Pablo Neruda

Sonnet XVII (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

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.

One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII

TRANSLATED BY MARK EISNER

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,   

or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:   

I love you as one loves certain obscure things,   

secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries   

the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,   

and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose   

from the earth lives dimly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,   

I love you directly without problems or pride:

I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,

except in this form in which I am not nor are you,   

so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,   

so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

Vicente Huidobro

 

(Dying sun / There is a breakdown in the motor / And a springlike aroma / Remains in the air on passing / Some place / a song / WHERE ARE YOU / One evening like this / I looked for you in vain / Over the mist of all the roads / I kept on running into myself / And in the smoke of my cigar / There was a lost bird / No one would answer / The last shepherds had drowned / And the confused sheep / Were eating flowers and giving no honey / The wind that was passing by / Piles up the wool / Among the clouds / Wet from my tears / Why cry again / over the already lamented / And since the sheep are eating flowers / Sign that you have just passed by)

Huidobro himself has explicated this poem, or at least tried to. When he was in Chile in 1919, spreading the word about the new aesthetic, he was taken for an iconoclast. Seeking to correct this misinterpretation, he visited Hernán Díaz Arrieta, his conservative-minded friend from the days of Musa Joven and Azul, and then critic for the influential weekly Zig-Zag. As evidence of his classicism, he pointed out «Égloga» and tried to explain its imagery. The critic, although unconvinced, has fortunately left us a record of the attempt:(7)

After a long conversation with the author [of «Égloga»], we have arrived at the following conclusions. The dying sun offers no difficulty; it could be creationist, just as well as classicist, or even romantic. It is the same old sun that dies out every afternoon. The breakdown in the motor? I first took that to mean that the poet had gone on a trip and that his car had broken down. But no; the breakdown is suffered by the sun and it is for this reason that it is dying. That's what Huidobro says. Alright. At bottom, it is not really an important issue. Continuing along in the poem, one hears a lost song, someone is looking for something, remembers, feels alone. All this is stated in a rather extravagant manner; but when have poets ever expressed themselves like the rest of us? Suddenly, «in the smoke of my cigar a lost bird». And this? What is it? No one replies; the last shepherds are drowned, in other words they are silenced. Someone, then goes on calling out for someone else. One comes across some sheep strangely confused. Up above, the clouds pile up like mountains of wool. A reflection of contentment. And the explanation for the sheep eating flowers: someone special had just been there . . .
— Do you understand now?
— Very little.
— But this is a translation of an eclogue of San Juan de la Cruz!
— It doesn't surprise me; if you had translated 

translation by Rene Dacosta 

Vicente Huidobro

MINUIT

Les heures glissent
Comme des gouttes d’eau sur une vitr                                                                    Silence de Minuit

La peur se déroule dans l’air 

Et le vent

                se cache au fond du puits

                            OH

                        C’est une feuille
                            on pense que la terre va finir

                            Le temps

                                                        remue dans l’ombre

tout le monde dort

                                    UN SOUPIR

Dans la maison quelqu’un vient de mourir

                                                                    translated by the author from the original Spanish

                                                                     (From Horizon Carré, Paris : Paul Birault, 1917.)                

Vicente Huidobro

Vicente Huidobro

 Eclogue

                                    Sun about to die

The car broken down

And a smell of spring
Remains as the air sweeps by

                                            Somewhere
                                                                 a song

                    WHERE ARE YOU

One afternoon much like this
                                                   I looked for you in vain

In the fog covering the roads
I kept finding myself

And in the smoke of my cigar
A lost bird

Nobody answered

                                 The last pastors drowned

And the stray sheep
Ate flowers and did not give honey

The wind that went by
Piles up their wool

                                                Between the clouds
                                                Holding my tears

Why cry once more
                                   about what I've cried already

And since the sheep eat flowers
Sign that you went by

(Egloga)

                                                         translation by Johannes Beilharz

Vicente Huidobro

 

Night

You hear the night glide across the snow

The song fell down from the trees

And through the fog sounded voices

I lit my cigar at a glance

Every time I open my lips

I flood the void with clouds

                                    In the harbor

The masts are full of nests.

