[Note on edit: This is not a review. These are peals of pleasure of a man drunk on Neruda wine, blurting out extempore, when he finished reading this [Note on edit: This is not a review. These are peals of pleasure of a man drunk on Neruda wine, blurting out extempore, when he finished reading this poetry collection]
Pablo Neruda � the name evokes romance and revolution in my consciousness, a riot of metaphors impregnated with sui generis imagery, a dark and intense celebration of love and beauty, a flood of high emotions that assails my senses and then dulls them, such that in that state of mind I'm receptive to nothing in the world except Neruda's poetry. Everything else blacks out and I’m transported to a world I have never seen before � and it's beautiful, it is magnificent, it is dancing with the joy of love!
I had never desired to learn Spanish, but after reading Neruda I wished I could find a way to experience him in the original, just as I wish I could improve my Persian to read Hafez and Rumi without the medium of translation. I really don't know how much of Neruda's Spanish is lost in translation, but whatever that has come down to us in English is more than sufficient to adore him.
There is no one who so brilliantly marries nature's metaphors of earth, sea, wind, trees, moon, stars with the enchanting anatomy of the beloved. Every line testifies to Neruda's unique way of perceiving nature; he likens the beloved to nature, his beloved becomes nature. It is through meditations on the vast agricultural richness of his land that he finds the beloved, in the form of liberty, or in shape of an elusive woman, sometimes as an inextricable amalgamation of the two. They are inseparable.
It is hard to make selections from this book; every poem is a work of wonder. Instead of copying many full-length poems, I am sampling some lines to show the luxuriant quality of imagery and the thunderous motion of his poems, the finesse of his thought, and the intensity of his style. Below are some of my favourite, quotable lines:
The simple, fast and action-packed eroticism of the first lines of the opening poem, Body of a woman.
"Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs, you look like a world, lying in surrender. My rough peasant’s body digs in you and makes the son leap from the depth of the earth."
And see how, later on, from the 'white hills, white thighs', on which he gambols about with pleasure, she is transformed into a 'weapon' that offers him protection and provides him succor, through a process that remains a mystery to the poet and the reader:
"I was alone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me, and night swamped me with its crushing invasion. To survive myself I forged you like a weapon, like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling."
In 'Almost Out of the Sky' we have a 'cloudless girl', who shines like a clear sky, antithesis of greyness, an omniscient being whose presence is felt everywhere. But she is unknown and mysterious - she is a 'question of smoke', that appears and dissolves the next moment, without giving him a moment to regroup perceptions. She is as soft and silky as a 'corn tassel'. You can appreciate the finesse of this metaphor if you have pressed a corn tassel between your fingers!
In this poem the beloved is cast into a formidable natural force that envelops and dominates the small and insignificant existence of the lover. He is in awe of her. This poem is asking to be quoted in full, without omission. So here it is:
"Almost out of the sky, half of the moon anchors between two mountains. Turning, wandering night, the digger of eyes. Let’s see how many stars are smashed in the pool.
It makes a cross of mourning between my eyes, and runs away. Forge of blue metals, nights of still combats, my heart revolves like a crazy wheel. Girl who have come from so far, been brought from so far, sometimes your glance flashes out under the sky. Rumbling, storm, cyclone of fury, you cross above my heart without stopping. Wind from the tombs carries off, wrecks, scatters your sleepy root.
The big trees on the other side of her, uprooted. But you, cloudless girl, question of smoke, corn tassel. You were what the wind was making with illuminated leaves. Behind the nocturnal mountains, white lily of conflagration, ah, I can say nothing! You were made of everything.
Longing that sliced my breast into pieces, it is time to take another road, on which she does not smile.
Storm that buried the bells, muddy swirl of torments, why touch her now, why make her sad.
Oh to follow the road that leads away from everything, without anguish, death, winter waiting along it with their eyes open through the dew."
From Every day you play, Neruda finds the beloved in the most unlikely places. Holding a cluster of fruit is like holding beloved’s head:
"Every day you play with the light of the universe. Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water. You are more than this white head that I hold tightly as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.
You are like nobody since I love you. Let me spread you out among yellow garlands. Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south? Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.
Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window. The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish. Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them. The rain takes off her clothes."
And further on:
"You are here. Oh, you do not run away. You will answer me to the last cry. Cling to me as though you were frightened. Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes.
How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me, my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running. So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes, and over our heads the grey light unwind in turning fans."
Neruda ends the poem with a striking image:
"I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees." --
Love, Desire, Furies, � it is in these elemental emotions Pablo Neruda has cast in verse his and the life of his belLove, a question has destroyed you.
