Step Two

Basic Background Info on Pablo Neruda:

In 1921, he moved to Santiago to study French at the Universidad de Chile with the intention of becoming a teacher, but soon Neruda was devoting himself full time to poetry. In 1923 his first volume of verse, Crepusculario ("Book of Twilights"), was published, followed the next year by Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada ("Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair"), a collection of love poems that was controversial for its eroticism, especially considering its author's young age. Both works were critically acclaimed and were translated into many languages. Over the decades, Veinte poemas would sell millions of copies and become Neruda's best-known work.

Neruda had one daughter, Malva Marina Trinidad (1934–1943), living in Gouda, The Netherlands. She died at age eight in 1942. (This was after veinte poemas)
Neruda was good friends with Venezuelan intellectuals and diplomats, such as Arturo Uslar Pietri, Juan Oropeza and Miguel Otero Silva.
Neruda always wrote in green ink because it was the color of Esperanza (hope).

I wonder what he was hoping for?

Jan Neruda:

Pablo Neruda chose his pen name in honour of the famous Czech poet Jan Neruda.

Jan Neruda was born in Prague, Bohemia, son of a small grocer who lived in the Malá Strana (Lesser Quarter) district of Prague. After studying philosophy and philology, he worked as a teacher until 1860, when he became a freelance journalist and writer. Neruda never married but had a close relationship to the writer Karolína Světlá.
In his work Neruda promoted the idea of rebirth of Czech patriotism. He participated in all the central cultural and political struggles of his generation, and gained a reputation as a sensitive critic. Neruda became, with Vítězslav Hálek, the most prominent representative of the new literary trends.
Neruda was known for his satirical depiction of the petty bourgeois of Prague. His most popular prose work is "Povídky malostranské" (1877, Tales of the Little Quarter), a collection of short stories, which was translated into English in 1957 by the novelist and mystery writer Ellis Peters. Neruda's stories take the reader to the Lesser Quarter, to its streets and yards, shops, churches, houses, and restaurants.

I see a few similarities between Pablo and Jan:

1. Both switched from teaching to writing
2. Both involved in politics
3. Both write in opposition of their government

And I found this interesting:

During the late 1960s, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was asked for his opinion of Pablo Neruda. After describing a brief meeting with him when both were young, Borges stated,

"I think of him as a very fine poet, a very fine poet. I don't admire him as a man, I think of him as a very mean man."

When asked for the reasons for this, Borges continued,

"Well, he wrote a book -- well, maybe here I'm being political -- he wrote a book about the tyrants of South America, and then he had several stanzas against the United States. Now he knows that that's rubbish. And he had not a word against Perón. Because he had a lawsuit in Buenos Aires, that was explained to me afterwards, and he didn't care to risk anything. And so, when he was supposed to be writing at the top of his voice, full of noble indignation, he had not a word to say against Perón. And he was married to an Argentine lady, he knew that many of his friends had been sent to jail. He knew all about the state of our country, but not a word against him. At the same time, he was speaking against the United States, knowing the whole thing was a lie, no?

 This may be interesting to mention if I focus on Neruda's opinion of the impact of voiced words.

Step One

I decided yesterday that because of the rush of people that would try to claim their first choice (pretty much anything but poetry) I would let them participate in the furious scramble and go with some good old Pablo Neruda. This is definitely a scary choice, because I am not a huge fan of poetry, and probably not a very smart one, because I am much better at analyzing books than poems. However, I am sort of excited about this because I really enjoy thinking about why Neruda incorporates so many references to nature in his poems.

I am planning on looking at a few (depending on how much I can find within each) poems from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. I will need to find them online, read them all, and decide which ones I want to use. Since they are all written originally in Spanish, I think I will want to look for all of the poems in English, hopefully translated by the same person. This will give me a more consistent pattern of word choice and style, and I think it will be better to read them as a set of poems translated by one translator than a scattered group written by different people.

--Later--

I found the book here, and I believe this version is translated by Willam Stanley Merwin. I might also refer to this if I feel like seeking out the poem in its original language. However, I should probably stick to just one version in order to stay consistent. (The Spanish version was helpful in the very first poem, where it says "and a love you" in the English translation, but the Spanish version says "te amo," which is "i love you." I was pretty sure that "a love you" was a typo, but I just wanted to double check.

--Later Again--

So far I have read the first 5 poems, and I will finish the rest of them soon.
I noticed a few things that I remember talking about in class previously:

From I

• Being "alone"
  
• "forged you like a weapon" = "like a sword sheathed in meteors"
  
• talking about her "voice"
  
• repetition of "thirst"
  

From II

• "alone in the loneliness"
• "light" "flame" "fire"

From III

• repetition of "hours"
• "voice" again

From IV

• repetition of "wind" - also in other poems
• "wave without spray / and substance without weight" - unnatural, impossible
  

From V

• "grapes" (also in XIII)
  
• more "wind"
• more "voice"

I think that while he often refers to (a woman's) voice in his poems, he writes about having trouble using his own. In "V," he says that his words will "grow thin as the tracks of the gulls on the beaches" and I immediately thought that birds don't usually leave prints on the beach because they fly instead. Then I remembered that when you take a step in dry sand, your footsteps just form little indents that are not recognizable as footprints. I think he is saying that in order for his true "words" to be expressed, he will not use words, if that makes sense. This relates to what we have discussed in class (two weeks ago I think) about how Neruda said "between the lips and the voice something goes dying," (from XIII) meaning that his true meaning cannot be conveyed through words. I hope to find more evidence of this and work it into my IOP.