I hope it won't seem improper, given the occasion of Forrest's post, to be a bit contrarian here.

Neruda is obviously one of the central figures in the history of Latin American poetry. And he has remained something of a sacred-cow figure here in the U.S. ever since the great rush of translations beginning in the 60s. It's worth pointing out, though, that his reputation among many Spanish-language poets has been sliding for some time now.

Even in Chile, where his various houses are national museums and working class folk by the thousands can recite him at the drop of a hat, Neruda's gushing lyrical surrealism is seen by growing numbers of poets as somewhat passe. Today, the major models are writers like Nicanor Parra (whose Anti-Poetry was, in fact, a self-conscious challenge to the Nerudian mode), Enrique Lihn, or Raul Zurita, among others.

(An interesting analogy, perhaps, is that of Ginsberg's current slide, though it's in earlier stages than Neruda's: Like Neruda, Ginsberg will no doubt remain a centripetal cultural figure, but his poetic rank may well not keep up.)

In Latin America at large, the overarching figure for recent generations is not Neruda, but Vallejo. Their poetries are very different, and the differences define certain broad allegiances, somewhat like the Pound-Stein-Williams vs. late Eliot-Stevens-Bishop lines do for us.

So just to point out that what Neruda is to many of us here is not necessarily what Neruda is to many poets there. The poetic tradition south of the border, actually, is arguably more complex and contentious than ours (I don't pretend to fully understand it!)...

Other than that, Forrest's translation of the poem is superb.

Kent

Children give birth to beauty.

Jane, it's interesting that you say that. I was just reading a draft of a biography of Neruda that Mark Eisner is writing. Eisner quotes the poet (later to be awarded the Nobel Prize) Vicente Aleixandre. Visiting Neruda after the birth of Malva, Alexaindre writes:

"Pablo was leaning over what seemed to be a cradle. I saw it from afar while I heard his voice. Malva Marina, do you hear me? Come, Vicente, come. Look how marvelous. My daughter. The most beautiful in the world."

Better yet, Parra is still alive for us to share oxygen with and appreciate.

Part of what I love about Bolaño is his disdain for Neruda.

I have the Donald D. Walsh translation of the Residecias. I like some of the choices you made better than his.

"or dreams that bubble up from my heart,"

sounds better than

"or dreams that come spurting from my heart."

Your translation of "ven" first as "Approach" then as "come near" works really well.

Maybe it's not a matter of better, just different. His translations seem to be more on the literal side while this translation seems to aim at capturing the suggested gestures of the words. It would be interesting to hear how you make certain decisions while translating.

Like Kent says, the poetic tradition (this should really be plural) in Latin America is complex and contentious for anyone to pretend to fully understand it. But I do know what I learned from those young Latin American poets I studied with in my MFA. Neruda (the man and the work) is disliked, but they admit their dislike is a result of being forcefed Neruda throughout their schooling. The problem with Neruda, they would say, is that he wrote too much for too long. The 20 and ONE is a masterpiece; the First Residencia is brilliant; but does anyone really want to read Canto General. I even have a Colombian friend who feels so strongly about this that in his "official bio" he identifies himself as someone who argues for Parra over Neruda as Chile's best poet.

I've always thought that our (American) view of Latin American (this is probably also true about other literatures.) poetry was limited and skewed because translators focused on a few poets: Neruda, Vallejo, Paz. During my years in the MFA, I was roommates with Jaime Urco, a fifty-something year old Peruvian poet. He introduced me to the work of Jorge Eduardo Eielson, who, Urco said, is second only to Vallejo. People--la gente que sabe--are always surprised when I tell them there is no English translation of Eielson's work. We translated his Habitacion en Roma one summer and even managed to get Eielson's permission to publish some poems in Hunger Mountain before he passed away. I guess my point is I only started to begin to learn about Latin American poetry once I turned away from Neruda. By the way, I disagree with my friend and argue for Neruda over Parra. If only to be contrarian. It's good to see translators like Forrest go beyond the big three.

Reputation? How dreary. To be. Somebody.

I've had a couple of female friends tell me that while they were studying abroad in Chile young men would hit on them using Neruda's verses. There is nothing more I desire for my poems than for them to suffer the same fate: to be reduced to (ineffective) pick-up lines.

