Pablo Neruda

| Poet Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda

Biography

Pablo Neruda, born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes, was a renowned poet and politician from the South American country of Chile. He was born in the small town of Parral in Chile on July 12, 1904. Neruda started writing poetry at a very young age and received his first official recognition as a poet at the age of ten. Unlike some poets who limit themselves to writing in one genre, Neruda wrote poems in a wide variety of genres, from surrealistic poems to political poems to erotic love poems. He often wrote in green ink, which was his personal symbol for hope and desire. In 1971, Neruda won the Nobel Prize for literature. He was a well-known poet worldwide until his death in his home country in Santiago de Chile on September 23, 1973.

Neruda is famous for a number of his poems, but the most well-known are his first two works: Book of Twilights, published in 1923, and twenty erotic love poems in the collection known as Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. Both of these works were received incredibly well by critics, although the latter of the two, which was published 1924 and had a follow-up second edition published in 1932, was received with some hesitancy due to its erotic contents, which were considered especially inappropriate since Neruda was so young. Both works have been translated into dozens of languages. Since its publication, Twenty Love Poems has sold millions of copies and is Neruda’s most recognized work.

As a child, Neruda studied at the Temuco Boys’ School near his home in Chile. As he got older and his interests turned toward writing, his father became increasingly disapproving of the young Neruda’s passion for poetry and other writing. At the age of 16, partially to escape the disapproving shadow of his father, Neruda left his home and went to the University of Chile in Santiago de Chile to study French. His original intention was to become a teacher. However, he realized that his love for writing continued to grow, so he soon decided to pursue a career as a poet rather than as a teacher.

Aside from being hailed by some as the greatest poet of the twentieth century, Neruda also filled many other positions throughout his life. Despite the fact that he was a well-known poet even during his lifetime, Neruda had extensive financial problems. In an attempt to offset his money trouble, he decided to take a position as a diplomat in 1927 in Rangoon, the capital of the then-British province of Burma. Neruda held diplomatic posts in a variety of countries throughout his career as a diplomat, which spanned several decades. He was also a diplomat in countries like India, Argentina, and Spain. He was an ardent supporter of communism, so he played an active role in the Spanish Civil War during his time as a diplomat. His support of communism led him to receive many prizes, such as the Stalin Peace Prize and the Lenin Peace Prize.

Pablo Neruda, one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, enjoyed a long and prolific career as one of the best-known poets of his time. From assuming a pseudonym to ward off the disappointment of his father to becoming an international diplomat to help make ends meet, Neruda lived a life that impacted people in a variety of fields, from public policy to various genres of literature. Whether it was being a diplomat and representing his country and his political ideologies or pursuing his true passion of writing poetry, Pablo Neruda lived a life that is sure to be remembered for centuries to come. 

Poem by Pablo Neruda

A Song of Despair

 The memory of you emerges from the night around me.

The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.

Deserted like the dwarves at dawn.

It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!

Cold flower heads are raining over my heart.

Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.

In you the wars and the flights accumulated.

From you the wings of the song birds rose.

You swallowed everything, like distance.

Like the sea, like time.
 In you everything sank!

A Dog Has Died

My dog has died.

I buried him in the garden

next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I'll join him right there,

but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,

his bad manners and his cold nose,

and I, the materialist, who never believed

in any promised heaven in the sky

for any human being,

I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.

Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom

where my dog waits for my arrival

waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,

of having lost a companion

who was never servile.

His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine

Morning (Love Sonnet XXVII)

Naked you are simple as one of your hands;

Smooth, earthy, small, transparent, round.

You've moon-lines, apple pathways

Naked you are slender as a naked grain of wheat.

Naked you are blue as a night in Cuba;

You've vines and stars in your hair.

Naked you are spacious and yellow

As summer in a golden church.

Naked you are tiny as one of your nails;

Curved, subtle, rosy, till the day is born

And you withdraw to the underground world.

As if down a long tunnel of clothing and of chores;

Your clear light dims, gets dressed, drops its leaves,

And becomes a naked hand again.

Always

I am not jealous

of what came before me.

