Favorite Poems by Pablo Neruda

[stopharian]

Enigmas

You've asked me what the lobster is weaving there with
his golden feet?
I reply, the ocean knows this.
You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent
bell? What is it waiting for?
I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.
You ask me whom the Macrocystis alga hugs in its arms?
Study, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.
You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal,
and I reply by describing
how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.
You enquire about the kingfisher's feathers,
which tremble in the pure springs of the southern tides?
Or you've found in the cards a new question touching on
the crystal architecture
of the sea anemone, and you'll deal that to me now?

You want to understand the electric nature of the ocean
spines?
The armored stalactite that breaks as it walks?
The hook of the angler fish, the music stretched out
in the deep places like a thread in the water?



I want to tell you the ocean knows this, that life in its
jewel boxes
is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure,
and among the blood-colored grapes time has made the
petal
hard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of light
and untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall
from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.

I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead
of human eyes, dead in those darknesses,
of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes
on the timid globe of an orange.

I walked around as you do, investigating
the endless star,
and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked,
the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.


Translated by Robert Bly

Pablo Neruda

This poem is one of Nerudas more popular; many people recognize it from that INTP movie of the late 80s Mindwalk. It certainly is afavorite of mine.

For some reason I love to read Neruda,s works in spanish as well as in english, even though I dont really speak spanish. I dont know why, but the rhythm is almost magical in the mother tongue, and it seems as if the words are more elemental. I couldn't find this one in spanish online, but you can generally find 3 different translations if you look.

[stopharian]

Tonight I can write


Audio Recording link fixed
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Below is the poem first in Spanish and then in English
Tonight I Can Write

XX
por Pablo Neruda

Puedo escribir los versos m?s tristes esta noche.

Escribir, por ejemplo: "La noche est? estrellada,
y tiritan, azules, los astros, a los lejos."

El viento de la noche gira en el cielo y canta.

Puedo escribir los versos m?s tristes esta noche.
Yo la quise, y a veces ella tambi?n me quiso.

En las noches como ?sta la tuve entre mis brazos.
La bes? tantas veces bajo el cielo infinito.

Ella me quiso, a veces yo tambi?n la quer?a.
C?mo no haber amado sus grandes ojos fijos.

Puedo escribir los versos m?s tristes esta noche.
Pensar que no la tengo. Sentir que la he perdido.

O?r la noche inmensa, m?s inmensa sin ella.
Y el verso cae al alma como al pasto el roc?o.

Qu? importa que mi amor no pudiera guardarla.
La noche est? estrellada y ella no est? conmigo.

Eso es todo. A lo lejos alguien canta. A lo lejos.
Mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.

Como para acercarla mi mirada la busca.
Mi coraz?n la busca, y ella no est? conmigo.

La misma noche que hace blanquear los mismos ?rboles.
Nosotros, los de entonces, ya no somos los mismos.

Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero cu?nto la quise.
Mi voz buscaba el viento para tocar su o?do.

De otro. Ser? de otro. Como antes de mis besos.
Su voz, su cuerpo claro. Sus ojos infinitos.

Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero.
Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.

Porque en noches como ?sta la tuve entre mis brazos,
mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.

Aunque ?ste sea el ?ltimo dolor que ella me causa,
y ?stos sean los ?ltimos versos que yo le escribo.



Tonight I Can Write
by Pablo Neruda, translated by W.S. Merwin

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

[stopharian]

ODE TO A BEAUTIFUL NUDE


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or

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Ode to a Beautiful Nude


- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by PABLO NERUDA



With a chaste heart
With pure eyes I celebrate your beauty
Holding the leash of blood
So that it might leap out and trace your outline
Where you lie down in my Ode
As in a land of forests or in surf
In aromatic loam, or in sea music


Beautiful nude
Equally beautiful your feet
Arched by primeval tap of wind or sound
Your ears, small shells
Of the splendid American sea
Your breasts of level plentitude
Fulfilled by living light
Your flying eyelids of wheat
Revealing or enclosing
The two deep countries of your eyes


The line your shoulders have divided into pale regions
Loses itself and blends into the compact halves of an apple
Continues separating your beauty down into two columns of
Burnished gold
Fine alabaster
To sink into the two grapes of your feet
Where your twin symmetrical tree burns again and rises
Flowering fire
Open chandelier
A swelling fruit
Over the pact of sea and earth


From what materials
Agate?
Quartz?
Wheat?
Did your body come together?
Swelling like baking bread to signal silvered hills
The cleavage of one petal
Sweet fruits of a deep velvet
Until alone remained
Astonished
The fine and firm feminine form


It is not only light that falls over the world spreading inside your body
Yet suffocate itself
So much is clarity
Taking its leave of you
As if you were on fire within


The moon lives in the lining of your skin





(Spanish)
Oda a la belle desnuda

Con casto coraz?n,
con ojos puros, te celebro, belleza,
reteniendo la sangre
para que surja y siga la l?nea, tu contorno,
para que te acuestes a mi oda
como en tierra de bosques o de espuma,
en aroma terrestre o en m?sica marina.


