Pablo Neruda’s Cien Sonetos de Amor rank among other sonnets as those of Petrarch or Shakespeare. They are pillars of a literature
Matilde and Pablo
of the world, timeless in their humanity. The breathless beauty with which they describe the changing aspects of Neruda’s love for his wife Matilde make each one a veritable kaleidoscope, a miniature in painted with words.
Poor Neruda died as the socialist experiments in Chile were being brutally snuffed out by the CIA-backed military. These events not only witnessed the murder of his hopes, but the physical murder of so many of his friends, such as President Salvador Allende and the musician and song writer Victotr Jara, not to mention the torture and imprisonment of many others/ Although he had not long to live the fascist military conducted a search of his home at Isla Negra, to which Neruda responded “You will find nothing here but poetry”. He died eleven days after the putsch led by the blood-stained monster Pinochet, a personification of wickedness with whom Mrs Thatcher sipped tea. Of course she yearned of being to deal with “lefties” with the same dispatch as Augusto Pinochet, but she was able to do it through manipulation of the media, the brainwashing of the British public and their transformation into senseless materialist morons, a process continued so adeptly by her spiritual heir Tony Blair.
Neruda’s One hundred Sonnets of Love are divided into the four parts of the day: manana, mediadia, tarde and noche. I translate here Sonnet XXIV.
Love, love, the clouds to the tower of the sky
climbed like triumphant washerwomen
And everything glowed in blue, all was a star:
The sea, the boat, the day were exiled together.
Come and sea the cherries of the water in constellation,
And the round kea of the fast universe.
Come and touch the fire of the instantaneous blue
Come before its petals are consumed.
There is no water but light, quantities, cluster,
Space opened by the virtues of the wind
Until liberating the last secrets of the foam.
And between so many blues- heavenly, submerged
Our eyes are lost, divining with difficulty
The powers of the air, the keys under the sea.