Actually, isn't Roberto Bolano's position on Neruda quite nuanced and full of delicious contradictions? At least that's how I read it. There's an incident, which must have been "real", since he milks it in a few different fictions, including Savage Detectives, when, as a young man trying to defend Neruda to an older and infinitely wilier critic, he breaks down crying. It comes up in the beautiful short story Dance Card -- http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/1289/prmID/1409 -- a combination of wry love songs to Neruda and some songs of despair too, where the camps of Neruda, Parra and Vallejo come into clear view. At one point Bolano becomes a rare Parrist in Mexico city, saying "By that stage, I didn't like Neruda anymore". Later he explains why he cannot read the memoirs without feeling ill. And yet, he cannot shake free of Neruda; one of the last entries in the story reads, "Do we have to come back to Neruda as we do to the Cross, on bleeding knees, with punctured lungs and eyes full of tears?"

As you might guess, Neruda also casts a towering and sometimes debilitatingly dark shadow on many Indian poetries-- in a number of languages, not so much on Indian poetry written in English, except for English poetry from the Northeast region of India, where virtually everyone of a certain generation seems to write like Neruda. Neruda also looms large on the (standardised) texbooks and syllabi for English literature at the undergraduate level where, can you believe it, versions of his poems appear without any translator credited! Just think about the scale of that crime, students all across India reading Neruda as if he wrote in English! And because of all this, when I first began to be called in to discuss poetry in classrooms, I was often asked to discuss Neruda, presumably because it would help the students out with their exams--- until, very quickly I had to put a stop, once and for all, to all requests of any nature to discuss Neruda in public. So you can see why I would have reason to resent him, and I can see why Spanish language poets would have reason to resent him too, perhaps in the way that some of us resent Tagore over here. And yet, goddammit, I cannot shake off Neruda either. There he is, haunting my very desk, for the past two weeks....

By an amazing coincidence, Poetry will soon bring you a special portfolio of Roberto Bolaño's poems.

Resent Tagore, Vivek! OMG. I was about to ask what you thought of Joe Winter's new contemporary-sounding versions, published by Anvil as The Golden Boat; what was I thinking!!

Like Kent, I don't mean to insult Neruda. Major figures like Neruda and Paz are strong enough poets to withstand plenty of criticism or disdain.

Definitely, Vivek, Roberto Bolaño is pretty nuanced with all the writers he attacks. I think Bolaño just likes to be a contrarian and doesn't want to worship any single writer. Maybe at other times, he's just having fun, being a punk poet, attacking the elders. His use of Paz as a foil in "The Savage Detectives" seems hilarious to me. Even Bolaño, as he now becomes a "major" figure among readers, has a growing share of detractors.

Roque Dalton also seemed to get annoyed with some of Neruda. In his long prose poem "Con palabras" from "Taberna y otros lugares" (1969), he writes the following about him (in my English version):

"[...] Wordless man is not synonymous with mute but rather with zombie. A wordless poet can continue to publish little books in deluxe editions and host cocktail parties so as to keep throwing things into literary pages, or even join Academies or clubs. But if Neruda – to cite a well known case – has something of the zombie after "Residencia en la tierra," how do we discover, recognize, classify, the virus of the dead, the cadaverous profile in his subsequent books, the expendable viscous mass in order to isolate the architectonic elements that maintain locomotion's physiology and respiratory impudence of the living-dead whom the audience would poison; that is to say, finally, how do we differentiate a living word from one that is ready for the championship? Well, as Erique Muiño would say, when words die music begins and this is very serious for those of us who aren't immune to 70 ampere headaches. One of the most abominable crimes of Western civilization and Christian culture has consisted precisely in convincing the great popular masses that words are merely signifying elements. [...]"

http://venepoetics.blogspot.com/2008/09/con-palabras-roque-dalton.html

Glad Guillermo mentioned Roque Dalton, a terrific poet, whose life and art make discussions about political poetry in our cozy climes seem hilarious, at best. People were talking about irony under another post (the one about the Pompeii poem), and if you want to read someone who really wields irony with a pointed and meaningful difference (in service, that is, to matters beyond mandarinic literary gamemanship), read Dalton-- whose death, actually, is one of the most sadly ironic cases in the history of 20th century literature.

Though it's also true he wrote quite a few poems satirizing self-important, well-placed poets!

And speaking of irony, it's poignant that Bolano thought of himself first and foremost as a poet. Fiction writing was completely secondary in comparison, a way of paying the bills. But his poetry, alas, is, well... Let's just say that he is an extraordinary fiction writer.

