Excerpts from Pablo Neruda’s lecture “Towards the Splendid City” (© the Nobel Foundation, 1971) are reprinted with the kind permission of the Nobel Foundation.
And I thank the following for their gracious permission to reprint these translations of Pablo Neruda’s poetry:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux for the following translations by Alastair Reid: “Where Can Guillermina Be?”; excerpts from “Forget About Me,” “Keeping Quiet,” from Extravagaria. Translation copyright © 1974 by Alastair Reid. Excerpts from “Fully Empowered,” “The Poet’s Obligation,” “To ‘La Sebastiana,’” and “The Word” from Fully Empowered. Translation copyright © 1975 by Alastair Reid. Excerpts from “The Birth,” “The Father,” “The More-Mother,” and “Poetry” from Isla Negra. Translation copyright © 1981 by Alastair Reid.
City Lights Books for excerpts from venture of the infinite man, translated by Jessica Powell © 2017; and the following from The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems, edited by Mark Eisner, © 2004: “Canto XII” and other excerpts from “Heights of Macchu Picchu” translated by Mark Eisner with John Felstiner and Stephen Kessler; excerpts from “The Fugitive XII” and “United Fruit Co.” translated by Jack Hirschman; excerpts from “Right, comrade, it’s the hour of the garden (from El mar y las campanas) and “Ode with a Lament” translated by Forrest Gander; “Poem XV” translated by Robert Hass; “Ode to Wine,” “Sonnet XVII,” “The Potter,” “The Sea,” “Poem XX,” and excerpts from “Dead Gallop” translated by Mark Eisner; “Ars Poetica” and “It Means Shadows” translated by Stephen Kessler.
The Kenneth Rexroth Trust for an excerpt of “Poem VI,” from Thirty Spanish Poems of Love and Exile, edited and translated by Kenneth Rexroth, City Lights Books, © Kenneth Rexroth, 1968.
Copper Canyon Press for the following translations by William O’Daly: “Returning,” The Sea and the Bells. Translation copyright © 1988, 2002 by William O’Daly. Excerpts from “1968,” “The Worship (II),” and “Death of a Journalist,” from World’s End. Translation copyright © 2009 by William O’Daly. Excerpts from “I,” “XIII,” and “LXXII,” from The Book of Questions. Translation copyright © 1991, 2001 by William O’Daly. “Winter Garden,” from Winter Garden. Translation copyright © 1986, 2002 by William O’Daly.
International Publishers Co./New York for excerpts from “Let the Rail-Splitter Awake” translated by Waldeen, from Masses and Mainstream, © 1950.
I am also grateful to the Colchie Agency, GP, for permission to reprint “Translator to Poet” by Alastair Reid, from Weathering: Poems and Translations by Alastair Reid (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978). Copyright © 1978 by Alastair Reid; and copyright © 2015 by Leslie Clark. All rights reserved. Lastly, I am grateful to Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, for permission to reprint “Spain 1937,” copyright © 1940 and copyright renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden; from Selected Poems by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelson.
About the Author
MARK EISNER has spent most of the past two decades working on projects related to Pablo Neruda. He conceived, edited, and was a principal translator of The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems (City Lights, 2004). He wrote the introduction to City Lights’ first-ever English translation of Neruda’s Venture of the Infinite Man, a project he developed. He is a producing a documentary on Neruda, with support from Latino Public Broadcasting. An initial version, narrated by Isabel Allende, won the Latin American Studies Association Award of Merit.
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Copyright
NERUDA. Copyright © 2018 by Mark Eisner. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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*Complete poem in Appendix I.
*The original Spanish of Neftalí’s earliest recorded poem, on the postcard to his stepmother, is indeed a poem of true complexity. Besides the themes mentioned in the text, when one reads the original Spanish, there is a sublime rhythm of internal rhymes:
De un paisaje de áureas
regiones,
yo escogí
para darle querida mamá
esta humilde postal. Neftalí
The internal rhyme runs around the j in front of the short e vowels in paisaje, pronounced paee-sah-heh, a similar inflect with the combination of gi, which sounds like hee: regiones and escogí. Then there are the ee sounds (as the i in Spanish sounds like English’s long e), sometimes accented, sometimes milder: regiones, escogí, querida, humilde, Neftalí. As well, there are the last two lines’ short ahs: para, dar, querida, mamá, esta, postal, Neftalí.
*In these early works, Neruda often employs the alexandrine, a classic form found in both French and Spanish poetry (among others) for centuries. It is composed of five symmetrical quartets of flexible fourteen-syllable lines that rhyme alternately. Neruda also built upon recent trends with the form. This is most notable in Poem XV, from Twenty Love Poems, and its famous lyrics: “I like it when you’re quiet . . .” Allowing himself the flexibility to break out of the traditional patterns of where the stresses fell in each line, he could dynamically accentuate specific words, intensifying their impact. As author René de Costa highlights, in Poem XV, for instance, Neruda actually targets stress on phrases that hit on the poem’s themes of absence, distance, and the inability
