Pablo Neruda

Was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.

Children: Malva Marina (b.1934, d.1942)

Colombian novelist Gabriel Garca Mrquez considers him the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.

Federico Garca Lorca was a primary influence on his style. The two poets were close friends up until Lorcas execution during the Spanish Civil War.

Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". New Revision Series, Vol. 131, pages 321-330. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005.

The love poetry Patch Adams (Robin Williams ) reads to Corinne Fisher (Monica Potter ) in Patch Adams was from Nerudas "100 Love Sonnets : Cien sonetos de amor".

Kenneth Rexroth s translation of Nerudas 1955 poem "Brown and Agile Child" is shown on the back cover of Jackson Browne s 1976 album "The Pretender".

Adopted the pen name Pablo Neruda as a tribute to Czech writer and poet Jan Neruda (1834-1891).

Neruda died 12 days after Augusto Pinochets military coup toppled the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende. In 2013, Chilean judge Mario Carroza ordered the exhumation of Nerudas remains after his chauffeur, Manuel Araya, told the Mexican magazine Proceso that the poet had called him in desperation from the hospital to say that he had been injected in the stomach while he was asleep. Samples of Nerudas remains were sent to forensic genetics laboratories in four countries for analysis and in 2015 the Chilean government said that it was "highly probable that a third party" was responsible for his death. 16 scientists unanimously rejected the cause of death noted on Nerudas death certificate, cancer cachexia, which involves significant weight loss. "That cannot be correct," said Dr Niels Morling of the University of Copenhagens department of forensic medicine, who took part in the analysis. "There was no indication of cachexia. He was an obese man at the time of death. All other circumstances in his last phase of life pointed to some kind of infection." The day before the poets death, the then Mexican ambassador to Chile, Gonzalo Martnez Corbal, visited the poet in hospital and told him there was a plane waiting on the runway at Santiago airport to fly him to safety in Mexico, where he would receive the best available treatment for his cancer. Neruda hesitated, saying he would prefer to wait two days, but died the next day. Proponents of the poisoning hypothesis maintain that, as a prominent communist, Neruda would have been an influential voice of opposition to the military junta from exile and that he was murdered to prevent him from leaving Chile. The tests on the samples continued. [The Guardian, Oct. 2017].

Love is so short and forgetting so long.

Only with burning patience shall we conquer the splendid city which,shall give light, justice and dignity to all men. Thus shall Poetry not,have sung in vain.

Shyness is a condition foreign to the heart - a category, a dimension,which leads to loneliness.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Well, nowIf little by little you stop loving meI shall stop loving youLittle by littleIf suddenly you forget meDo not look for meFor I shall already have forgotten youIf you think it long and mad the wind of banners that passes through my lifeAnd you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have rootsRememberThat on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my armsAnd my roots will set off to seek another land,I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

Tonight I can write the saddest linesI loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair. Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps. I hunger for your sleek laugh, your hands the color of a savage harvest, hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails, I want to eat your skin like a whole almond. I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body, the sovereign nose of your arrogant face, I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes, and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight, hunting for you, for your hot heart, Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

As if you were on fire from within. The moon lives in the lining of your skin.

If You Forget MeI want you to knowone thing. You know how this is:if I lookat the crystal moon, at the red branchof the slow autumn at my window,if I touchnear the firethe impalpable ashor the wrinkled body of the log,everything carries me to you,as if everything that exists,aromas, light, metals,were little boatsthat sailtoward those isles of yours that wait for me. Well, now,if little by little you stop loving meI shall stop loving you little by little. If suddenlyyou forget medo not look for me,for I shall already have forgotten you. If you think it long and mad,the wind of bannersthat passes through my life,and you decideto leave me at the shoreof the heart where I have roots,rememberthat on that day,at that hour,I shall lift my armsand my roots will set offto seek another land. Butif each day,each hour,you feel that you are destined for mewith implacable sweetness,if each day a flowerclimbs up to your lips to seek me,ah my love, ah my own,in me all that fire is repeated,in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,my love feeds on your love, beloved,and as long as you live it will be in your armswithout leaving mine.

You are like nobody since I love you.

