting his works, and that of Auden as well, for my reading project. I would like to find, at minimum, a good translation of Odes for my permanent collection.