Home > Work > Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems
1 " AGAPE Today no one has come to inquire, nor have they wanted anything from me this afternoon. I have not seen a single cemetery flower in so happy a procession of lights. Forgive me, Lord! I have died so little! This afternoon everyone, everyone goes by without asking or begging me anything. And I do not know what it is they forget, and it is heavy in my hands like something stolen. I have come to the door, and I want to shout at everyone: —If you miss something, here it is! Because in all the afternoons of this life, I do not know how many doors are slammed on a face, and my soul takes something that belongs to another. Today nobody has come ; and today I have died so little in the afternoon! Translated by John Knoepfle "
― Pablo Neruda , Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems
2 " TWILIGHT I have dreamed of flight. And I have dreamed of your laces strewn in the bedroom. I have dreamed of some mother walking the length of a wharf and at fifteen nursing the hour. I have dreamed of flight. A “forever” sighed at a fo’c’sle ladder. I have dreamed of a mother, of fresh sprigs of table-greens, and the stars stitched in bridals of the dawn. The length of a wharf … the length of a drowning throat! Translated by John Knoepfle "
3 " To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvelous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses---that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being and unites all living things. "
4 " […] the heart moving through a tunnel,in it darkness, darkness, darkness,like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,as though we were drowning inside our hearts,as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul. "
5 " Graniza tanto, como para que yo recuerde y acreciente las perlas que he recogido del hocico mismo de cada tempestad. "
6 " que no tuvo ya causa ni carece de causa. ¿Qué sería su causa? ¿Dónde está aquello tan importante, que dejase de ser su causa? Nada es su causa ; nada ha podido dejar de ser su causa. "
7 " Neruda worked all his adult life to keep Chile from returning to right-wing control. Finally, in 1973, after his friend Salvador Allende was killed and Allende’s government was overthrown, Neruda died. "
8 " The outcome of this longing is that the word is never fresh, the line has fused vertebrae, and the poem does not convey thinking, but instead contains portraits of ideas, like those “Wanted” posters issued by police departments. "
9 " love poems were sprouting out all over my body. "
10 " When Neruda reads, the mood in the room is one of affection between the audience and himself. "