Love. Because of you, in gardens of blossomingFlowers I ache from the perfumes of spring. I have forgotten your face, I no longerRemember your hands; how did your lipsFeel on mine?Because of you, I love the white statuesDrowsing in the parks, the white statues thatHave neither voice nor sight. I have forgotten your voice, your happy voice;I have forgotten your eyes. Like a flower to its perfume, I am bound toMy vague memory of you. I live with painThat is like a wound; if you touch me, you willMake to me an irreperable harm. Your caresses enfold me, like climbingVines on melancholy walls. I have forgotten your love, yet I seem toGlimpse you in every window. Because of you, the heady perfumes ofSummer pain me; because of you, I againSeek out the signs that precipitate desires:Shooting stars, falling objects.

In this part of the story I am the one whodies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,because I love you, Love, in fire and in blood.

And I, infinitesima­l being, drunk with the great starry void, likeness, image of mystery, I felt myself a pure part of the abyss, I wheeled with the stars, my heart broke loose on the wind.

I want you to knowone thing. You know how this is: if I look at the crystal moon, at the red branch of the slow autumn at my window, if I touch near the fire the impalpable ash or the wrinkled body of the log, everything carries me to you, as if everything that exists, aromas, light, metals, were little boats that sail toward those isles of yours that wait for me. Well, now, if little by little you stop loving me I shall stop loving you little by little. If suddenly you forget me do not look for me, for I shall already have forgotten you. If you think it long and mad, the wind of banners that passes through my life, and you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots, remember that on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my arms and my roots will set off to seek another land. But if each day, each hour, you feel that you are destined for me with implacable sweetness, if each day a flower climbs up to your lips to seek me, ah my love, ah my own, in me all that fire is repeated, in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten, my love feeds on your love, beloved, and as long as you live it will be in your arms without leaving mine.

I have named you queen. There are taller than you, taller. There are purer than you, purer. There are lovelier than you, lovelier. But you are the queen. When you go through the streetsNo one recognizes you. No one sees your crystal crown, no one looksAt the carpet of red goldThat you tread as you pass,The nonexistent carpet. And when you appearAll the rivers soundIn my body, bellsShake the sky,And a hymn fills the world. Only you and I,Only you and I, my love,Listen to it.

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair. Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

Love! Love until the night collapses!,With a chaste heart With pure eyes I celebrate your beautyHolding the leash of bloodSo that it might leap out and trace your outline Where you lie down in my Ode As in a land of forests or in surfIn aromatic loam, or in sea musicBeautiful nudeEqually beautiful your feetArched by primeval tap of wind or soundYour ears, small shellsOf the splendid American seaYour breasts of level plentitudeFulfilled by living lightYour flying eyelids of wheatRevealing or enclosingThe two deep countries of your eyesThe line your shoulders have divided into pale regionsLoses itself and blends into the compact halves of an apple Continues separating your beauty down into two columns ofBurnished goldFine alabasterTo sink into the two grapes of your feetWhere your twin symmetrical tree burns again and risesFlowering fireOpen chandelierA swelling fruit Over the pact of sea and earth From what materialsAgate?Quartz?Wheat?Did your body come together?Swelling like baking bread to signal silvered hills The cleavage of one petal Sweet fruits of a deep velvet Until alone remainedAstonished The fine and firm feminine form It is not only light that falls over the world spreading inside your bodyYet suffocate itselfSo much is clarity Taking its leave of youAs if you were on fire within The moon lives in the lining of your skin.

By night, Love, tie your heart to mine, and the two together in their sleep will defeat the darkness,Take bread away from me, if you wish,take air away, butdo not take from me your laughter. Do not take away the rose,the lance flower that you pluck,the water that suddenlybursts forth in joy,the sudden waveof silver born in you. My struggle is harsh and I come backwith eyes tiredat times from having seenthe unchanging earth,but when your laughter entersit rises to the sky seeking meand it opens for me allthe doors of life. My love, in the darkesthour your laughteropens, and if suddenlyyou see my blood stainingthe stones of the street,laugh, because your laughterwill be for my handslike a fresh sword. Next to the sea in the autumn,your laughter must raiseits foamy cascade,and in the spring, love,I want your laughter likethe flower I was waiting for,the blue flower, the roseof my echoing country. Laugh at the night,at the day, at the moon,laugh at the twistedstreets of the island,laugh at this clumsyfool who loves you,but when I openmy eyes and close them,when my steps go,when my steps return,deny me bread, air,light, spring,but never your laughter.

