Free Sublime Blue: Selected Early Odes by Pablo Neruda by Pablo Neruda Page A

happened to me, no adventures that would amuse my readers.” Yet it was during this period that he received the Stalin Prize (later renamed the Lenin Peace Prize), and, more importantly, it was then that he and Delia del Carril “separated for good” and he moved into his new home,
La Chascona,
with Matilde Urrutia, his beloved, tempestuous, and final wife.
    When Neruda began writing the odes, in 1952, he already had completed his ambitious
Residencia en la tierra
(a book he later said “breathed the rigidly pessimistic air” of the time) and, more recently, his epic
Canto general,
each a major contribution toward opening “America’s matrix.” So, when he turned to the odes it was, in a sense, with a heart unburdened, momentarily relieved of certain charges and free to explore experience at the simplest, most ordinary level. It was as if, reversing the chronology of Blake (whom he translated), having completed a round of songs of experience now he could embark upon these odes of innocence.
    The famous, widely imitated form he chose for these poems—tall, slender poetic stalks, not unlike Queen Ann’s Lace slowly rocking in a seaside breeze—brilliantly suited the air of quick spontaneity these works exude. The phrases fall like thin wrists of water cascading from great heights, exploding at intervals against ledges and obstacles protruding from a sheer cliff-face. Fluent, sinuous, riddled with delightful surprise, the offhand form is also suited to the tone of seemingly casual surmise that can so suddenly pool in a conclusion of great clarity and depth. The poet speaks of his style as a “guided spontaneity.” It has also been suggested that the form derives in part from Neruda’s plan to serialize these poems for newspapers whose columns, of course, are restrictively narrow.
    Of his first collection of
Odas elementales
Neruda declared:
    I decided to deal with things from their beginnings, starting with the primary state, from birth onward. I wanted to describe many things that had been sung and said over and over again. My intention was to start like the boy chewing on his pencil, setting to work on his composition assignment about the sun, the blackboard, the clock, or the family. Nothing was to be omitted from my field of action; walking or flying, I had to touch on everything, expressing myself as clearly and freshly as possible.
    Elsewhere he remarked that his “tone … gathered strength by its own nature as time went along, like all living things.”
    A few odes from this and from the two subsequent collections by Neruda have become widely available to American audiences. Originally I avoided rerendering odes already familiar in order to concentrate on others less known or altogether unknown in English. In the early 80’s when I began this work, only one of these odes had appeared widely in English. Twice previously this collection was accepted for publication; one publisher held the mss for years before announcing it was henceforth a printer-for-hire rather than a publisher, and the other, also after years, went bankrupt. As it happens, those delays made for a much improved set of translations. In the intervening years, other translators, including María Jacketti and Ken Krabbenhoft, have brought out collections of odes, Margaret Sayers Peden’s
Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda
chief among them. Not surprisingly her collection includes versions of several more of the odes I, too, have rendered. I gladly recommend her fine work to anyone interested in the Odes, with this proviso: she has avoided altogether the more politically oriented works and such selection serves to domesticate a body of work as deliberately gnarly and behorned in some aspects as it is luminously tender in others.
    I open my selection with the “The Invisible Man,” which Neruda himself chose to preface his collection. (Nancy Willard has published a book-length study