When Pablo Neruda published the first poem in this collection in 1924, the devastating aftermath of the First World War still hung heavy. Additionally, Neruda’s native Chile was hit hard by the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918-1921. The nation that first read the lines that follow was a nation, a people, in recovery. Pablo Neruda’s career as a poet blossomed in a world searching for a sense of normalcy following great tragedy, and ultimately earned him a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971.
Recovery in the wake of political unrest and pandemic is a state of being all too familiar. Yet in a period filled with tragedy, we too have learned to appreciate and cherish joy even more so than before. Pablo Neruda, facing a period of “afterness,” chose to write about love, heartbreak, and what makes us human. He illustrates the importance of meditating on beauty and love in a period of searching.
W. S. Merwin’s translation of this iconic text brings Neruda’s thoughts on love into English with the skill and beauty that earned Merwin the title of U. S. Poet Laureate and won him two Pulitzer Prizes for his own poetry. This text is the work of two of the greatest poets in modern literature, conveying for us the emotions that we often cannot put into words ourselves.
Originally published as the February 2023 dispatch
Pablo Neruda is one of the most influential and widely read 20th-century poets of the Americas. “No writer of world renown is perhaps so little known to North Americans as Chilean poet Pablo Neruda,” observed New York Times Book Review critic Selden Rodman. Numerous critics have praised Neruda as the greatest poet writing in the Spanish language during his lifetime. John Leonard in the New York Times declared that Neruda “was, I think, one of the great ones, a Whitman of the South.” Among contemporary readers in the United States, he is largely remembered for his odes and love poems.
