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.