NERUDA, Pablo
Love Sonnet VI
Lost in the forest, I broke off a dark twig
and lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips:
maybe it was the voice of the rain crying,
a cracked bell, or a torn heart.
Something from far off: it seemed
deep and secret to me, hidden by the earth,
a shout muffled by huge autumns,
by the moist half-open darkness of the leaves.
Wakening from the dreaming forest there, the hazel-sprig
sang under my tongue, its drifting fragrance
climbed up through my conscious mind
as if suddenly the roots I had left behind
cried out to me, the land I had lost with my childhood—
and I stopped, wounded by the wandering scent.
Love Sonnet XI
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,
and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.
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espeso aroma de algas, lodo y luz machacados, qué oscura claridad se abre entre tus columnas?
Qué antigua noche el hombre toca con sus sentidos?
con aire ahogado y bruscas tempestades de harina: amar es un combate de relámpagos
y dos cuerpos por una sola miel derrotados.
tus márgenes, tus ríos, tus pueblos diminutos,
y el fuego genital transformado en delicia
hasta precipitarse como un clavel nocturno,
hasta ser y no ser sino un rayo en la sombra.
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thick smell of seaweed, crushed mud and light, what obscure brilliance opens between your columns?
What ancient night does a man touch with his senses?
with smothered air and abrupt storms of flour: loving is a clash of lightning-bolts and two bodies defeated by a single drop of honey.
your borders, your rivers, your tiny villages,
and the genital fire transformed into delight
until it plunges down, like a dark carnation,
until it is and is no more than a flash in the night.
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Love Sonnet XVII
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
Love Sonnet XX - Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example,'The night is shattered
and the blue stars 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, and 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 shattered 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 searches for her as though to go to her.
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. Like my kisses before.
Her voide. Her bright body. Her inifinite 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 sould 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
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Sonnet LVIII
Among the broadswords of literary iron
I wander like a foreign sailor, who does not know
the streets, or their angles, and who sings because
that’s how it is, because if not for that what else is there?
From the stormy archipelagoes I brought
my windy accordion, waves of crazy rain,
the habitual slowness of natural things:
they made up my wild heart.
And so when the sharp little teeth of Literature
snapped at my honest heels, I passed along
unsuspectingly, singing in the wind,
toward the rainy dockyards of my childhood,
toward the cool forests of the indefinable South,
toward where my heart was filled with your fragrance.
Love Sonnet LXXXI - And Now You're Mine
And now you're mine. Rest with your dream in my dream.
Love and pain and work should all sleep, now.
The night turns on its invisible wheels,
and you are pure beside me as a sleeping amber.
No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go,
we will go together, over the waters of time.
No one else will travel through the shadows with me,
only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.
Your hands have already opened their delicate fists
and let their soft drifting signs drop away; your eyes closed like two gray
wings, and I move
after, following the folding water you carry, that carries
me away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny.
Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.
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quiero la luz y el trigo de tus manos amadas pasar una vez más sobre mì su frescura:
sentir la suavidad que cambià? mi destino.
quiero que tus oìdos sigan oyendo el viento, que huelas el aroma del mar que amamos juntos
y que sigas pisando la arena que pisamos.
y a ti te amé y canté sobre todas las cosas,
por eso sigue tú floreciendo, florida,
para que se pasee mi sombra por tu pelo,
para que asì conozcan la razà?n de mi canto.
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I want the light and the wheat of your beloved hands to pass their freshness over me once more: I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.
I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you to sniff the sea's aroma that we loved together, to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.
and you whom I love and sang above everything else to continue to flourish, full-flowered:
so that my shadow can travel along in your hair,
so that everything can learn the reason for my song.
hun frisheid nog eens langs mij voelen strijken:
de zachtheid voelen die mijn leven wendde.
dat je de wind blijft horen in je oren, de zee blijft ruiken die ons beiden lief is,
het zand dat wij betraden blijft betreden.
jou had ik lief, bezong ik boven alles, blijf jij daarom in bloei, mijn bloeiende,
opdat mijn schaduw door je haren wandelt,
opdat men zo de grond kent van mijn zang.
