Pablo Neuruda really fucken sucks and my "love poetry" is a million times better (I've been told so)

Pablo Neuruda really fucken sucks and my "love poetry" is a million times better (I've been told so).

Yet this shlock is the shit that gets published in a neat little coffee table book to be consummed by vapid cuties who want to give a surface level appearance of sophistication.

Twist the arm of a weak cute little girl who claims to like his work, and demand a memorable line--they will most likely not be able to utter a single coherent sentence.

...you're reading translations, aren't you?

>I've been told so
yeah, mommy loves you

Don't mess with Pablo - you want to be branded racist, boi?

your mommy loved me a lot last night

Hang yourself, talentless, sheltered cunt.

Reading Pablo Neruda in English... you have what you deserve, ignorant boy. Learn some Spanish and maybe you can enjoy the best poet of all time

literal how-i-met-your-mother-core

ted was the worst character

did she reafirm your fragile ego too?

He doesnt write in metre--free form is easy as fuck--not a poet.

>He thinks that meter's hard.

That was Iambic trimeter just now. Am I better than Neruda?

she held it softly in her hand and started to stroke it. it got a lot bigger, but she said that was perfectly natural for a boy my age

reminder that Neruda raped an untouchable tamil woman.

well she's hardly untouchable if he raped her

Sounds exotic
I'm gonna write poem about it

curry stink asshole
gets me hard
here in the
southern lands
of India
Ancient lands, of Noble
dravidian stock
I raped a
Pariah
here in the Tamil lands
old lands, of old gods

far in the south
I raped a smelly woman

and came

in her vagina

t. Rupee poo-ar

Lol!

I enjoyed Canto General way more than his love poetry.

1/2

He is not consistent, and he generally writes many bad verses (also, he didn’t care much for metrics and the rhythms of poetry, and I think that is due more to laziness than to aesthetic choice). Yet, among those bad verses, there are as often a great deal of lines of impressive beauty.

Neruda had a rare gift for metaphor: he could produce so many of them in so stratospheric level that he might have achieved the same exuberance of Shakespeare if he were more disciplined and self-demanding.

Yet he was too loose, too prone to repeat himself over and over again. Many of his metaphors seem like a haze, like a mist that one can observe and understand, but that are yet to take a perfect form: you sense that the idea and image could have been better sculpted, made more clear, more incisive.

That’s the difference between his metaphorical language and the one of Shakespeare: Shakespeare condenses the mists of metaphors into crystals, he gives them a better shape, a better vocabulary. He also innovates more on subject theme.

Yet Neruda’s metaphorical language was very impressive. Many poets who were more cerebral and cultured would have killed for his facility with this that is the greatest of all figures of speech and chief artifact of a poet. To be honest there is not another poet I can name apart from Shakespeare, the author of the Book of Job and Aeschylus with the same lushness and boldness in metaphorical creation.

2/2

Consider this poem (there are many unimpressive things on it, but a few great jewels):

Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.

You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
>Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.

Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes.

The birds go by, fleeing.
The wind. The wind.
I can contend only against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.

You are here. Oh, you do not run away.
You will answer me to the last cry.
Cling to me as though you were frightened.
Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes.

Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle,
and even your breasts smell of it.
>While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies
>I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
>So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
>and over our heads the gray light unwind in turning fans.

>My words rained over you, stroking you.
>A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.

>I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

The lines that I greentexted are all great lines, and the last line of the poem is one of the greatest verses I have ever encountered in a love poem. Dante has never created a better love verse in all his sonnets to Beatrice.

>translations
what the fuck are you doing

>translations
Oh Christ dude if I met you in real life I would laugh so hard in front of your face, that everybody nearby would get second-hand embarrassment from it. But I wouldn't, because you are that stupid.

If a poet is truly great his work will survive translation. The imagery and the ideias will survive, only sonority will be lost. But mere musical poets are not the best ones. A poet like Neruda, with his metaphorical exuberance - and with no use of metric, so no need to have his verses re-modeled to fit a foreign measure - can be read in translation and still have his merits admired.

i don't believe you

Trust me. I read Shakespeare in Portuguese and he is greater than all the other masters of portuguese poetry, even in translation. His metaphors and imagery - the greatest aspect of his language and art - are all saved by good translators.

If you ask any spic intellectual they will tell you that Neruda's love poems are utter trash.
His Canto General is one of the best spic poems ever, but you should avoid the gringo-bait love poems.
Also don't read translations you fucking mongoloid.

native spanish speaker here, Neruda's still garbage

Women do not write love poems because they are not able to love

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example,'The night is shattered
and the blue stars 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, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight 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.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
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. Like my kisses before.
Her voide. Her bright body. Her inifinite 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 sould 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.

>tfw

Only read the translation, but I love how the sentences are paced to sound dead or apathetic. It really captures the feeling of hopelessness that accompanies heartbreak.

What a shitty translation.

why?

Walking on the sands

I decided to leave you.

I was treading a dark clay
that trembled
and I, sinking and coming out,’
decided that you should come out
of me, that you were weighing me down
like a cutting stone,
and I worked out your loss
step by step:
to cut off your roots,
to release you alone into the wind.

Ah in that minute,
my dear, a dream
with its terrible wings
was covering you.

You felt yourself swallowed by the clay,
and you called to me and I did not come,
you were going, motionless,
without defending yourself
until you were smothered in the quicksand.

Afterwards
my decision encountered your dream,
and from the rupture
that was breaking our hearts
we came forth clean again, naked,
loving each other,
without dream, without sand,
complete and radiant,
sealed by fire.

Are you the Guatemalan guy I’ve seen posting here before?