Up above like branches moved by a common wind,Īs luck would have, I came across a bilingual edition: my rudimentary Spanish is still good enough to make me appreciate the original rhythm, the musicality of the phrasing, to compare the sonorous Latino expressions so familiar from countless pop tunes with the chosen translation. If you need an argument that love is more than an excuse for selling Valentine Day’s merchandise, an invention of insolvent authors in need of quick cash, this collection of the love poems written by the celebrated Chilean author is the place to go. It made me realize I have heard this name for years, came across scattered verses of his, but I still haven’t tried to sit down a really dig into one of his collections. What good is a poet in this mercantile, selfish modern world? Recently, I watched a wonderful movie about the late years of Pablo Neruda, living in exile on a small, sunny island near Italy. In me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,Īnd as long as you live it will be in your arms I shall stop loving you little by little. ![]() Toward those isles of yours that wait for me. There aren’t many examples of Neruda's high imagery in this short selection, for which one needs to read Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, but there are a few nevertheless: He can transform the mundane into sublime with a few strokes of the pen in such a way that I have never seen any other do. He has an exceptional talent for creating striking imagery and stunning phrases out of everyday objects and ordinary natural phenomena. Or overwhelmed with love, as when your eyes Neruda’s love is not only loud and celebratory but intense and masculine - and unabashedly so. ![]() In Eastern poetics love is a feminine sentiment, a silent tempest that rises from the depths of the heart and expressed in a female voice to best capture the desire, longing, pain, and eternal wait – poetry’s tools of trade. I can scarcely measure the sky’s most spacious eyesĪnd I lean down to your mouth to kiss the earth. In love you have loosened yourself like sea water: My arm scarcely managed to encircle the thin In Nerudian universe love is a force of nature and the beloved an embodiment of the Earth, a telluric metaphor par excellence - and deliciously erotic. Neruda's funeral became the first public protest against the Chilean military dictatorship. However, thousands of grieving Chileans disobeyed the curfew and crowded the streets to pay their respects. Pinochet had denied permission to transform Neruda's funeral into a public event. Already a legend in life, Neruda's death reverberated around the world. Three days after being hospitalized, Neruda died of heart failure. Neruda was hospitalized with cancer at the time of the Chilean coup d'état led by Augusto Pinochet. Years later, Neruda was a close collaborator to socialist President Salvador Allende. Later, Neruda escaped into exile through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. Friends hid him for months in a house basement in the Chilean port of Valparaíso. When Conservative Chilean President González Videla outlawed communism in Chile, a warrant was issued for Neruda's arrest. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Salvador Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.ĭuring his lifetime, Neruda occupied many diplomatic posts and served a stint as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party. On July 15, 1945, at Pacaembu Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil, he read to 100,000 people in honor of Communist revolutionary leader Luís Carlos Prestes. ![]() Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language." In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature, a controversial award because of his political activism. Neruda was accomplished in a variety of styles, ranging from erotically charged love poems like his collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, surrealist poems, historical epics, and overtly political manifestos. With his works translated into many languages, Pablo Neruda is considered one of the greatest and most influential poets of the 20th century. Neruda's pen name was derived from Czech writer and poet Jan Neruda Pablo is thought to be from Paul Verlaine. Neruda assumed his pen name as a teenager, partly because it was in vogue, partly to hide his poetry from his father, a rigid man who wanted his son to have a "practical" occupation. ![]() Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean writer and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto.
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