Love, Desire, Furies, � it is in these elemental emotions Pablo Neruda has cast in verse his and the life of his beloved. They met at the beginning of Time when Big Bang was taking shape in their souls and when those various elements came together, guided by violent forces, in a restive arrangement to from their bodies out which arose a desire of self-preservation in perpetual conflict with the vein of self-abnegation. In a way these poems represent the struggle of emotions - emotions that are not conflicting but complementing, but when they overstep their sphere of influence, they disturb that of others. A veritable struggle then ensues in the cosmos of heart. Imagine, what it would feel like if love took on the destructive force of fury? Or if love turned out to be no more than the nom de guerre of a transient desire? Neruda will let you find the answer for yourself.
Neruda had written these poems for his wife Matilde Urrutia at a time when sublime love was feeling the first pains of domestic disquiet. He published the collection anonymously and did not take ownership for over a decade, perhaps because he considered them confessional poems. He wrote: “To reveal its source was to strip bare the intimacy of its birth.� But his close friends, seeing the success of the poems, persuaded him to let the personal become the public � and universal. This is what good art is: it is personal at heart but in its scope it is universal, so that it becomes intimately personal to whoever lays eyes on it.
I have read this collection twice and on both occasions I could not detect anything that makes these poems confessional. Allusions to people and events are completely missing, if that was the fear. There is also no trace of Neruda the man distinguishable from Neruda the poet whom we do not already know from his other collections, in style and form, and in the use of language and metaphor. One may see this collection as an afterword of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. My suspicion is that since, unlike the rest of his poetry, these express his difficulties with love and loving, leading on to a visible conflict that may be seen as an unsuitable topic for love poetry, Neruda did not like what he was writing and hid himself.
Be that as it may, amid the pleasures and bounties of boundless love expressed in a colossal voice of nature, of which I will write further down, here Neruda writes freely of the nooks of shadow darkening the path which he wants as straight as road or a sword; his imagination struggles with each wound that has the shape of your mouth, which has injured him in his slumber of love; he complains openly, You have not made me suffer / merely wait and I vainly sought you in the depths of my arms; but he’s also repentant for his own part, Shake off my word that came to wound you / and let it fly through the open window / It will return to wound me / without your guiding it. In the end he affirms, It is not only the fire that burns between us / but all of life; Then comes the final warning, when love is pushed against the wall, it resorts to masculine violence:
"I shall end up by attacking those who between my breast and your fragrance try to interpose their dark foot."
Because
"Ah let them tell me how I could abolish you and let my hands without your form tear the fire from my words."
This is then love at a loss, passion circumventing the trappings of stillness, vow fighting the pangs of doubt, affection scratching off the rust of weariness; this is, to use Milan Kundera’s phrase, Neruda’s attempt to understand the unbearable lightness of love. He does this in a manner which is his forte: by transforming his beloved into Nature pure and unsullied, made up of earth, water, fire and wind, mountains, rivers, seas and skies, and all that emerges from those. In short, he traverses every corner of the body of earth to sow it and cultivate it, to sow and cultivate again and again, to save it from the barrenness that threatens its primordial fecundity. Neruda, as he does elsewhere, employs a stunning and all-encompassing telluric metaphor to the soul and body of his beloved. Take a look at this:
In You the Earth
Little rose, roselet, at times, tiny and naked, it seems as though you would fit in one of my hands, as though I’ll clasp you like this and carry you to my mouth, but suddenly my feet touch your feet and my mouth your lips: you have grown, your shoulders rise like two hills, your breasts wander over my breast, my arm scarcely manages to encircle the thin new-moon line of your waist: in love you have loosened yourself like sea water: I can scarcely measure the sky’s most spacious eyes and I lean down to your mouth to kiss the earth.
A beautiful, delightful poem loaded with creative eros whose most pleasing aspect is the shift of perspective that gradually expands from a 'rose, roselet� to ‘loosened sea water� and ‘spacious sky.�
One may object to his unabashed masculinity, the latent violence of his possessive charms, the overpowering candour of his physical superiority, the machismo he infuses his confessions of love with � his manliness tightens, without a qualm, its insistent arms against the tender flesh of the lover’s body lying in surrender. His poems are written for the elemental female form, testing her patience with the flood and volcano of emotions that he pours into it. But he is not unaware of this. He understands it thus:
From Absence
"I have scarcely left you when you go in me, crystalline or trembling, or uneasy, wounded by me or overwhelmed with love, as when your eyes close upon the gift of life that without cease I give you.
Yet, he pays homage to the female form of his lover with a lightness of expression that dilutes his aggressive beginnings. Take a look at this one by way of example. Here, again, the perspective transform the lover from the 'little one' to 'the earth at vintage time', vast and pristine, naked and without limits.
The Infinite One
“Do you see these hands? They have measured the earth, they have separated minerals and cereals, they have made peace and war, they have demolished the distances of all the seas and rivers, and yet, when they move over you, little one, grain of wheat, swallow, they cannot encompass you, they are weary seeking the twin doves that rest or fly in your breast, they travel the distance of your legs, they coil in the light of your waist. For me you are a treasure more laden with immensity than the sea and its branches and you are white and blue and spacious like the earth at vintage time. In that territory, from your feet to your brow, walking, walking, walking, I shall spend my life."