Bella desnuda,
igual tus pies arqueados
por un antiguo golpe de viento o del sonido
que tus orejas, caracolas m?nimas
del espl?ndido mar americano.
Iguales son tus pechos de paralela plenitud,
colmados por la luz de la vida.
Iguales son volando tus p?rpados de trigo
que descubren o cierran
dos pa?ses profundos en tus ojos.


La l?nea que tu espalda ha dividido en p?lidas regiones
se pierde y surge en dos tersas mitades de manzana,
y sigue separando tu hermosura en dos columnas
de oro quemado, de alabastro fino,
a perderse en tus pies como en dos uvas,
desde donde otra vez arde y se eleva
el ?rbol doble de tu simetr?a,
fuego florido, candelabro abierto,
turgente fruta erguida
sobre el pacto del mar y de la tierra.


Tu cuerpo, en qu? materia,
?gata, cuarzo, trigo,
se plasm?, fue subiendo
como el pan se levanta
de la temperatura
y se?al? colinas
plateadas,
valles de un solo p?talo, dulzuras
de profundo terciopelo,
hasta quedar cuajada
la fina y firme forma femenina?


No s?lo es luz que cae sobre el mundo
lo que alarga en tu cuerpo
su nieve sofocada,
sino que se desprende
de ti la claridad como si fueras
encendida por dentro.


Debajo de tu piel vive la luna.

[stopharian]

....

[stopharian]

Naked, You Are As

Naked, you are simple as one of your hands,
Smooth, earthy, small, transparent, round:
You have moonlines, applepathways:
Naked, you are slender as a naked grain of wheat.

Naked, you are blue as the night in Cuba;
You have 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.


PABLO NERUDA

[Eileen]

Sonnet XVII (100 Love Sonnets, 1960)

I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

[escapeTheVoid]

Drunk as Drunk

Drunk as drunk on turpentine
From your open kisses,
Your wet body wedged
Between my wet body and the strake
Of our boat that is made of flowers,
Feasted, we guide it - our fingers
Like tallows adorned with yellow metal -
Over the sky's hot rim,
The day's last breath in our sails.

Pinned by the sun between solstice
And equinox, drowsy and tangled together
We drifted for months and woke
With the bitter taste of land on our lips,
Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime
And the sound of a rope
Lowering a bucket down its well. Then,
We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,
And lay like fish
Under the net of our kisses.

[Amethyst]

If You Forget Me

I want you to know one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine

---------------
I like Neruda, he is my favourite poet.

[PonderBee]

Your Feet

When I cannot look at your face
I look at your feet.
Your feet of arched bone,
your hard little feet.
I know that they support you,
and that your sweet weight
rises upon them.
Your waist and your breasts,
the doubled purple
of your nipples,
the sockets of your eyes
that have just flown away,
your wide fruit mouth,
your red tresses,
my little tower.
But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.

[PonderBee]

WE ARE MANY

Of the many men whom I am, whom we are,
I cannot settle on a single one.
They are lost to me under the cover of clothing
They have departed for another city.
When everything seems to be set
to show me off as a man of intelligence,
the fool I keep concealed on my person
takes over my talk and occupies my mouth.
On other occasions, I am dozing in the midst
of people of some distinction,
and when I summon my courageous self,
a coward completely unknown to me
swaddles my poor skeleton
in a thousand tiny reservations.
When a stately home bursts into flames,
instead of the fireman I summon,
an arsonist bursts on the scene,
and he is I. There is nothing I can do.
What must I do to distinguish myself?
How can I put myself together?
All the books I read
lionize dazzling hero figures,
brimming with self-assurance.
I die with envy of them;
and, in films where bullets fly on the wind,
I am left in envy of the cowboys,
left admiring even the horses.
But when I call upon my DASHING BEING,
out comes the same OLD LAZY SELF,
and so I never know just WHO I AM,
nor how many I am, nor WHO WE WILL BE BEING.
I would like to be able to touch a bell
and call up my real self, the truly me,
because if I really need my proper self,
I must not allow myself to disappear.
While I am writing, I am far away;
and when I come back, I have already left.
I should like to see if the same thing happens
to other people as it does to me,
to see if as many people are as I am,
and if they seem the same way to themselves.
When this problem has been thoroughly explored,
I am going to school myself so well in things
that, when I try to explain my problems,
I shall speak, not of self, but of geography.

[Birdsnest]

These are amazing poems, I've never read these before.

[stopharian]

These are amazing poems, I've never read these before.

Aye


He was an Amazing man.