The Greatest Latin American Poet of the Twentieth Century: Pablo Neruda

Gabriel Garcia Marquez once called Pablo Neruda, “The greatest poet of the twentieth century in any language.” Pablo Neruda was born Ricardo Eliezer Neftalí Reyes y Basoalto, but he derived his name from a Czech poet Jan Neruda, and Pablo is thought to be from Paul Valentine.

Pablo Neruda was first published as a teenager. He assumed Pablo Neruda as a pen name, first as a fad, and later to hide his work from his austere father. He later legally changed his name. After a lifetime of work, and despite his political leaning as a known communist, Mr. Neruda, gained worldwide notoriety, and fame for his poetry, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1971.

Mark Eisner, a nationally known Pablo Neruda expert, who has written the best selling translation on Neruda in the States and who created a non-for-profit organization, a website geared to merge the written and cinematic power of literature called Red Poppy writes about Neruda receiving the Nobel Prize: “In 1971 Neruda received the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he accepted, “not as a Chilean but as a Latin American.”

For more on Pablo Neruda go to: http://www.redpoppy.net/pablo_neruda.php or click on the above title.

Neruda on Love

I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You
by Pablo Neruda

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.

Neruda on Politics

The Dictators
by Pablo Neruda

An odor has remained among the sugarcane:
a mixture of blood and body, a penetrating
petal that brings nausea.
Between the coconut palms the graves are full
of ruined bones, of speechless death-rattles.
The delicate dictator is talking
with top hats, gold braid, and collars.
The tiny palace gleams like a watch
and the rapid laughs with gloves on
cross the corridors at times
and join the dead voices
and the blue mouths freshly buried.
The weeping cannot be seen, like a plant
whose seeds fall endlessly on the earth,
whose large blind leaves grow even without light.
Hatred has grown scale on scale,
blow on blow, in the ghastly water of the swamp,
with a snout full of ooze and silence

Neruda on Common Culture

Ode to My Socks
by Pablo Neruda (translated by Robert Bly)

Mara Mori brought me a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder's hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,
Violent socks,
my feet were two fish made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons,
my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.
They were so handsome for the first time
my feet seemed to me unacceptable
like two decrepit firemen,
firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
of those glowing socks.

Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere as schoolboys
keep fireflies,
as learned men collect
sacred texts,
I resisted the mad impulse to put them
in a golden cage and each day give them
birdseed and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers in the jungle
who hand over the very rare green deer
to the spit and eat it with remorse,
I stretched out my feet and pulled on
the magnificent socks and then my shoes.

The moral of my ode is this:
beauty is twice beauty
and what is good is doubly good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool in winter.