And the wind

                       groans in the birds' wings

     THE WAVES ROCK THE DEAD SHIP

Whistling on the shore I

          Look at the star that glows between my fingers

(Noche)

                                                translation by Johannes Beilharz

Nicanor Parra

fromAlthrough I haven't come preparraed

por Dave Oliphant

For a nation of only 13 million inhabitants, Chile has the distinction of being the birthplace of at least five world-renowned poets, two of those, Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, winners of the Nobel Prize for literature. A third poet who has been touted as deserving of the Noble Prize is the 84-year-old self-proclaimed antipoet, Nicanor Parra. The concept of antipoetry as prescribed by Parra -"You can do anything in poetry"; "in sincerity lies the danger" and "truth is a collective error" -owes something of its iconoclastic outrageousness to an earlier Chilean poet, Vicente Huidobro, who declared that "the poet is a little God" and "an adjective, when it doesn't give life, takes it away.". Following both Huidobro and Parra, a fifth Chilean poet, Enrique Lihn, carried on the antipoetry tradition by attacking both his medium and himself as the messenger, asserting that poetry is "a big pile of muck stirred by chance" and the poet is "a rotten little rhetorician." Despite what may seem an overly negative and therefore limited approach to the making of a poem, Chilean poets have produced in the antipoetic mode some of the most provocative and original writing of the last half of the twentieth century.

Nicanor Parra

"Help!'

 I don’t know how I got here:

I was running along happy as you please
My hat in my right hand
Chasing a phosphorescent butterfly 
Who drove me crazy with joy

And suddenly zap! I tripped
I don’t know what’s happened to the garden
The whole thing went to pieces
My nose and my mouth are bleeding.

Honestly I don’t know what’s going on
Either give me some help
Or a bullet in the head.

Pablo Neruda

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.

                                                    Translation by W. S. Merwin

Pablo Neruda

 

Love Sonnet XII 

Full woman, fleshly apple, hot moon,
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?

Loving is a journey with water and with stars,
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.

Kiss by kiss I move across your small infinity,
your borders, your rivers, your tiny villages,
and the genital fire transformed into delight

runs through the narrow pathways of the blood
until it plunges down, like a dark carnation,
until it is and is no more than a flash in the night.

	      (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

Pablo Neruda

Morning (Love Sonnet XXVII)

Naked you are simple as one of your hands;
Smooth, earthy, small, transparent, round.
You've moon-lines, apple pathways
Naked you are slender as a naked grain of wheat.

Naked you are blue as a night in Cuba;
You've 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

The Weary One

The weary one, orphan
of the masses, the self,
the crushed one, the one made of concrete,
the one without a country in crowded restaurants,
he who wanted to go far away, always farther away,
didn't know what to do there, whether he wanted
or didn't want to leave or remain on the island,
the hesitant one, the hybrid, entangled in himself,
had no place here: the straight-angled stone,
the infinite look of the granite prism,
the circular solitude all banished him:
he went somewhere else with his sorrows,
he returned to the agony of his native land,
to his indecisions, of winter and summer.

Pablo Neruda

 

One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII

TRANSLATED BY MARK EISNER

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,   

or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:   

I love you as one loves certain obscure things,   

secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries   

the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,   

and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose   

from the earth lives dimly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,   

I love you directly without problems or pride:

I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,

except in this form in which I am not nor are you,   

so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,   

so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

Roberto Bolano

 GODZILLA IN MEXICO

Listen carefully, my son: bombs were falling
over Mexico City
but no one even noticed.
The air carried poison through
the streets and open windows.
You’d just finished eating and were watching
cartoons on TV.
I was reading in the bedroom next door
when I realized we were going to die.
Despite the dizziness and nausea I dragged myself
to the kitchen and found you on the floor.
We hugged. You asked what was happening
and I didn’t tell you we were on death’s program
but instead that we were going on a journey,
one more, together, and that you shouldn’t be afraid.
When it left, death didn’t even
close our eyes.
What are we? you asked a week or year later,
ants, bees, wrong numbers
in the big rotten soup of chance?
We’re human beings, my son, almost birds,
public heroes and secrets.

Roberto Bolano

 

from The Savage Detectives

NOVEMBER 2

I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way.

NOVEMBER 3

I'm not really sure what visceral realism is. I'm seventeen years old, my name is Juan Garcia Madero, and I'm in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I gave in. I'm an orphan, and someday I'll be a lawyer. That's what I told my aunt and uncle, and then I shut myself in my room and cried all night. Or anyway for a long time. Then, as if it were settled, I started class in the law school's hallowed halls, but a month later I registered for Julio Cesar Alamo's poetry workshop in the literature department, and that was how I met the visceral realists, or viscerealists or even vicerealists, as they sometimes like to call themselves. Up until then, I had attended the workshop four times and nothing ever happened, though only in a manner of speaking, of course, since naturally something always happened: we read poems, and Alamo praised them or tore them to pieces, depending on his mood; one person would read, Alamo would critique, another person would read, Alamo would critique, somebody else would read, Alamo would critique. Sometimes Alamo would get bored and ask us (those of us who weren't reading just then) to critique too, and then we would critique and Alamo would read the paper.

It was the ideal method for ensuring that no one was friends with anyone, or else that our friendships were unhealthy and based on resentment.

Enrique Lihn

Narcissus' Old Age

I look at myself in the mirror and can't see my face.

I have vanished: the mirror is my face.

