Scan barcode
A review by mary_soon_lee
The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda
Nearly fifty years after his death, Pablo Neruda remains a highly influential and celebrated poet. This collection contains fifty of his poems. The Spanish originals are presented alongside their English translations. Eight translators are credited, with initials used to indicate who had primary responsibility for each poem. So far: excellent. I love when poetry translations include the original text, especially in this side-by-side fashion, so that the reader can conveniently compare the original to the translation. And I'm grateful that English translations of Neruda's work are available.
Onto a couple of minor complaints that are unrelated to the poetry itself. Firstly and perhaps most importantly, being ignorant of the details of Pablo Neruda's life, I would have liked a couple of pages of biography.
Next, the contents name the collections that the poems were drawn from, together with the dates those collections were published, with the poems progressing from the earliest collection onward, ending with several poems that appeared posthumously. I would have appreciated these dates and divisions being shown in the main text, together with translations of the titles of the collections (the translations of the titles are also omitted in the contents list). As a related niggle, it bugged me that the titles in the contents list didn't precisely match the titles in the body of the book: I spotted at least two droppings of the word "the" between the contents and the main text.
Onto the poetry itself. In as much as I can tell -- ignorant of Spanish, but with a smattering of Italian sufficient to mostly match Spanish text to its translation -- these are fine and poetic translations. Yet I didn't care for most of the poems. They are highly regarded, widely loved poems, so I conclude that I am simply the wrong reader for them.
I recognize the poetry in these poems, but often the content didn't appeal to me. Of the fifty poems, I marked ten as ones that I liked or half-liked. Of those ten, there was one poem that I liked quite a bit ("Heights of Macchu Picchu: VI//And then on the ladder") and one poem that I liked better still ("I Explain Some Things").
In general, I preferred the more political poems and those touching on pre-Colombian America. To me, there seemed to be an undercurrent of sexism or something adjacent to sexism in some of the poems. Plus the voice of the poems was sometimes too concerned with the poet as a Poet (capital P). It didn't help that partway through I resorted to Wikipedia to learn more about Pablo Neruda. The following extract from the lengthy Wikipedia article soured me on the poet:
N.B. The above text was taken from Wikipedia, retrieved 6/21/2022 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Neruda.
This collection stands as an excellent resource, even though I am among the outliers who didn't warm to the poetry.
About my reviews: I try to review every book I read, including those that I don't end up enjoying. The reviews are not scholarly, but just indicate my reaction as a reader, reading being my addiction. I am miserly with 5-star reviews; 4 stars means I liked a book very much; 3 stars means I liked it; 2 stars means I didn't like it (though often the 2-star books are very popular with other readers and/or are by authors whose other work I've loved). In the case of poetry books, for various reasons, I often omit a rating altogether.
Onto a couple of minor complaints that are unrelated to the poetry itself. Firstly and perhaps most importantly, being ignorant of the details of Pablo Neruda's life, I would have liked a couple of pages of biography.
Next, the contents name the collections that the poems were drawn from, together with the dates those collections were published, with the poems progressing from the earliest collection onward, ending with several poems that appeared posthumously. I would have appreciated these dates and divisions being shown in the main text, together with translations of the titles of the collections (the translations of the titles are also omitted in the contents list). As a related niggle, it bugged me that the titles in the contents list didn't precisely match the titles in the body of the book: I spotted at least two droppings of the word "the" between the contents and the main text.
Onto the poetry itself. In as much as I can tell -- ignorant of Spanish, but with a smattering of Italian sufficient to mostly match Spanish text to its translation -- these are fine and poetic translations. Yet I didn't care for most of the poems. They are highly regarded, widely loved poems, so I conclude that I am simply the wrong reader for them.
I recognize the poetry in these poems, but often the content didn't appeal to me. Of the fifty poems, I marked ten as ones that I liked or half-liked. Of those ten, there was one poem that I liked quite a bit ("Heights of Macchu Picchu: VI//And then on the ladder") and one poem that I liked better still ("I Explain Some Things").
In general, I preferred the more political poems and those touching on pre-Colombian America. To me, there seemed to be an undercurrent of sexism or something adjacent to sexism in some of the poems. Plus the voice of the poems was sometimes too concerned with the poet as a Poet (capital P). It didn't help that partway through I resorted to Wikipedia to learn more about Pablo Neruda. The following extract from the lengthy Wikipedia article soured me on the poet:
His only offspring, his daughter Malva Marina (Trinidad) Reyes, was born in Madrid in 1934. She was plagued with severe health problems, especially suffering from hydrocephalus. She died in 1943 (nine years old), having spent most of her short life with a foster family in the Netherlands after Neruda ignored and abandoned her, forcing her mother to take what jobs she could.
N.B. The above text was taken from Wikipedia, retrieved 6/21/2022 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Neruda.
This collection stands as an excellent resource, even though I am among the outliers who didn't warm to the poetry.
About my reviews: I try to review every book I read, including those that I don't end up enjoying. The reviews are not scholarly, but just indicate my reaction as a reader, reading being my addiction. I am miserly with 5-star reviews; 4 stars means I liked a book very much; 3 stars means I liked it; 2 stars means I didn't like it (though often the 2-star books are very popular with other readers and/or are by authors whose other work I've loved). In the case of poetry books, for various reasons, I often omit a rating altogether.