Poem-a-Day April 17: Eso es todo.

Hello Friends,

I find Gabriel García Márquez occupying the space in my thoughts where poetry month should be this evening. But Márquez didn't think very highly of his own early forays into poetry — so I am not going to embarrass him by sharing them, even if I think they were quite good.

Instead, a poem that García Márquez loved all his life: one story goes that a teenage "Gabo" got in trouble with the jesuit fathers in secondary school for memorizing Pablo Neruda's "Poema XX" and reciting it several times a day. Fittingly, Neruda was just a teenager himself when he wrote "Poema XX," published in his poetry collection Viente poemas de amor y una canción de desesperada / Twenty Love Poems and One Song of Despair in 1924, when Neruda was just 19 years old (and three years before Gabriel García Márquez was born).

Later in life, García Márquez would call Neruda "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language." Neruda, in turn, had the chance to call Márquez's most famous novel, Cien años de soledad / One Hundred Years of Solitude, "the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Don Quixote."

Enjoy.
Ellen

XX PUEDO ESCRIBIR

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.

Escribir, por ejemplo: «La noche está estrellada,
y tiritan, azules, los astros, a los lejos».

El viento de la noche gira en el cielo y canta.

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Yo la quise, y a veces ella también me quiso.

En las noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos.
La besé tantas veces bajo el cielo infinito.

Ella me quiso, a veces yo también la quería.
Cómo no haber amado sus grandes ojos fijos.

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Pensar que no la tengo. Sentir que la he perdido.

Oír la noche inmensa, más inmensa sin ella.
Y el verso cae al alma como al pasto el rocío.

Qué importa que mi amor no pudiera guardarla.
La noche está estrellada y ella no está conmigo.

Eso es todo. A lo lejos alguien canta. A lo lejos.
Mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido. 		XX 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 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 starry and she is not with me.

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


Pablo Neruda was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 13, 2007.

W.S. Merwin's English translation of Neruda's Viente poemas de amor y una canción de desesperada, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, was first published in 1969.