Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Description

Brilliant English translation of beloved poems by Pablo Neruda, who is the subject of the film Neruda starring Gael García Bernal and directed by Pablo Larraín 

A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, with French flaps

First published in 1924, Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada remains among Pablo Neruda’s most popular work. Daringly metaphorical and sensuous, this collection juxtaposes youthful passion with the desolation of grief. Drawn from the poet’s most intimate and personal associations, the poems combine eroticism and the natural world with the influence of expressionism and the genius of a master poet. This edition features the newly corrected original Spanish text, with masterly English translations by award-winning poet W. S. Merwin on facing pages.

   •  Includes twelve sketches by Pablo Picasso
   •  New introduction by Cristina García

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.Twenty Love Poems and a Song of DespairIntroduction
I. Body of a Woman
II. The Light Wraps You
III. Ah Vastness of Pines
IV. The Morning Is Full
V. So that You Will Hear Me
VI. I Remember You As You Were
VII. Leaning into the Afternoons
VIII. White Bee
IX. Drunk with Pines
X. We Have Lost Even
XI. Almost out of the Sky
XII. Your Breast Is Enough
XIII. I Have Gone Marking
XIV. Every Day You Play
XV. I Like for You to Be Still
XVI. In My Sky at Twilight
XVII. Thinking, Tangling Shadows
XVIII. Here I Love You
XIX. Girl Lithe and Tawny
XX. Tonight I Can Write
The Song of Despair
Selected Bibliography
Suggestions for Further ReadingBy the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

Neftali Ricardo Reyes, whose pseudonym was to be Pablo Neruda, was born in Parral, Chile, in 1904. He grew up in the pioneer town of Temuco, briefly encountering Gabriela Mistral, who taught there for a time. In 1920 he went to Santiago to study, and the following year published his first collection of poetry,La Cancion de la Fiesta. A second collection, Crepusculario, brought him critical recognition; and in 1924 the hugely successful Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Cancion Desesperada appeared. From 1927 to 1943, Neruda lived abroad, serving as a diplomat in Rangoon, Colombo, Batavia, Singapore, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, and Mexico City. This is the period that saw the publication of the first two volumes of his celebrated Residencia en la Tierra. He joined the Communist Party of Chile after World War II, was prosecuted as a subversive, and began an exile that took him to Russia, Eastern Europe, and China. Already the most renowned Latin American poet of his time, he returned to Chile in 1952. He died there in 1973, having just seen the fourth edition of his Obras Completas through the press. In receiving the Nobel Prize in 1971, he had said that the poet must achieve a balance “between solitude and solidarity, between feeling and action, between the intimacy of one’s self, the intimacy of mankind, and the relevation of nature.”

W. S. Merwin (translator; 1927–2019) published many highly regarded books of poems, for which he received a number of distinguished awards—the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize, a Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, and the Governor’s Award for Literature of the state of Hawaii among them. The U.S. poet laureate from 2010 to 2011, he translated widely from many languages, and his versions of classics such as The Poem of the Cid and The Song of Roland are standards.

Cristina García (introducer) is the author of Dreaming in Cuban, which was nominated for the National Book Award.

The Morning is Full

The morning is full of storm
in the heart of summer.

The clouds travel like white handkerchiefs of good-bye,
the wind, traveling, waving them in its hands.

The numberless heart of the wind
beating above our loving silence.

Orchestral and divine, resounding among the trees
like a language full of wars and songs.

Wind that bears off the dead leaves with a quick raid
and deflects the pulsing arrows of the birds.

Wind that topples her in a wave without spray
and substance without weight, and leaning fires.

Her mass of kisses breaks and sinks,
assailed in the door of the summer’s wind.

Es La Mañana Llena

Es la mañana lleno de tempestad
en el corazón del verano.

Como pañuelos blancos de adiós las nubes,
el viento las sacude con sus viajeras manos.

Innumerable el corazón del viento
latiendo sobre nuestro silencio enamorado.

Zumbando entre los árboles, orquestal y divino,
como una lengua llena de guerras y de cantos.

Viento que lleva rápido robo la hojarasca
y desvia las flechas latientes de los parajos.

Viento que le derriba en ola sin espuma
y sustancia sin peso, y fuegos inclinados.

Se rompe y se submerge su volumen de besos
combatido en la puerta del viento del verano.

US

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