Appendix I
Selected Poems in Their Full Length
Where Can Guillermina Be?
Where can Guillermina be?
When my sister invited her
and I went out to open the door,
the sun came in, the stars came in,
two tresses of wheat came in
and two inexhaustible eyes.
I was fourteen years old,
brooding, and proud of it,
slim, lithe, and frowning,
funereal and formal.
I lived among the spiders,
dank from the forest,
the beetles knew me
and the three-coloured bees,
I slept among the partridges
hidden under the mint.
Then Guillermina entered
with her blue lightning eyes
which swept across my hair
and pinned me like swords
against the walls of winter.
That happened in Temuco.
there in the South, on the frontier.
The years have passed slowly,
pacing like pachyderms,
barking like crazy foxes,
The soiled years have passed,
waxing, worn, funeral,
and I walked from cloud to cloud,
from land to land, from eye to eye,
while the rain on the frontier
fell in its same grey shape.
My heart has travelled
in the same pair of shoes,
and I have digested the thorns.
I had no rest where I was:
where I hit out, I was struck,
where they murdered me I fell;
and I revived, as fresh as ever,
and then and then and then and then—
it all takes so long to tell.
I have nothing more to add.
I came to live in this world.
Where can Guillermina be?
—From Estravagario (1958). Translated by Alastair Reid in Extravagaria, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974.
Poem XV
I like it when you’re quiet. It’s as if you weren’t here now,
and you heard me from a distance, and my voice couldn’t reach you.
It’s as if your eyes had flown away from you, and as if
your mouth were closed because I leaned to kiss you.
Just as all living things are filled with my soul,
you emerge from all living things filled with the soul of me.
It’s as if, a butterfly in dreams, you were my soul,
and as if you were the soul’s word, melancholy.
I like it when you’re quiet. It’s as if you’d gone away now,
And you’d become the keening, the butterfly’s insistence.
And you heard me from a distance and my voice didn’t reach you:
it’s then that what I want is to be quiet with your silence.
It’s then that what I want is to speak to your silence
in a speech as clear as lamplight, as plain as a gold ring.
You are quiet like the night, and like the night you’re star-lit.
Your silences are star-like,
they’re a distant and a simple thing.
I like it when you’re quiet. It’s as if you weren’t here now.
As if you were dead now, and sorrowful, and distant.
A word then is sufficient, or a smile, to make me happy,
Happy that it seems so certain that you’re present.
—From Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924). Translated by Robert Hass in The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems, City Lights Books, 2004.
A note on this translation and the art of translation in general: The literal translation into English of the first line of the opening and closing stanzas of Poem XV, “Me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente,” becomes “I like it when you become quiet because it’s as if you were absent.” But in the version above, Pulitzer Prize winner and U.S. poet laureate emeritus Robert Hass varies his translation from the traditional. His starts, “I like it when you’re quiet. It’s as if you weren’t here now.” “I was reading XV out loud to myself and it struck me that the alexandrines sounded exactly like an old Leonard Cohen lyric—‘Suzanne’—so I tried to render that rhythm,” he told me. He tried—and succeeded—to translate not just the meaning of the words but also the inherent poetry of the original. His decision was guided by “sound, which may or may not be a good reason. I was trying to imitate the meter, which ‘as if you weren’t here now’ fit and which the more abrupt ‘as if you were absent’ didn’t. ‘As if you weren’t here now’ sounded more like ‘porque estás como ausente,’ especially if the vowels are elided in ‘com’ausente.’”
Poem XX
I can write the saddest verses tonight.
Write, for example, “The night is filled with stars,
twinkling blue, in the distance.”
The night wind spins in the sky and sings.
I can write the saddest verses tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
On nights like this I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times beneath the infinite sky.
She loved me, at times I loved her too.
How not to have loved her great still eyes.
I can write the saddest verses tonight.
To think that I don’t have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the verse falls onto my soul like dew onto grass.
What difference does it make if my love could not keep her.
The night is full of stars, and she is not with me.
That’s all. In the distance, someone sings. In the distance.
My soul is not at peace with having lost her.
As if to bring her closer, my gaze searches for her.
My heart searches for her, and she is not with me.
The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, of then, now are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, it’s true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched for the wind which would touch her ear.
Another’s. She will be another’s. As before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, it’s true, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, and forgetting is so long.
Because on nights like this I held her in my
