Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto was born July 12, 1904. For many, that name doesn’t ring a bell, however, his pen name, which he later made his legal name, is definitely familiar to many people: Pablo Neruda. He became a poet when he was only 10 years old. He wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair” from 1924.
Neruda won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971, and Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez even called him “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.” Harold Bloom included Neruda as one of the 26 writers central to the “Western Tradition” in his book “The Western Canon.” To honor Pablo Neruda's legacy on what would have been his 112th birthday, here are six excerpts of his work:
1. "I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close."
- Pablo Neruda
2. "In this part of the story I am the one who
dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
because I love you, Love, in fire and in blood."
- Pablo Neruda
3. "I built up these lumber piles of love, and with fourteen boards each I built little houses, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing to, might live in them. Now that I have declared the foundations of my love, I surrender this century to you: wooden sonnets that rise only because you gave them life."
- Pablo Neruda
4. "I love you without knowing how, or when,or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close."
- Pablo Neruda
5. "Bitter love, a violet with it's crown of thorns in a thicet of spiky passions, spear of sorrow, corolla of rage: how did you come to conquer my soul? What brought you?" - Pablo Neruda
6. Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own:
I wavered through the streets, among
Objects:
Nothing mattered or had a name:
The world was made of air, which waited.
I knew rooms full of ashes,
Tunnels where the moon lived,
Rough warehouses that growled 'get lost',
Questions that insisted in the sand.
Everything was empty, dead, mute,
Fallen abandoned, and decayed:
Inconceivably alien, it all
Belonged to someone else - to no one:
Till your beauty and your poverty
Filled the autumn plentiful with gifts."
- Pablo Neruda
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