Neruda in Translation

Pablo Neruda taught the way all great teachers do, by sharing his vision and asking for it to be considered. He did this through one of the most powerful forms of independent media: poetry. At an early age Neruda realized his writing moved people. He reflected on his subject matter and emotion to understand his potential to affect the world. The conclusions he came to through writing reflect my beliefs about life and the power of the word. From reading his poetry I have learned more about how to be myself in relation to my environment.

Neruda attained great popular success in his early twenties with the publication of his second book, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. He began writing these poems with the notion that poetry was all-powerful and could make his life work the way he wanted. These poems remind me of my own approach to life up until the middle of freshman year of college, when I began to be aware of the forces in the universe governing my life. He majestified the objects of his affection, but also reflected his awareness — whether conscious or not — of their inevitable departure. By the last poem in this book, "The Song of Despair," Neruda had realized that the power of poetry had its limits, and it couldn't fix everything. The family of the woman he loved, Teresa, disapproved of their relationship because they were rich and Neruda's family was not. His love for her, and his poetry, could not keep them together. In this last poem he addresses her:

"Like a jar you housed the infinite tenderness,
and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar."

It is as though their love was a powerful union, but the forces of their lives tore them apart.

The reception of this book by the people of Chile was confusing to Neruda. They found happiness in his writing and often read his poems to their loved ones. Neruda, on the other hand, saw these poems as a sad part of his past not to be dwelled in. The end of this relationship, his realizations about poetry, and his growing feelings of alienation propelled him toward Surrealism.

In Neruda's surrealist phase he wrote Residence on Earth I, II, & III. The poems in these books were packed with the language of dreams and symbolism, in an attempt to defy or shatter conventional notions of reality. It is in these poems where Neruda first explores the sphere of existence — specifically death — something he comes back to explore later in Winter Garden. In the poem "Nothing but Death," Neruda writes:

"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 not mouth, with no tongue, with no throat.
Nevertheless its steps can be heard
and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.
I am not sure, I understand only a little, I can hardly see,
but it seems to me that the 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 penetrating dampness of a violet leaf
and the somber color of embittered winter."

One of Neruda's first major lessons on the impact his poetry has on people involved his poem "Walking Around." Shortly after the release of Residence on Earth I, a man who had committed suicide was found with the book open to that poem. He had specifically underlined the opening line: "It so happens I am sick of being a man." It is unknown whether this poem was the reason the man committed suicide, or simply an explanation he felt people would understand. Neruda took the news of this particularly hard, but it allowed him to realize a new level of the power poetry has. The power of Neruda's poetry to move people allowed his later works — specifically from Spain in the Heart on — to have political and social impact. In a sense, this revived Neruda's poetry, because he cared so much about the human condition and events of the world.

This deep empathy led Neruda to many acts of humanitarian aid — from buying a ship to rescue Spanish refugees from Franco's fascist regime, to writing poems like "General Franco in Hell" and the poems of The Heights of Macchu Picchu. Neruda strove to raise global awareness of the state of humanity, and he did this by continuing to show the world his perspective through poetry. In poem XI from The Heights of Macchu Picchu, Neruda writes:

"Through a confusion of splendor,
through a night made of stone let me plunge my hand
and move to beat in me a bird held for a thousand years,
the old and unremembered human heart!
Today let me forget this happiness, wider than all the sea,
because man is wider than all the sea and her necklace of islands
and we must fall into him as down a well to clamber back with
branches of secret water, recondite truths."

He is encouraging people to look within themselves and find their humanity. In doing so he solidified and modified his understanding of the interconnectedness of everything in the universe.

Neruda expressed his understanding of existential unity specifically through his three books of odes — Elemental Odes, New Elemental Odes, and Third Book of Odes. With these poems he dignified and personified the things in life most people gloss over or ignore, to show people the importance of their actions and their effect on their environment, from an individual to a global level. For example, in "Ode to a Woman Gardening," Neruda writes:

"Everything grew from you, penetrating the earth, immediately becoming green light, foliage and strength. You communicated your seeds to the earth, my beloved auburn-haired gardener: your hand spoke lovingly to the earth, and bright budding was instantaneous. Love, so too your hand of water, your heart of earth, lent fertility and force to my songs. You touch my chest while I sleep and trees bud from my dream. Awake, I open my eyes, and you have planted in me astonished stars that soar with my song. It is true, gardener: our love is earthly: your mouth is the plant of light, corolla, my heart toils among the roots."

In this way he taught his readers to see past the superficial, to the intuitive ripples of being.

Neruda's greatest lessons, in my experience, come from the deep self-reflection that takes place between the covers of Winter Garden — Neruda's self-reflection as a part of the society of humans. For example:

"We are all the people, the gray links of lives that repeat themselves until death, and we never wear unfitting uniforms, no precise tears: it's proper that we communicate, have clean love, pure bread, soccer, side streets with garbage in the doorways, the dogs with complacent tails, the juice of a lemon with the arrival of the peaceful fish. I ask permission to be like everybody else, like the rest of the world and what's more, like anybody else: I beg you, with all my heart, if we are talking about me, since we are talking about me, please resist blasting the trumpet during my visit and resign yourselves to my quiet absence."

Here Neruda seems to be praising the perfection of the process of life, in the sense that it has given us the ability to live in comfort — but he is also asking us to look past it, to what comes next. He knows that he is no better or worse than anyone else, and he wishes for people to see everyone as equal parts of a greater whole. He wishes for people to stop singling him out and start living their own lives to the fullest. This is similar to the teachings of Buddha, who told us we are all separate yet all one, and because of this, no one being is more important than another.

To a familiar ear, the name Pablo Neruda sounds like the oceans and the skies of his poetry. He is a breath of fresh air in a world polluted by corrupt economies. The realizations he reached in life, and his feelings about humanity, are extremely similar to my own. Knowing that there are people who have thought like him gives me faith in humanity, and reassures me that our species has the potential to overcome its suffering.

— Julia Simonson, May 2005