I find Gabriel García Márquez occupying the space in my thoughts where poetry month should be this evening. But Márquez didn’t think very highly of his own early forays into poetry — so I am not going to embarrass him by sharing them, even if I think they were quite good.
Instead, a poem that García Márquez loved all his life: one story goes that a teenage “Gabo” got in trouble with the jesuit fathers in secondary school for memorizing Pablo Neruda’s “Poema XX” and reciting it several times a day. Fittingly, Neruda was just a teenager himself when he wrote “Poema XX,” published in his poetry collection Viente poemas de amor y una canción de desesperada / Twenty Love Poems and One Song of Despair in 1924, when Neruda was just 19 years old (and three years before Gabriel García Márquez was born).
Later in life, García Márquez would call Neruda “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.” Neruda, in turn, had the chance to call Márquez’s most famous novel, Cien años de soledad / One Hundred Years of Solitude, “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Don Quixote.”
Enjoy.
Ellen
| XX PUEDO ESCRIBIR
Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche. Escribir, por ejemplo: «La noche está estrellada, El viento de la noche gira en el cielo y canta. Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche. En las noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos. Ella me quiso, a veces yo también la quería. Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche. Oír la noche inmensa, más inmensa sin ella. Qué importa que mi amor no pudiera guardarla. Eso es todo. A lo lejos alguien canta. A lo lejos. |
XX TONIGHT I CAN WRITE
Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Write, for example, ‘The night is starry The night wind revolves in the sky and sings. Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Through nights like this one I held her in my arms. She loved me, sometimes I loved her too. Tonight I can write the saddest lines. To hear the immense night, still more immense without her. What does it matter that my love could not keep her. This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance. |
Pablo Neruda was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 13, 2007.
W.S. Merwin’s English translation of Neruda’s Viente poemas de amor y una canción de desesperada, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, was first published in 1969.