I have made myself vanish 

– since from seeing myself too much in this broken mirror

I have lost the meaning of my face

or, having counted it so much it is now infinite to me

or the nothingness that in it, like in all things,

was hidden hides it,

the nothingness in everything like the sun in the night,

and I'm my own absence before a broken mirror.

From Poemas de este tiempo y de otro Ediciones Renovación

Translation by Judith Filc

Roberto Bolano

Written in the form of a list, Bolaño’s postcard succinctly and wittily conveys the nature and scope of his developing aesthetic. It is written on a gallery announcement for a Jörg Madlener show in the nearby town of Figueres, an event Bolaño makes no mention of, but which dates the card as no earlier than 1983. The list [translation mine] interweaves references to literature, film, painting, and music with moments of sensual quotidian experience:

Readings: Philip K. Dick, Dickens, Cervantes, Delicado
Weather condition: Beautiful fog, stoles of cold 

Sex: Soft toboggan 

Food: Pasta veronese, Mexican pizza
Adventures: I am Lemmy Caution
Writing: I am Horselover Fat
Music: Jon Hassel
Science Fiction: ¡The Wub!

Paintings: George Henry Durrie
Heroines: Women on bridges

Vesture: Torn pants and three sweaters

Vision: Sunglasses at 5 in the morning

Animals: Everywhere their muzzles tepid or cold like knives
Fantasies: To kiss Sidney Carton in the gallows

Fantasies: To live in a movie theater
Fantasies: To see Dumbo like a ray in the sky of Gerona

Postcard from Bolaño to Enrique Lihn, 1983.

Enrique Lihn

  

Hothouse

What has become of us now? Were we caught off guard that night, in the woods forever
with rusty wellwater seeping in our dreams or did we pick up the old familiar path
that evening
and was it a bit late for us in the garden, a bit night near the hothouse
our nostrils, our hands smeared with woods, hands stained with rust from the wellmouth,
the smart in our burning ears, the corpus delicti clapped on our ears:
the bite, the trace of a harmless insect?

Or did we really get lost in the woods? This might be a clearing in the dream:
we're only there the way a bittersweet memory of the children returns
late at night, when everyone at a painful family gathering has tried
and couldn't keep it shut in the playroom upstairs. Because this
talking garden would no doubt tell us something if we were awake.
But between it and us (we've sworn like perjurers to our real age)
the years rise up, smeared with the air that enters the hothouse through all its
broken panes,
glazing our view of night in the invincible woods.

And there's nobody out there, they'd all say that if we asked loud enough; and
if they heard us asking; or if they agreed
to take up this absurd questions. Nobody but the scattered reflection of all those
faces
in the unbroken panes, smeared with nobody.

The leaves say nothing that isn't clear in the leaves. Memory
says nothing that is not a memory. Only fever speaks about
what speaks in it with another voice each time. Only fever
is different from the self it talks of.
And there's nobody out there

But what has become of us now?

─Translated from the Spanish by John Felstiner

Enrique Lihn

 Cities

Cities are images
All you need is a schoolboy's notebook to carry out
the absurd like of poetry
in its first stages:
strangeness raised to Dürer's third power, 
and a pain that never gets to be itself,
in a melancholy way.

Two white rats runs in a circle
at the speed of neurosis;
after whirling around for a full sixty days
in the big world as in a cage,
I set my mind on one thought:
rats going in circles.

White, shaggy, little sphere
split in halves that jump to unite,
but where the cut was, the confused softness
and the pain, there are now those little legs,
and between them different sexes,
counterbalanced sexes.
Things come out of us from where we were
completely apart, apart complete.
five minutes of hate, in all...five minutes.

Cities are like getting lost on the same old
street, in that part of the world, never in another.

What is it that wouldn't matter
if it were to be made whole again, in short,
to be pettily identical to what's different?
Sun of the final day; what a great way to end
poetry and its work!

In the big world as in a cage
I tune a dangerous instrument.

─Translated from the Spanish by David Unger

Sea Breeze

Raul Zurita

Felipe Zurita

There will be nothing. You see then his eyes
wide open and soon the tufts of red hair that
stick to his face wet from sweat and saliva.
That's how he appears to you through the ice.
You know he's been crying and you notice
now the pull of his lips contracting as if he
still wants to say something. You also want
to say something. You remember the battered
table, the hole in the wall joint in the outskirts,
his screams on the telephone almost at dawn,
the taxi searching for the address a girl gave you
before he hung up. But since you didn't talk before,
you can't talk now. Or, at least, explain to him
that it doesn't matter and the trips to the
psychiatrist and your nightmarish fear of
addiction. You love him to death. You see him
through the glaciers.
You then look at the giant wall of ice and you
feel you were once there, perhaps hundreds,
thousands of years ago, and you curl up in a ball
as if wanting to save yourself from that memory.