Quotes from Pablo Neruda

a los bárbaros se les caían de las botas, de las barbas, de los yelmos, de las herraduras, como piedrecitas, las palabras luminosas que se quedaron aquí resplandecientes... el idioma. Salimos perdiendo... Salimos ganando... Se llevaron el oro y nos dejaron el oro... Se lo llevaron todo y nos dejaron todo... Nos dejaron las palabras.

el verbo es origen y vierte vida: es sangre, es la sangre que expresa su substancia y está dispuesto así su desarrollo

En la red de mi música estas presa, amor mío, y mis redes de música son anchas como el cielo. Mi alma nace a la orilla de tus ojos de luto. En tus ojos de luto comienza el país del sueño

Cementerios de besos, aún hay fuego en tus tumbas, aún los racimos arden picoteados de pájaros

death stretches out like a clothesline, and then suddenly blows: blows a dark sound that swells the sheets and beds are sailing into a harbor where death is waiting, dressed as an admiral

Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle, and even your breasts smell of it. While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth. — Pablo Neruda, from "XIV [Every day you play with the light of the universe.]," Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despai r, in The Poetry of Pablo Neruda , ed. Ilan Stavans (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003)

Mi voz buscaba el viento para tocar su oído.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without complexities 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.

I am hungry for your silken laughter, For your hands the color of savage harvest, Hungry for the pail stones of your fingernails. I want to eat your skin like a whole almond. from "Love Sonnet XI

Y si no das más, tan sólo encuentra lo que hay en tus manos, piensa que dar amor nunca es en vano. Sigue adelante sin mirar atrás

ALWAYS Facing you I am not jealous. Come with a man at your back, come with a hundred men in your hair, come with a thousand men between your bosom and your feet, come like a river filled with drowned men that meets the furious sea, the eternal foam, the weather. Bring them all where I wait for you: we shall always be alone, we shall always be, you and I, alone upon the earth to begin life.

I like for you to be still, and you are still far away.

You should know that I don't love you and that I love you.

È così ingiusta l'anima senza radici: rifiuta la bellezza che le offrono, cerca il suo disgraziato territorio e solo in esso il martirio e la pace.

My struggle is harsh and I come back with eyes tired at times from having seen the unchanging earth, but when your laughter enters it rises to the sky seeking me and it opens for me all the doors of life.

Put aside your mantles of mourning, join all your tears until you make them metal: for

How much does a man live, after all? Does he live a thousand days, or one only? For a week, or for several centuries? How long does a man spend dying? What does it mean to say 'for ever'?

while inside, a ferocious love wound around and around me-till it pierced me with its thorns, its sword, slashing a seared road through my heart 100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda, translated by Stephen Tapscott

Someone will ask later, sometimes searching for a name, his own or someone else's why I neglected his sadness or his love or his reason or his delirium or his hardships: and he'll be right: it was my duty to name you, you, someone far away and someone close by, to name someone for his heroic scar, to name a woman for her petal, the arrogant one for his fierce innocence, the forgotten one for his famous obscurity. But I didn't have enough time or ink for everyone

I go from loving to not loving you From waiting to not waiting

What does old ash say when it passes near the fire? Que dice la vieja ceniza cuando camina junto al fuego?

Each morning, each turbid morning of your lives you will have it steaming and burning at your tables: so as not to see it, not to digest it so many times: you will push it aside a bit between the bread and the grapes, this bowl of silent blood that will be there each morning, each morning. A

A multidão humana foi a maior lição da minha vida. Posso chegar a ela com a inerente timidez do poeta, com o receio do tímido; mas, uma vez no seu seio, sinto-me transfigurado.. Sou parte da essencial maioria, sou mais uma folha da grande árvore humana.

From one hell to another, what difference? In the howling of your legions, in the holy milk of the mothers of Spain, in the milk and the bosoms trampled along the roads, there is one more village, one more silence, a broken door. Here