Pablo writes, Jibran rates, but how come a star goes missing? As noted, Neruda had written these poems as anonymous specimens soon to be forgotten for good. In that some poems are doubtless written in haste. In some lines poetry is difficult to detect; in others there is repetitive enumeration of emotions and elements that smacks of poetic juvenilia. I can easily overlook it for the journey has been full of brilliant scenery, fresh metaphor and uninhibited expression of love and fidelity that ends in these words:
"And so this letter ends with no sadness my feet are firm upon the earth, my hand writes this letter on the road, and in the midst of life I shall be always beside the friend, facing the enemy, with your name on my mouth and a kiss that never broke away from yours."...more
I make no claims. I am not so presumptuous as to give an impression of having telescoped like a Galileo into Paul CelSpeak- But keep yes and no unsplit
I make no claims. I am not so presumptuous as to give an impression of having telescoped like a Galileo into Paul Celan’s poetic cosmos, his crumbling stars and dug up black holes, and a breathing, foaming spirit of life that is indestructible in the face of annihilation.
So all I will do here is hang on to that stony oppression bearing down on my soul by the ferocious power of his verse; what I will do here is convey something of the havoc wrought in me through a medium as lamentably limited as words on a computer screen.
It is not easy. Not many who have seen pain, misery, and death so up close are able to generate an intellectual distance that enables them to turn their harrowing experience into a language of poetry that purifies the misfortunes of existence in such a way as to transform them into a song � a song of death.
As I charted his poetic journey I discovered a person who was trying to unlive his experience by removing himself � the I � from his writings by subjecting the dialectic of suffering to meticulous, pristine forms that elevated his words far above the confines of 'the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart'.
Here is Celan’s most well-known poem Fugue of Death which fits the epithet of terrible beauty to a tee. He captures his direct experience of a Jewish captive in Nazi death camps by turning it into 'black milk'. (I am quoting first few lines with a link to the complete poem)
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at nightfall we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night drink it and drink it we are digging a grave in the sky it is ample to lie there A man in the house he plays with the serpents he writes he writes when the night falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete he writes it and walks from the house the stars glitter he whistles his dogs up he whistles his Jews out and orders a grave to be dug in the earth he commands us strike up for the dance Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night we drink in the mornings at noon we drink you at nightfall drink you and drink you
"Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer"
Strangely, Paul Celan renounced Fugue of Death in his later years for being ‘too direct� and hindered its republication, without success. His desire for writing absolute poetry, under the influence of French surrealism, led him to search for a more refined mode of expression. For this reason it becomes very difficult to interpret his later work with any degree of certainty. What he did was weave an intricate web of cryptic allusions and variegated images into which we � the readers - interpose our own bone-and-blood in order to make some sense of what is being conveyed. His later poems may be seen as prototypes of poetry, sort of a template that sets the limits of what can be known about human perversion, which we � the readers � are welcome to sully by interjecting our own plebeian suffering into it. For instance:
Speak, You Also
Speak, you also, speak as the last, have your say.
Speak - But keep yes and no unsplit, And give your say this meaning: give it the shade.
Give it shade enough, give it as much as you know has been dealt out between midday and midday and midnight,
Look around: look how it all leaps alive - where death is! Alive! He speaks truly who speaks the shade.
But now shrinks the place where you stand: Where now, stripped by shade, will you go? Upward. Grope your way up. Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer. Finer: a thread by which it wants to be lowered, the star: to float further down, down below where it sees itself gutter: on sand dunes of wandering words.
Here is another poem that marks his new style.
Flower
The stone. The stone in the air, which I followed. Your eye, as blind as the stone.
We were hands, we baled the darkness empty, we found the word that ascended summer: flower.
Flower - a blind man's word. Your eye and mine: they see to water.
Growth. Heart wall upon heart wall adds petals to it.
One more word like this word, and the hammers will swing over open ground.
One fascinating aspect of his illusive language is to deploy one word wonders which turn the reading of the preceding lines on its head and force us to readjust our perspective, and re-read it.
In Below, note the ‘awakening�.
Led home into oblivion the sociable talk of our slow eyes.
Led home, syllable after syllable, shared out among the dayblind dice, for which the playing hand reaches out, large, awakening.
And the too much of my speaking: heaped up round the little crystal dressed in the style of your silence.
And look at these spine-tingling lines, a heartrending image of a captive who looks up but, instead of gazing in despair at the ceiling, feels the nearness of sky. From Language Mesh
Eye’s roundness between the bars. Vibratile monad eyelid propels itself upward, releases a glance. Iris, swimmer, dreamless and dreary: the sky, heart-grey, must be near.
And, towards the end of the poem, he sees two puddles made by rain which, though within distance of a kiss, are like crippled mouths - beautiful image, simply brilliant!
The flagstones. On them, close to each other, the two heart-grey puddles: two mouthsfull of silence....more
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