Cien sonetos de amor
100 Love Sonnets
By
Pablo Neruda
Translated by Stephen Tapscott
Paper, ISBN 0-292-78140-7
222 pages, $12.95
For 20th century love poetry in English, perhaps only Kenneth Rexroth s Sacramental Acts can rival Pablo Neruda s Cien sonetos de amor. Neruda s love poetry is powerful:
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I
prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish
me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
And where does Neruda take us?
hunting for you, for
your hot heart,
like a puma in the
barrens of Quitratue.
Translator
Stephen Tapscott notes that Quitratue in 1875 was a subtribe of 160, derived
from the Araucanians, and that the name now applies to an area of desolate
volcanic and glacial highlands. This
landscape of the mind cannot be seen in the inside cover photograph of Neruda
and Matilde Urrutia in their fifties, a birch tree behind them and woods around
them, standing with their bodies touching, he with his pleasant smile, chin
resting on her head, eyes nearly closed, as if the scent of her and the woods
is the same; and she, too, smiling, her hand on his chest, his hands in his
pockets. First published in
But I forgot that your
hands fed the roots,
watering the tangled
roses,
till your fingerprints
bloomed
full, in a natural
peace.
Composed of the traditional 14 lines, but in two quatrains, then two stanzas of three lines each, they also rebuke those who would have cast the poet out:
They re liars, those who
say I lost the moon,
who foretold a future
like a public desert for me,
who gossiped so much
with their cold tongues:
they tried to ban the
flower of the universe.
Neruda also knows the repressing power of silence, of time no good alone, of waiting for the one person impossible to live without:
Out of sheer taciturnity the ceiling listens
to the fall of the
ancient leafless rain,
to feathers, to whatever
the night imprisoned . . .
He
separated from Delia del Carril, his wife of 18 years, in 1955, and began to
live with Matilda Urrutia that same year. Tapscott notes that Out of delicacy
for the feelings of Delia del Carril, Neruda
withheld the publication of The Captain s Verses, addressed to Matilda,
for some time. Awarded the Nobel Prize
in 1971, he died in 1973 during the week the CIA-sponsored coup overthrew
Allende. He spent his childhood in a
volcanic, rainy and snow-capped wilderness and frontier called the Frontera,
near the town of
. . . we are only one dark space,
a chalice filling with
celestial ashes,
a drop in the pulse of a
long slow river.
From 1939 on, he spent much of his time on Isla Negra, his house overlooking the sea. His house was La Chascona. Matilda joined him there.
It s good to feel you close in the night,
Love,
invisible in your sleep,
earnestly nocturnal,
while I untangle my
confusions
like bewildered nets.
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