When I was barely half the age I am now, I was working on my degree in Spanish. I’d planned to become a high school Spanish teacher, and how did that work out? Well, I’ve used my Spanish a couple times to explain to people who didn’t speak English why they can’t sit in the exit row of my aircraft.
Although twenty years of disuse have left me with just enough Spanish to keep up while watching Telemundo, it hasn’t been a total loss. Along the way, I discovered some of my favorite authors: Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, and Jorge Luis Borges. But if I was going into space for a year and could only bring one book, it would be Pablo Neruda’s collected poems.
Neruda’s “Tonight I can write the saddest lines” is the best post-breakup poem ever written, and is still the only poem that I can recite from memory in Spanish but not in English. It is one of my favorite poems of all time, and I thought it would remain unchallenged until I came across Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems.
Neruda won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. Reading his poetry has always felt to me like standing barefoot on a Chilean beach, holding someone passionately and whispering something passionately in her ear. His poems have the sound of the ocean in them, wave crashing after wave, the lines and the meaning and the prosody expanding and contracting to match the shore. I always assumed this was due to the attention to craft and the rounds of polishing he did before final publication, but the poems in this volume were lost for various reasons.
Whether it was mere accident, or he came up with what he thought was a better way to say what he had to say, or another idea burst through from his fertile mind, these poems did not get the work his published ones did. Nonetheless, they still have that rich, intoxicating Neruda taste, and if someone had slid one of these in front of me unattributed and asked me to identify the author, I’d have no problem getting it on the first guess.
Only seven pages in, poem 4 (“What guides autumn’s singing leaf into your golden hand”) already makes this book worthwhile. Then along comes poem 11 (“If they put”) which is both beautiful and interesting at the same time. I liked it so much, I have a post on it alone coming up.
The translator, Forrest Gander, has written an excellent prologue that describes not just the process of translation, but the feel and the passion of writing itself. A bonus of this being a work of translation done by only one person is it lacks the unevenness of the entries in Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems, where four different translators worked on the dozens of poems that were selected. I won’t name names, but some of the translators were brilliant and beautiful, and others… not.
The art of translation is rapidly disappearing. AI systems are good enough for everyday work, pushing translators of Gander’s level to a small corner of scholarship devoted to the massive effort of taking “good enough” and making it perfect. To use a transportation analogy, AI has become the cars that replaced the horse. A car will get you where you want to go, but you lose the connection with the journey. The trees zip by in a car and we also lose the forest that we would have been so close to in a carriage. The metaphor isn’t perfect because the difference an excellent translator makes is that at the end of the ride, an excellent one leaves you in Paris, France, but a “good enough” one leaves you in Paris, Texas.
The book is “only” 21 poems, but Neruda has been collected, compiled, and canonized for decades now, so even this many is a big haul by this point. It’s amazing that there are even this many left to find over forty years after his death, but poetry dripped off Neruda like he was just walking back on shore from swimming in an ocean of beauty, and this little book gives us some footprints that are still damp. Some of these are as brilliant as anything he’s ever done, some others, not so much. A few others are interesting artifacts: pieces that weren’t included in other things because they were prototypes of another bigger and/or better poem to come.
Although I was pleased that both the Spanish and the English versions were included, I would have preferred a recto/verso format (i.e., the Spanish on one side and the English on the other). There is a good reason why so many translations of poetry are laid out like that, and it makes it a lot less cumbersome when trying to compare the original to the translation. This is a minor quibble, however, and this book is still a nice addition to the Neruda corpus.
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