My sweetheart and I don't usually "do" Valentine's Day, as we both tend to see it as a quintessential Hallmark Holiday, another capitalist gimmick to get us to spend money, and all in the name of love, or rather, Love™.
So I was a bit surprised when I got a VDay present today, with a big red heart on the cover.
It was a copy of Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.
I'm neither a poet nor a critic, and I don't know Spanish (the book contains the original Spanish alongside the English version), but I do believe that, like
feminism, poetry is for everybody, so here goes nothing.
When sitting down to read a novel or book of poetry whose context or background I know little about, I always appreciate a good preface by someone who knows the subject well, and can provide information that makes the work more meaningful for me. In that vein, this collection has an excellent, brief introduction by Cristina Garcia. While Neruda was to become a Communist Party member after WWII, and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971, these poems were written when he was a young man of 20. Neruda grew up in Temuca, "a densely forested region in the south of Chile." At the age of 16 he moved to Santiago, and published these poems in 1924. Garcia writes that Neruda's images are "firmly rooted in the severe beauty of his native soil."
The evocation of nature in his poems is truly beautiful. I find especially powerful his ability to write of intimate, sensual experience while at the same time relating a sense of expansiveness, harmony, and elation.
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 war and songs.
- From "The Morning is Full"
The young Pablo Neruda
I also find his work to urge an active, engaged attitude toward the world, with sorrow and despair finding meaning and even transcendence
Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad nets
towards your oceanic eyes.
There in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens
and flames,
its arms turning like a drowning man's.
- From "Leaning into the afternoons"
Garcia writes that Neruda "reminded readers that even if they'd been to hell and back, they could still fall in love, experience beauty and rapture, nurse their indignities and personal tragedies, and still appreciate that 'the best poet is the man that delivers their daily bread'."
Here I love you.
In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.
The moon glows like phosphorous on the vagrant waters.
Days, all one kind, go chasing each other.
The snow unfurls in dancing figures.
A silver gull slips down from the west.
Sometimes a sail. High, high stars.
- From "Here I Love You"
Now that's a love for the year round.