Then I speak to her in a language she has never heard, I speak to her in Spanish, in the tongue of the long, crepuscular verses of Díaz Casanueva; in that language in which Joaquín Edwards preaches nationalism. My discourse is profound; I speak with eloquence and seduction; my words, more than from me, issue from the warm nights, from the many solitary nights on the Red Sea, and when the tiny dancer puts her arm around my neck, I understand that she understands. Magnificent language!,You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.

Donde termina el arco iris,en tu alma o en el horizonte?Where does the rainbow end,in your soul or on the horizon?,Y por que el sol es tan mal amigodel caminante en el desierto?Y por que el sol es tan simpaticoen el jardin del hospital?And why is the sun such a bad companionto the traveler in the desert?And why is the sun so congenial in the hospital garden?,Sólo con una ardiente paciencia conquistaremos la espléndida ciudad que dará luz, justicia y dignidad a todos los hombres. Así la poesía no habrá cantado en vano.

Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,paying me the attention I need,the attention requiredto make a vain person like me understandthat, being a dog, he was wasting time,but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,he’d keep on gazing at mewith a look that reserved for me aloneall his sweet and shaggy life,always near me, never troubling me,and asking nothing.

We the mortals touch the metals,the wind, the ocean shores, the stones,knowing they will go on, inert or burning,and I was discovering, naming all the these things:it was my destiny to love and say goodbye.

It was at that agethat poetry came in search of me.

I hunger for your sleek laugh and your hands the color of a furious harvest. I want to eat the sunbeams flaring in your beauty.

Green was the silence, wet was the light,the month of June trembled like a butterfly.

I want to see thirstIn the syllables,Tough fireIn the sound;Feel through the darkFor the scream.

Love is a clash of lightnings,Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.

Each in the most hidden sack keptthe lost jewels of memory,intense love, secret nights and permanent kisses,the fragment of public or private happiness. A few, the wolves, collected thighs,other men loved the dawn scratchingmountain ranges or ice floes, locomotives, numbers. For me happiness was to share singing,praising, cursing, crying with a thousand eyes. I ask forgiveness for my bad ways:my life had no use on earth.

You know how this is:if I lookat the crystal moon, at the red branchof the slow autumn at my window,if I touchnear the firethe impalpable ashor the wrinkled body of the log,everything carries me to you,as if everything that exists,aromas, light, metals,were little boatsthat sailtoward those isles of yours that wait for me.

I love all things, not only the grand but the infinitely small: thimble, spurs, plates, flower vases. . . . .

I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers; thanks to your love a certain solid fragrence risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body. and: No one can stop the river of your hands, your eyes and their sleepiness, my dearest. You are the trembling of time, which passes between the vertical light and the darkening sky. and: From the stormy archipelagoes I brought my windy accordian, waves of crazy rain, the habitual slowness of natural things: they made up my wild heart.

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

So the freshness lives onin a lemon,in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,the proportions, arcane and acerb.

Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero. Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.

Escóndeme en tus brazospor esta noche sola,mientras la lluvia rompecontra el mar y la tierrasu boca innumerable.

I stalk certain words. . . I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives. . . I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them. . . I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, like pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves. . . Everything exists in the word.

La heradera del dia destruida. (The heiress of the destroyed day. ),A book,a book fullof human touches,of shirts,a bookwithout loneliness, with menand tools,a bookis victory.

Soy el desesperado, la palabra sin ecos, el que lo perdiò todo, y el que todo lo tuvo.

Las lágrimas que no se lloranesperan en pequeños lagos?O serán ríos invisiblesque corren hacia la tristeza?,I shivered in thosesolitudeswhen I heardthe voiceofthe saltin the desert.

Te amo sin saber cómo, ni cuándo, ni de dónde, te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo: así te amo porque no sé amar de otra manera, sino así de este modo en que no soy ni eres, tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mía, tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.

Where were you then?Who else was there?Saying what?Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly when I am sad and feel you are far away?,yo te amo para comenzar a amarte,para recomenzar el infinitoy para no dejar de amarte nunca:por eso no te amo todavía.

