Residence On Earth [Paperback]

Neruda delivers an uninhibited glimse at human emotions and panges of life in this collection of poems. Neruda jars the soul by explaining in simple verse, how tragic life can be. The reflections and odes collected in this work are a superb display of the skill Neruda has. Residence on Earth is a compilation of poetry from a mature poet who willfully takes risks, and carries through with beautiful prose. Nerudas candid emotional stylizations convince one of the feeling of being consumed by the poetry itself. Neruda is boundless in structure. The easy style allow for the reader to atempt to understand the abundant imagery and symbolism contained traditionally within Nerudas works. One must read this compilation, as one would consume a fine port wine, or richly decadent chocolate-with trepidation. Time to reflect and savor the splendor of this poet is most definately required.

So many poets explore the conditions of the world, attempting to form them together into a theme or idea. Neruda takes the opposite tack, the course of the true dreamer; he takes themes and ideas and tries to form them together into a real world.

The paradox of Neruda is the earthy quality of so many of his poems combined with the idealistic imagery. Neruda was a common man living the life of a folk hero in his own mind, who by placing that life into poetry became a folk hero of substance. He captured the hearts and minds of an entire generation of Chileans, spanish-speaking peoples, and eventually the world. And for good reason. Neruda believes in the power of words. He is a master of image placed into language, a visionary linguist in every sense.

Unlike so many English and American poets, you don't need to be an expert on Greek mythology or on other poets to understand where Neruda is coming from. This is a poetry of the people, accessible to the many, and yet effective enough that it should melt even the most stodgy teacher of English lit.

The third section, written many years after the first two, explores many political themes, as opposed to the more personal images evoked in the first two sections. It's too bad, as I personally enjoy the first two a little more. But even so, it pointed towards new directions that Neruda would explore in his later, more mature works. Yet maturity or no, this is the Neruda that I found most eminently readable, most capable of evoking a sense of obscure appreciation that I can't quite put my finger on. Neruda's poetry is not always as specific as so many authors, and so allows the reader to weave the perfect amount of personal perspective into the story or vision being woven; the words and ideas here can be interacted with on an individual level, rather than simply accepted as good or bad. It's hard not to get carried away with yourself at times: to float above the linguistic quality of the words and forget that Neruda might, at times, be writing about something in particular.

Genuine yet beautiful and ethereal, Neruda stands on his own as one of the most innovative and evocative poets of the twentieth or any other century. And here is one of his greatest works.

I am sure this will be a distinctly minority view, but I would caution the first time, non Spanish speaking reader of Neruda away from this work and this translation.

I find the poems from the first residence here almost impenetrably surrealistic and the translations overly literal in many places. The later poems are awkwardly political, violent, and at times vulgar. There are bright spots such as the Ode to Federico Garcia Lorca, but to my taste, they are few and far between.

I would, instead of this volume, recommend Stephen Mitchell's lovely translations of the later works of Neruda entitled "Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon".

Those of you who are already spitting mad that anyone would dare to find Neruda anything but brilliant need read no further, but for those wondering how I can complain about translations that everyone else praised, I will take some time with one poem to flesh out my position.

The very first poem in the collection is Galope Muerto or Dead Gallop as Mr. Walsh renders it. There's just not space to render both Spanish and English, but I've spent hours with both due to things like the translation of the very first line including the phrase "like seas peopling themselves". Now I don't care if you are a surrealist or something else, that phrase is English drivel. Two lines later we find "the crossed bells crossing," which while not exactly nonsense, does not move the meaning of the poem forward in any accessible way.

Later in the second stanza of the same poem we have "... like the pulley wild within itself,/ those motor wheels in short." Now, this make no earthly sense in English. It also ignores the punctuation of the second line in Spanish that reads " esas ruedas de los motores, en fin." I wouldn't mind that if it improved the sense of what was said, but here something seems lost without recompense. Worse yet, the translation continues: "Existing like the dry stitches in the tree's seams,/ silent, all around, in such a way,/ all the limbs mixing their tails." Again, I'm sorry, with due respect to Mr. Walsh, this is jibberish. And while he's preserved the parenthetical phrase here by rendering "de tal modo" as "in such a way" it relates to no phrase before it nor any following and so is parenthetical to nothing. It justs sits there without meaning.

Since these lines were some of the first I read and bothered me so, I spent in excess of twenty hours with on-line translators and a Spanish/English dictionary to try to decide for myself what some reasonable sense of these two stanzas might be in English. Admittedly, the Spanish is either quite figurative or idiomatic. Some of what I complain of above is pretty literally what's written. Still, when a translator is willing to render gibberish rather than trying to provide lines with reasonable meaning, I'm just never going to be able to trust what I'm reading. Certainly, you can go too far in the other direction as well, but really, tree limbs mixing their tails? Sorry, Mr. Walsh lost me and any recommendation I might have given this volume in these first two stanzas.

It's just not that hard to see that colas, the word he translates as "tails" also can mean a train, like on a dress, and that dry stitches in the seams of a tree might "combine" (another meaning for the word he translates as mixing) the limbs of the trees into such a thing. Thus, perhaps: "Existing like the sapless stitches in the seams of trees,/ silent, surrounding, so that/ all the limbs combine in a train."/.

The pulley (I think) is "mad within itself, those wheels of its motors, anyway." And "the crossed bells crossing" at the "crest of the roads", might be rendered: "the criss-crossed overlapping sound of bells". Admittedly, "seas peopling themselves,/ in the submerged slowness, in the shaplessness," was a puzzler. I settled on "...seas becoming occupied/ by submerged slowness, by formlessness,". If this is Greg Nobody saying what he thinks the Nobel Prize winning poet said, sure it is, and maybe it's off base, but at least for me, a questionable or even wrong meaning was preferable to none.

Neruda was a great poet. As a starter though, I'd send the non Spanish speaker someplace other than this volume, despite, I'm sure, that recommendation will be a minority view.

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