My former roommate from college days, the now-prominent Mexican composer Javier Alvarez, hung out all the time with Bolano in Mexico City during the 70s. I was hearing about Bolano and his escapades before nearly anyone had heard of him. Crazy stuff he and Javier and Co. used to do in Mexico gets into The Savage Detectives, including the harrassment of Paz.

Thus, one of my few brushes with greatness...

Kent

Regarding Neruda and Tagore, in Poema XVI of the 20 Love Poems, Neruda paraphrased/plagiarized the thirtieth poem of Tagore's The Gardner:

You are the evening cloud floating in the sky of my dreams.
I paint you and fashion you ever with my love longings.
You are my own, my own, Dweller in my endless dreams!

Your feet are rosy-red with the glow of my heart's desire,
Gleaner of my sunset songs!
Your lips are bitter-sweet with the taste of my wine of pain.
You are my own, my own, Dweller in my lonesome dreams!

With the shadow of my passion have I darkened your eyes, Haunter
of the depth of my gaze!
I have caught you and wrapt you, my love, in the net of my music.
You are my own, my own, Dweller in my deathless dreams!

Neruda's poem XVI (translated by W.S. Merwin:

In my sky at twilight you are like a cloud
and your form and colour are the way I love them.
You are mine, mine, woman with sweet lips
and in your life my infinite dreams live.

The lamp of my soul dyes your feet,
My sour wine is sweeter on your lips,
oh reaper of my evening song,
how solitary dreams believe you to be mine!

You are mine, mine, I go shouting it to the afternoon's
wind, and the wind hauls on my widowed voice.
Huntress of the depth of my eyes, your plunder
stills your nocturnal regard as though it were water.

You are taken in the net of my music, my love,
and my nets of music are wide as the sky.
My soul is born on the shore of your eyes of mourning.
In your eyes of mourning the land of dreams begin.

Vicente Huidobro among others called him out on this. Neruda admitted that yes, he had borrowed from Tagore, but that it wasn't plagiarism, but rather that the poem was a "paraphrase" of Tagore's. In the 1937 edition of the Love Poems and all those subsequent, he added the words "paraphrase of R. Tagore" under the poem's title. (The first edition was in 1924 (when Neruda was only twenty)).

That's fascinating, Mark. Curious if Vivek knew that.

Speaking of Huidobro, I've got something coming out in the next issue of Fulcrum, about the ghost-poet Omar Caceres, with whom Huidobro (and Pablo de Rokha) had a very strange, still-unsolved relationship. Neruda also enters the affair, though in a secondary way.

Kent

don't remember the title exactly but can find it if interested--a book about all the literary rivalries in chile, focusing especially on huidobro-de rothka-neruda. (published in chile).

from the current draft of my neruda bio after talking about all the infighting:

The dispute reached the point that in April 1935, Neruda responded to the attacks with a scathing poetic retort. He didn’t go so far as to publish it, but instead let it make its way hand by hand back to Chile, eventually reaching de Rokha and Huidobro, circulating through the circles of students and men and women of letters. It is defiantly entitled, “I Am Here.”

I am here with my lips of iron
and an eye in each hand,
and completely with my heart,
and dawn comes, and dawn comes,
and I am here in spite
of dogs, in spite
of wolves, in spite
of nightmares, in spite
of lice, in spite of spites[
I am full of tears and cut poppies,
and pale doves of energy,
and with all my teeth and fingers, I write
and with all the matter of the sea,
with all the matter of the heart, I write.

Bastards!
Sons of whores!
Neither today nor tomorrow
not ever
will you be finished with me!
I’ve got my testicles full of petals,
I’ve got my hair full of birds,
I’ve got poetry and steam,
cemeteries and houses,
people who gasp,
fires,
in my “Twenty Poems,”
in my weeks, in my adventures,
and I shit on the whore who gave birth to you,
de Rokhas, gallows,
snakey Huidobros. . .

In the face of the attacks of the Chilean rivals, Lorca, Alberti, Hernández, Alexiandre, Cernuda, and eleven others published three recent Neruda poems in an edition entitled “Homage to Pablo Neruda”

by the way, for more info on the neruda documentary i'm working on, along with more on the essential neruda where forrest's translation of Ode with a Lament appears, please check out http://www.redpoppy.net/pablo_neruda.php

paz,
mark