It’s freezing outside. Our exams are looming over us. Some of us, maybe, are looking for an escape. Pablo Neruda’s poetry can be a lot more than distraction, but its sunny climes and passionate emotion inevitably move us beyond ourselves. The 1993 reissuing of the 1976 Penguin Twentieth Century Classics edition of “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair” makes it easy to love these 21 poems. They are translated by W.S. Merwin, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet himself. His experience and fluency shine through each poem, positioned in the book opposite the Spanish-language original.
It is astonishing to learn that Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto—Pablo Neruda was his pen name—published “Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Canciòn Desesperada” in 1924, when he was only twenty years old. The sagacity and world-weary appreciation for beauty seem too well-developed for an age when most famous authors are still in training—Dostoyevsky, for example, published his first novel at twenty-four, Joyce wrote “Dubliners” when he was twenty-three, and Hemingway waited until twenty-seven for his first novel, “The Torrents of Spring.” College students know better than anyone that these differences of several years are far from inconsequential.
Yet youth seems to animate the incredible and original imagery of Neruda’s work, and he draws metaphors and what seem like symbolist paintings in words that are frankly unbelievable: “The night gallops on its shadowy mare/ shedding blue tassels over the land.” The example comes from the seventh poem, “Leaning Into The Afternoons,” like most of the twenty love poems, is less than a page in length. Neruda is a master of making a little do a lot—his work is cinematic, but it weaves through the physical, natural, and internal in a way that no film ever could. It is as if he uses the objects of nature in his native Chile—the waves, trees, ocean, stars, horses, and breezes—as the words of a language, to signify what he cannot express otherwise. Even though most of the love poems (and, obviously, the longer poem of despair) deal with loves already departed, they are sensual and uplifting. Neruda is extremely easy to read and very hard to dislike. As poetry, his work is immediate and accessible in a way that almost seems to demand its own genre. With scraps of his poems floating around in your head, you’ll never look at the trees in front of Olin or the dawn sky after your all-nighter the same way again.
Leave a Reply