By night, beloved, tie your heart to mineand let them both in dreams defeat the darkness,Over your breasts of motionless current,over your legs of firmness and water,over the permanence and the prideof your naked hairI want to be, my love, now that the tears arethrowninto the raucous baskets where they accumulate,I want to be, my love, alone with a syllableof mangled silver, alone with a tip of your breast of snow.

You are the trembling of time, that passesbetween vertical light and darkened sky,You, in bloom, heart, beloved,you are like the foliage of the sky over my eyesand I look at you lying on the earth,my beauty, flower by flower, star by star,wave by wave, love, I have counted your body.

My ugly one, I love you for your waist of gold,my beauty, I love you because of a wrinkle on your forehead,love, I love you because you are clear and dark.

I move in the university of the waves.

With which stars do they go on speaking,the rivers that never reach the sea?,Come see the cherry trees of a water constellationand the round key of the rapid universe,come touch the fire of instantaneous blue,come before its petals are consumed.

Naked you are blue like the night in Cuba,you have vines and stars in your hair,from that terrible love the soft pure handsgave peace to my eyes and sun to my senses.

Love brought its tail of pains,its long static beam of thorns,and we close our eyes so that nothing,so that no wound will separate us.

No one will retrieve my lost heartamidst so many roots, in the bitter freshnessof the sun multiplied by the fury of the water,there the shadow lives that does not travel with me.

And the heart sounds like a sour conch,calls, oh sea, oh lament, oh molten panic,scattered in the unlucky and disheveled waves:the sea reports sonorouslyon its languid shadows, its green poppies.

With kisses your mouth taught memy lips came to know fire.

Settle your perfect hips here and the bow of wet arrowsloosens into the night the petals that form your formlet your clay limbs climb the silence and its pale ladderrung by rung taking off with me in my dream. I can sense you scaling the shade tree that sings to the shadows. Dark is the world’s night without you my love,you, my friend, could be the smoke’s daughter,you who may not have known you were born of fire and rage,lightning over flaming lava etched your violet mouth,your sex in the scorched oak’s moss like a ring in a nest,your fingers there in the flames, your compact bodyrose from leaves of fire that make me recallthere were bakers in your family tree,you’re still the rainforest’s bread, ash from violent wheat,Dark is the world’s night without you my love,I cannot quit your love without dying.

I love you in order to begin loving you,to start infinity againand never to stop loving you:that is why I do not love you yet.

I love you without knowing how, nor when, nor from where,I love you directly without problems or pride:I love you this way because I know no other way to love,I have hunger for your mouth, for your voice, for your hair,I touched you and my life stopped,Oh invade me with your scalding mouth,search me if you like, with your nocturnal eyes,but allow me to sail and sleep upon your name.

Love, my territory of kisses and volcanoes.

I love the piece of earth you are,because in all the planetary prairiesI do not have another star. You repeatthe multiplication of the universe.

Como se reparten el sol en el naranjo las naranjas?How do the oranges divide up sunlight in the orange tree?,The word was born in the blood, grew in the dark body, beating, and took flight through the lips and the mouth. Farther away and nearer still, still it came from dead fathers and from wondering races, from lands which had turned to stone, lands weary of their poor tribes, for when grief took to the roads the people set out and arrived and married new land and water to grow their words again. And so this is the inheritance; this is the wavelength which connects us with dead men and the dawning of new beings not yet come to light.

I want to see the thirstinside the syllablesI want to touch the firein the sound:I want to feel the darknessof the cry. I wantwords as roughas virgin rocks. ” - Verb.

Do you not hear the constant victory,in the human footraceof time, slow as fire,sure, and thick and Herculeanaccumulating its volume and adding its sad fiber?,If you think it long and mad the wind of banners that passes through my lifeAnd you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have rootsRememberThat on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my armsAnd my roots will set off to seek another land,Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon,dark smell of seaweed, crush of mud and light,what secret knowledge is clasped between your pillars?What primal night does Man touch with his senses?Ay, Love is a journey through waters and stars,through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain:Love is a war of lightning,and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness. Kiss by kiss I cover your tiny infinity,your margins, your rivers, your diminutive villages,and a genital fire, transformed by delight,slips through the narrow channels of bloodto precipitate a nocturnal carnation,to be, and be nothing but light in the dark.

I love you like the plant that does not bloomand carries in itself, hidden, the light of those flowers,Oh, beloved, and there is nothing but shadowswhere you accompany me in your dreamsand tell me the hour of light.

