PABLO NERUDA

His real name was Neftali Ricardo Reyes. He was born in Chile in 1904. His first collecton of poems came out in 1921. During 1927-1943 he was abroad as a diplomat. He joined the Communist Party of Chile after 1945 and was prosecuted. He lived as an exile till in 1952 he returned to Chile. He got the Nobel Prize in 1971 and died in 1973.


Love Poem 1

Body of a Woman

Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,
you look like world, lying in surrender.
My rough peasant’s body digs in you
and makes a son leap from the depth of the earth.

I was alone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me,
and night swamped me with its crushing invasion.
To survive myself I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling.

But the hour of vengeance falls, and I love you.
Body of skin, of moss, of eager and firm milk.
Oh the goblets of the breast! Oh the eyes of absence!
Oh the roses of the pubis! Oh your voice, slow and sad!

Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace.
My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road!
Dark river-beds where the eternal thirst flows
and weariness follows, and the infinite ache.


Translated by W.S. Merwin (from Penguin Books)


Love Poem-2


Tonight I Can Write

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 love her great still eyes.

Toight 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.

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.


Translated by W.S. Merwin (from Penguin Edition)


ODE TO A BEAUTIFUL NUDE


With a chaste heart,
with pure eyes,
I celebrate your beauty
holding the leash of blood
so that it might leap out
and trace your outline
where
you lie down in my ode
as in a land of forests, or in surf:
in aromatic loam
or in sea-music.

Beautiful nude:
equally beautiful
your feet
arched by primeval tap
of wind or sound;
your ears
small shells
of the splendid American sea;
your breasts
of level plenitude full-
filled by living light;
your flying
eyelids of wheat
revealing
or enclosing
the two deep Countries of your eyes.

The line your shoulders
have divided
into pale regions
loses itself and blends
into the compact halves
of an apple,
continues separating
your beauty down
into two columns
of burnished gold, fine alabaster,
to sink into the two grapes of your feet,
where your twin symmetrical tree
burns again and rises:
flowering fire,open chandelier,
a swelling fruit
over the pact of sea and earth.

From what materials —
agate, quartz, wheat —
did your body come together,
swelling like baking bread
to signal silvered
hills,
the cleavage of one petal,
sweet fruits of a deep velvet,
until alone remained,
astonished,
the fine and firm feminine form?

It is not only light that falls
over the world,
spreading inside your body
its suffocated snow,
so much as clarity
taking its leave of you
as if you were
on fire within.

The moon lives in the lining of your skin.

Kamal Das