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Nothing But Death
There are cemeteries that are lonely,
graves full of bones that do not make a sound,
the heart moving through a tunnel,
in it darkness, darkness, darkness,
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,
as though we were drowning inside our hearts,
as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.
And there are corpses,
feet made of cold and sticky clay,
death is inside the bones,
like a barking where there are no dogs,
coming out from bells somewhere, from graves somewhere,
growing in the damp air like tears of rain.
Sometimes I see alone
coffins under sail,
embarking with the pale dead, with women that have dead hair,
with bakers who are as white as angels,
and pensive young girls married to notary publics,
caskets sailing up the vertical river of the dead,
the river of dark purple,
moving upstream with sails filled out by the sound of death,
filled by the sound of death which is silence.
Death arrives among all that sound
like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it,
comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no
finger in it,
comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no
throat.
Nevertheless its steps can be heard
and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.
I'm not sure, I understand only a little, I can hardly see,
but it seems to me that its singing has the color of damp violets,
of violets that are at home in the earth,
because the face of death is green,
and the look death gives is green,
with the penetrating dampness of a violet leaf
and the somber color of embittered winter.
But death also goes through the world dressed as a broom,
lapping the floor, looking for dead bodies,
death is inside the broom,
the broom is the tongue of death looking for corpses,
it is the needle of death looking for thread.
Death is inside the folding cots:
it spends its life sleeping on the slow mattresses,
in the black blankets, and suddenly breathes out:
it blows out a mournful sound that swells the sheets,
and the beds go sailing toward a port
where death is waiting, dressed like an admiral.
I Like For You To Be Still
I like for you to be still
It is as though you are absent
And you hear me from far away
And my voice does not touch you
It seems as though your eyes had flown away
And it seems that a kiss had sealed your mouth
As all things are filled with my soul
You emerge from the things
Filled with my soul
You are like my soul
A butterfly of dream
And you are like the word: Melancholy
I like for you to be still
And you seem far away
It sounds as though you are lamenting
A butterfly cooing like a dove
And you hear me from far away
And my voice does not reach you
Let me come to be still in your silence
And let me talk to you with your silence
That is bright as a lamp
Simple, as a ring
You are like the night
With its stillness and constellations
Your silence is that of a star
As remote and candid
I like for you to be still
It is as though you are absent
Distant and full of sorrow
So you would've died
One word then, One smile is enough
And I'm happy;
Happy that it's not true
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If you find on some road
a little boy
stealing apples
and a deaf old man
with an accordion,
remember that I am
the little boy, the apples and the aged man.
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Die Slowly
He who does not travel,
who does not read,
who does not listen to music,
who does not find grace in himself, dies slowly.
He who slowly destroys his own self-esteem,
who does not allow himself to be helped,
who spends days on end complaining about his own bad luck,
about the rain that never stops, dies slowly.
He who becomes the slave of habit,
who follows the same routes every day,
who never changes pace,
who does not risk and change the colour of his clothes,
who does not speak and does not experience, dies slowly.
He or she who shuns passion,
who prefers black on white,
dotting ones rather
than a bundle of emotions,
the kind that make your eyes glimmer,
that turn a yawn into a smile,
that make the heart pound in the face of mistakes and feelings, dies slowly.
He or she who does not turn things topsy-turvy,
who is unhappy at work,
who does not risk certainty for uncertainty,
to thus follow a dream,
those who do not forego sound advice at least once in their lives, die slowly.
He or she who abandon a project before starting it,
who fail to ask questions on subjects he doesn’t know,
he or she who don’t reply when they are asked something they do know, die slowly.
Let’s try and avoid death in small doses,
always reminding oneself that being alive requires an effort by far
greater than the simple fact of breathing.
