Pablo Neruda (1904–1973)
Poetry
And it was at that age… Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.
And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.
Translated by Anton Jarvis.
Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) was a Chilean poet and diplomat who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. Neruda was exiled from 1948–1951 when communism was made illegal in Chile. Later he served as a diplomat and an advisor to President Salvador Allende. When Allende was overthrown in a coup d’état that made way for Augusto Pinochet’s regime, Neruda was already dying of cancer. Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Márquez called Neruda “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.” This poem can be found in The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, edited by Ilan Stavens (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2003), p. 659.
Selected by Amy Frykholm: amy@journeywithjesus.net