I know you exist not just because your eyes flyand give light to things like an open window,If suddenly you do not exist,if suddenly you no longer live,I shall live on. I do not dare,I do not dare to write it,if you die. I shall live on. For where a man has no voice,there, my voice. Where blacks are beaten,I cannot be dead. When my brothers go to prisonI shall go with them. When victory,not my victory,but the great victory comes,even though I am mute I must speak;I shall see it come even though I am blind. No, forgive me. If you no longer live,if you, beloved, my love,if you have died,all the leaves will fall in my breast,it will rain on my soul night and day,the snow will burn my heart,I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, butI shall stay alive,because above all things you wanted me indomitable,and, my love, because you know that I am not only a manbut all mankind.

I will die kissing your mad cold mouth,embracing the lost bouquet of your body,and searching for the light of your closed 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 snow like dew to the pasture.

I remember you with my soul clenched in that sadness of mine that you know.

Like them you are tall and taciturn, and you are sad, all at once, like a voyage.

Sufre mas el que espera siempreque aquel que nunca espero a nadie?Does he who is always waiting suffer more than he who’s never waited for anyone?,Por que en las epocas oscurasse escribe con tinta invisible?Why in the darkest agesdo they write with invisible ink?,I was born anew, owner of my own darkness.

At night I dream that you and I are two plantsthat grew together, roots entwined,and that you know the earth and the rain like my mouth,since we are made of earth and rain.

To harden the earththe rocks took charge:instantlythey grew wings:the rocksthat soared:the survivorsflew upthe lightning bolt,screamed in the night,a watermark,a violet sword,a meteor. The succulentskyhad not only clouds,not only space smelling of oxygen,but an earthly stoneflashing here and therechanged into a dove,changed into a bell,into immensity, into a piercingwind:into a phosphorescent arrow,into salt of the sky.

Fear envelops bones like new skin,envelops blood with night’s skin,the earth moves beneath the soles of the feet -it is not your hair but the terror in your head,like long hair made of vertical nails,and what you see are not shattered streets,but rather, within you, your own crushed walls,your frustrated infinity, again the city comescrashing down: in your silence, only water’s threatis heard, and in the waterdrowned horses gallop through your death.

Every day you play with the light of the universe.

Do tears not yet spilledwait in small lakes?Or are they invisible riversthat run toward sadness?,It’s well known that he who returns never left,Girl lithe and tawny, the sun that formsthe fruits, that plumps the grains, that curls seaweedsfilled your body with joy, and your luminous eyesand your mouth that has the smile of the water. A black yearning sun is braided into the strandsof your black mane, when you stretch your arms. You play with the sun as with a little brookand it leaves two dark pools in your eyes.

Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood.

and everything burned in blue, everything a star,And so this letter endswith no sadness:my feet are firm upon the earth,my hand writes this letter on the road,and in the midst of life I shall bealwaysbeside the friend, facing the enemy,with your name on my mouthand a kiss that neverbroke away from yours.

It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour which the night fastens to all timetables.

Your eyes have the colour of the moon,I do not love you except because I love you;I go from loving to not loving you,From waiting to not waiting for youMy heart moves from cold to fire.

I learned about lifefrom life itself,love I learned in a single kissand could teach no one anythingexcept that I have livedwith something in common among men.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,as only dogs know how to be happywith only the autonomyof their shameless spirit.

Take bread away from me, if you wish,take air away, butdo not take from me your laughter.

Child who does not play is not a child, but the man who does not play has lost forever the child who lived within him and who he will miss terribly,I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you,Here I came to the very edge where nothing at all needs saying, everything is absorbed through weather and the sea, and the moon swam back, its rays all silvered, and time and again the darkness would be broken by the crash of a wave, and every day on the balcony of the sea, wings open, fire is born, and everything is blue again like morning.

I had no more alphabetthan the journeying of the swallows,the pure and tiny waterof the small, fiery birdthat dances rising from the pollen.

You came to my lifewith what you were bringing,madeof light and bread and shadow I expected you,and Like this I need you,Like this I love you,and to those who want to hear tomorrowthat which I will not tell them, let them read it here,and let them back off today because it is earlyfor these arguments.

So close that your hand upon my chest is mine,so close that your eyes close with my sleep.

The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.

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

You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.

Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread. .