A review by spacestationtrustfund
Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda by Pablo Neruda, Nathaniel Tarn

3.0

The annoying thing about being a poet (yes I've been published and no I won't link you to it) is that people think you're some grand authority on the quality of it. I mean, I am, but the constant questions get annoying, okay? Everyone's always asking stuff like, "Is this poem good?" or "Why can't you just have a normal job?" or "What's the sexiest line of poetry ever?" and I usually give the same answer to the first two questions, but as for the third... well, I've got you on this one, actually. Here's the sexiest line of poetry ever:

Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos.

It's from a poem by Pablo Neruda, and it makes my knees go weak every time. Why, you may be wondering, is Pablo Neruda such a sexy poet? And by "sexy" I don't mean the man himself was necessarily sexy, I mean that a poet is the sum total of their poetry, and Neruda's was an impressively attractive corpus. Anyway, one of the reasons he's so sexy is that he understood the three fundamental human emotions: horny, yearning, and sad. (There's overlap, of course—secondary emotions, like when you mix "horny" and "yearning" to get "romantic," or "horny" and "sad" to get "romantic," but those are the primary emotions.)

This compilation of Neruda's poetry is a bilingual edition, translated by Ben Belitt. The translations were originally published in 1961 (this edition is from 1977), 12 years before Neruda's death. The selection is fine; Belitt's translation is more or less decent, and the addition of the original Spanish text is certainly a major benefit. I haven't read any newer translations of Neruda (W.S. Merwin's, my favourite, is from 1969), but I think I probably should.