Come with a man

on your shoulders,

come with a hundred men in your hair,

come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet,

come like a river

full of drowned men

which flows down to the wild sea,

to the eternal surf, to Time!

Bring them all

to where I am waiting for you;

we shall always be alone,

we shall always be you and I

alone on earth

to start our life!

I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You

 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.

 How neatly a cat sleeps,

Sleeps with its paws and its posture,

Sleeps with its wicked claws,

And with its unfeeling blood,

Sleeps with ALL the rings a series

Of burnt circles which have formed

The odd geology of its sand-colored tail.

I should like to sleep like a cat,

With all the fur of time,

With a tongue rough as flint,

With the dry sex of fire and

After speaking to no one,

Stretch myself over the world,

Over roofs and landscapes,

With a passionate desire

To hunt the rats in my dreams.

I have seen how the cat asleep

Would undulate, how the night flowed

Through it like dark water and at times,

It was going to fall or possibly

Plunge into the bare deserted snowdrifts.

Sometimes it grew so much in sleep

Like a tiger's great-grandfather,

And would leap in the darkness over

Rooftops, clouds and volcanoes.

Sleep, sleep cat of the night with

Episcopal ceremony and your stone-carved moustache.

Take care of all our dreams

Control the obscurity

Of our slumbering prowess

With your relentless HEART

And the great ruff of your tail.

Clenched Soul

 We have lost even this twilight.

No one saw us this evening hand in hand

while the blue night dropped on the world.

I have seen from my window

the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.

Sometimes a piece of sun

burned like a coin in my hand.

I remembered you with my soul clenched

in that sadness of mine that you know.

Where were you then?

Who else was there?

Saying what?

Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly

when I am sad and feel you are far away?

The book fell that always closed at twilight

and my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.

Always, always you recede through the evenings

toward the twilight erasing statues.

Come With Me I Said And No One Knew (VII)

Come with me, I said, and no one knew

where, or how my pain throbbed,

no carnations or barcaroles for me,

only a wound that love had opened.

I said it again: Come with me, as if I were dying,

and no one saw the moon that bled in my mouth

or the blood that rose into the silence.

O Love, now we can forget the star that has such thorns!

That is why when I heard your voice repeat

Come with me, it was as if you had let loose

the grief, the love, the fury of a cork-trapped wine

the geysers flooding from deep in its vault:

in my mouth I felt the taste of fire again,

of blood and carnations, of rock and scald.

Don’t Go Far Off Not Even For A Day

 Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --

because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long

and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station

when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.
 

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because

then the little drops of anguish will all run together,

the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift

into me, choking my lost heart.
 

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;

may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
 

Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because in that moment you'll have gone so far

I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,

Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

Gentleman Alone

 The young maricones and the horny muchachas,

The big fat widows delirious from insomnia,

The young wives thirty hours' pregnant,

And the hoarse tomcats that cross my garden at night,

Like a collar of palpitating sexual oysters

Surround my solitary home,

Enemies of my soul,

Conspirators in pajamas

Who exchange deep kisses for passwords.

Radiant summer brings out the lovers

In melancholy regiments,

Fat and thin and happy and sad couples;

Under the elegant coconut palms, near the ocean and moon,

There is a continual life of pants and panties,

A hum from the fondling of silk stockings,

And women's breasts that glisten like eyes.

The salary man, after a while,

After the week's tedium, and the novels read in bed at night,

Has decisively fucked his neighbor,

And now takes her to the miserable movies,

Where the heroes are horses or passionate princes,

And he caresses her legs covered with sweet down

With his ardent and sweaty palms that smell like cigarettes.

The night of the hunter and the night of the husband

Come together like bed sheets and bury me,

And the hours after lunch, when the students and priests are masturbating,

And the animals mount each other openly,

And the bees smell of blood, and the flies buzz cholerically,

And cousins play strange games with cousins,

And doctors glower at the husband of the young patient,

And the early morning in which the professor, without a thought,

Pays his conjugal debt and eats breakfast,

And to top it all off, the adulterers, who love each other truly

On beds big and tall as ships:

So, eternally,

This twisted and breathing forest crushes me

With gigantic flowers like mouth and teeth

And black roots like fingernails and shoes.

With affection,

Ruben