Anniversary of Pablo Neruda's Death

Today is the anniversary of Pablo Neruda’s death in 1973. In homage, I’m posting this poem, “Ode with a Lament.”* Written in the early thirties in Spain, it probably alludes to Neruda’s daughter Malva who was born with hydrocephaly and Down’s syndrome. I find the last stanza particularly moving in its depiction of the emotionally vulnerable girl killing ants and crying, her abecedary on fire because she will never learn to read.

Drawing by Douglas Culhane

And I like the two pair of opposing images there in the last stanza. The image of the child piercing the speaker is followed by an image of the child going liquid at his touch. Then, a figure of death—dressed in white with bloodstained roses and a wineglass of ash—is juxtaposed with a figure of life that calls to mind Picasso’s painting, “Boy Leading a Horse.” By the end of the poem, Neruda’s soul has closed down. The wistful “press of doves” from the poem’s first line has become a single dead dove with a fixed number. Malva died when she was eight.
Ode with a Lament
Oh child among the roses, oh press of doves,
oh presidio of fish and rosebushes,
your soul is a bottle of dried salts
and a bell filled with grapes, your skin.
Unfortunately, I’ve nothing to give you but fingernails
or eyelashes, or melted pianos,
or dreams that bubble up from my heart,
dusty dreams that gallop like black riders,
dreams charged with dash and disfortune.
Only with kisses and red poppies can I love you,
with rain soaked wreaths,
contemplating ashen horses and yellow dogs.
Only with waves at my back can I love you,
between dull explosions of brimstone and reflective waters,
swimming against cemeteries that circulate in certain rivers,
drowned pasture flooding the sad, chalky tombstones,
swimming across the submerged hearts
and faded lists of unburied children.
There’s so much death, so many funereal events
in my destitute passions, my desolate kisses,
there’s water that falls on my head,
while my hair grows out,
a water like time, a black, undammed water
with a nocturnal voice, with a parrot’s
shriek in rain, with the interminable
shadow of a wet wing shielding my bones:
while I dress, while
incessantly I survey myself in mirrors and windows,
I hear someone trailing me, sobbing out my name
in a wounded voice putrefied by time.
You stand your ground, chock
full of teeth and lightning.
You propagate kisses and clobber the ants.
You cry from vitality, from an onion, a bee,
from your burning abecedary.
You’re like a sword, blue and green
and at my touch you undulate like a river.
Approach my soul, dressed in white, with a branch
of bloodstained roses and wineglasses of ash,
come near with an apple and a horse,
because therein lies a dark living room and a shattered candelabrum,
a few bent chairs waiting on winter,
and a dove, dead, with a number.
*This is my translation from The Essential Neruda, City Lights, 2004, edited by Mark Eisner