Only a burning patience will lead to the attainment of a splendid happiness.
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 wharves 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!
It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.
The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.
Pilot's dread, fury of blind driver,
turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!
In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.
Lost discoverer, in you everything sank!
You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,
sadness stunned you, in you everything sank!
I made the wall of shadow draw back,
beyond desire and act, I walked on.
Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost,
I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.
Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness.
and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.
There was the black solitude of the islands,
and there, woman of love, your arms took me in.
There was thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and ruins, and you were the miracle.
Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me
in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms!
How terrible and brief my desire was to you!
How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.
Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,
still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.
Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,
oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.
Oh the mad coupling of hope and force
in which we merged and despaired.
And the tenderness, light as water and as flour.
And the word scarcely begun on the lips.
This was my destiny and in it was my voyage of my longing,
and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank!
Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you,
what sorrow did you not express, in what sorrow are you not drowned!
From billow to billow you still called and sang.
Standing like a sailor in the prow of a vessel.
You still flowered in songs, you still brike the currents.
Oh pit of debris, open and bitter well.
Pale blind diver, luckless slinger,
lost discoverer, in you everything sank!
It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour
which the night fastens to all the timetables.
The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore.
Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate.
Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
Only tremulous shadow twists in my hands.
Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything.
It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!
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als het lijf van Chili, en teer als een anijsboom, en in elke tak hangt je getuigenis van onze onuitwisbare lentes: Welke dag is het vandaag? Jouw dag. En morgen is gisteren, niets is voorbij, geen enkele dag ontglipte je handen: je vangt de zon, de aarde, de viooltjes in je kleine schaduw als je slaapt. En zo schenk je me
het leven elke dag
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de siete patas rotas, huevo de telaraña, rata descalabrada, esqueleto de perra: Aquí no entras. No pasas. Ándate. Vuelve al Sur con tu paraguas, vuelve al Norte con tus dientes de culebra. Aquí vive un poeta. La tristeza no puede entrar por estas puertas. Por las ventanas entra el aire del mundo, las rojas rosas nuevas, las banderas bordadas del pueblo y sus victorias. No puedes. Aquí no entras. Sacude tus alas de murciélago, yo pisaré las plumas que caen de tu manto, yo barreré los trozos de tu cadáver hacia las cuatro puntas del viento, yo te torceré el cuello, te coseré los ojos, cortaré tu mortaja y enterraré tus huesos roedores
bajo la primavera de un manzano.
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met je zeven manke poten, ei van spinrag, gewonde rat, hondengeraamte: hier kom je niet binnen. Hier kom je niet voorbij. Hoepel maar op. Ga terug naar het zuiden met je parapluutje, ga terug naar het noorden met je slangentanden. Hier woont een dichter. De triestheid kan niet naar binnen door deze deuren. Door de ramen komt de adem van de wereld, frisse rode rozen, geborduurde vaandels van het volk en zijn zegepralen. Nee. Onmogelijk. Hier kom je niet binnen. Schud je vleermuizenvleugels, ik zal de veren vertrappen die uit je mantel vallen, ik zal de stukken van je karkas wegvegen naar alle vier de windstreken, ik zal je nek omdraaien, je ogen dichtnaaien, je doodskleed stuksnijden en, triestheid, je knagende botten begraaf ik
onder de lente van een appelboom.
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Canto IX
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peace for the bridge, peace for the wine, peace for the stanzas which pursue me and in my blood uprise entangling my earlier songs with earth and loves, peace for the city in the morning when bread wakes up, peace for the Mississippi, source of rivers, peace for my brother’s shirt, peace for books like a seal of air, peace for the great kolkhoz of Kiev, peace for the ashes of those dead and of these other dead, peace for the grimy iron of Brooklyn, peace for the letter-carrier who from house to house goes like the day, peace for the choreographer who shouts through a funnel to the honeysuckle vine, peace for my own right hand that wants to write only Rosario, peace for the Bolivian, secretive as a lump of tin, peace so that you may marry, peace for all the saw-mills of Bio-Bio, peace for the torn heart of guerilla Spain, peace for the little museum in Wyoming where the most lovely thing is a pillow embroidered with a heart, peace for the baker and his loaves, and peace for the flour, peace for all the wheat to be born, for all the love which will seek its tasselled shelter, peace for all those alive: peace
for all lands and all waters.
to my house, in my dreams I return to Patagonia where the wind rattles the barns and the ocean spatters ice. I am nothing more than a poet: I love all of you, I wander about the world I love; in my country they gaol miners and soldiers give orders to judges. But I love even the roots in my small cold country, if I had to die a thousand times over it is there I would die, if I had to be born a thousand times over it is there I would be born near the tall wild pines the tempestuous south wind the newly purchased bells. Let none think of me. Let us think of the entire earth and pound the table with love. I don’t want blood again to saturate bread, beans, music: I wish they would come with me: the miner, the little girl, the lawyer, the seaman, the doll-maker, to go into a movie and come out
to drink the reddest wine.
and for you to sing with me.
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take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter.
the lance flower that you pluck, the water that suddenly bursts forth in joy, the sudden wave
of silver born in you.
with eyes tired at times from having seen the unchanging earth, but when your laughter enters it rises to the sky seeking me and it opens for me all
the doors of life.
hour your laughter opens, and if suddenly you see my blood staining the stones of the street, laugh, because your laughter will be for my hands
like a fresh sword.
your laughter must raise its foamy cascade, and in the spring, love, I want your laughter like the flower I was waiting for, the blue flower, the rose
of my echoing country.
at the day, at the moon, laugh at the twisted streets of the island, laugh at this clumsy boy who loves you, but when I open my eyes and close them, when my steps go, when my steps return, deny me bread, air, light, spring, but never your laughter
for I would die.
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En mi patria hay un río.
El hambre baja al río.
No sé, pero son míos.
y me dicen "Sufrimos".
tu pueblo desdichado,
entre el monte y el río,
no quiere luchar solo,
te está esperando, amigo".
pequeña, grano rojo de trigo, será dura la lucha, la vida será dura, pero vendrás conmigo. |
In my country there is a river.
The faint longing down in the river.
I do not know, but they are mine.
and they say to me: “We suffer.”
your unlucky people,
between the mountain and the river,
they do not want to fight alone,
waiting for you, friend.”
small, red grain of wheat, the struggle will be hard, life will be hard,
but you will come with me.
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WHAT IS BORN WITH ME
I sing to the grass that is born with me
in this free moment, to the fermentations
of cheese, of vinegar, to the secret
spurt of the first semen, I sing
to the song of milk which now comes
in rising whiteness to the nipples,
I sing to the fertility of the stable,
to the fresh dung of great cows
from whose aroma fly multitudes
of blue wings, I speak
without any shift of what is happening now
to the bumblebee with its honey, to the lichen
in its soundless germination.
Like an everlasting drum
sounds the flow of succession, the course
from being to being, and I'm born, I'm born, I'm born
with all that is being born, I'm one
with growing, with the spread silence
of everything that surrounds me, teeming,
propagating itself in the dense damp,
in thread, in tigers, in jelly.
I belong to fruitfulness
and I'll grow while lives grow.
I'm young with the youthfulness of water,
I'm slow with the slowness of time,
I'm pure with the purity of air,
dark with the wine of night,
and I'll only be still when I've become
so mineral that I neither see nor hear,
nor take part in what is born and grows.
When I picked out the jungle
to learn how to be,
leaf by leaf,
I went on with my lessons
and learned to be root, deep clay,
voiceless earth, transparent night,
and beyond that, bit by bit, the whole jungle.
(translated by Alastair Reid)
Keeping Quiet
Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.
Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.