Don't bother reading the 9th Circuit en banc panel's Per Curiam decision reinstating the recall election. Lawrence Solum tells you everything you ever wanted to know. (And Rick Hasen also has valuable thoughts).

Pablo Neruda, 1971 Nobel Prize Winner and brilliant poet, has been dead thirty years to the day. If you speak Spanish, here's a section of La Tercera, a Chilean newspaper, devoted to Neruda with all the relevant links you could want.

I've always had a fondness for Neruda, even though he was a rabid socialist. I never found his political poetry particularly appealling, but his love poetry, personal odes, and the like I find incredibly moving. Normally I have a strong preference for some sort of rhyme, form, or formal meter in my poetry, but for him I make exceptions. So in honor of Pablo Neruda, here are an assortment of Neruda related quotes and observations, and then a few poems.

T.S. Eliot accepting his Nobel Prize (in 1948):

Poetry is usually considered the most local of all the arts. Painting, sculpture, architecture, music, can be enjoyed by all who see or hear. But language, especially the language of poetry, is a different matter. Poetry, it might seem, separates peoples instead of uniting them. But on the other hand we must remember, that while language constitutes a barrier, poetry itself gives us a reason for trying to overcome the barrier. To enjoy poetry belonging to another language, is to enjoy an understanding of the people to whom that language belongs, an understanding we can get in no other way.

Robert Heinlein, in Friday:

French is quite suited to lyric poetry, more so than is English - it takes Edgar Allen Poe to wring beauty consistently out of dissonances in English. German is unsuited to lyricism, so much so that translations fall sweeter on the ear than do German originals. This is no fault of Goethe or Heine; it is a defect of an ugly language. Spanish is so musical that a soap-powder commercial in Spanish is more pleasing to the ear than the best free verse in English - the Spanish language is so beautiful that much of its poetry sounds best if the listener does not understand the meaning.

Richard Stern, in an interview with Euphony:

"As for Latin America and Spain, the poetic and narrative traditions are very different-- remove sangre, suerte, and muerte from the poems and they melt."

Czeslaw Milosz (Nobel 1980), in The Captive Mind:

Pablo Neruda, the great poet of Latin America, comes from Chile. I translated a number of his poems into Polish. Pablo Neruda has been a Communist for some ten years. When he describes the misery of his people, I believe him and I respect his great heart. When writing, he thinks about his brothers and not about himself, and so to him the power of the word was given. But when he paints the joyous, radiant life of people in the Soviet Union, I stop believing him. I am inclined to believe him as long as he speaks about what he knows; I stop believing him when he starts to speak about what I know myself....
Let Pablo Neruda fight for his people. He is wrong, however, when he believes that all the protesting voices of Central and Eastern Europe are the voices of stubborn nationalisms or the yelps of wronged reaction. Eyes that have seen should not be shut. Hands that have touched should not forget when they take up a pen. Let him allow a few writers from Central and Eastern Europe to discuss problems other than those that haunt him.

If You Forget Me

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.



LXXXIX

When I die I want your hands on my eyes:
I want the light and the wheat of your beloved hands
to pass their freshness over me once more:
to feel the smoothness that changed my destiny.

I want you to live while I, asleep, await you,
I want you to go on hearing the wind,
to smell the aroma of the sea we loved together
to go on walking the land that we walked.

I want what I love to go on living
and I loved you and sang of you above all,
so go on flowering, flower,

so that you reach all my love shows you
so that my shadow passes through your hair,
so that they know the reason for my song.


XC

I thought I was dying, I felt cold closing in
and for all that I lived, I left only you:
your mouth was my earthly day and night
and your skin the republic my kisses founded.

In that instant, books ended
friendship, treasures unflaggingly amassed,
the transparent house you and I built:
everything ceased to exist but your eyes.

Because love, while life accosts us,
is simply a wave taller than the others,
but oh, when death comes knocking

there is only your glance to fill such emptiness
only your clarity to resist extinction
only your love to shut out the shadows.


XCVII

One must fly nowadays, but where?
Wingless, planeless, fly doubtless:
Unfaltering steps have already fallen,
not lifting the feet of the traveler.

One must fly at every instant
like eagles, like flies, like days,
one must conquer the ring of Saturn
and establish new bells there.

Now shoes and paths are not enough,
now the ground does not suffice for wanderers,
now roots cross the night,

and you will appear in another star
relentlessly ephemeral
finally transformed into poppies.

Much to my shock, I've just learned that the term "Confirmed Bachelor," is supposed to refer to gentlemen who are homosexual (though they may well be non-practicing). I say this is a shock because I've always loved the phrase, and use it all the time, but never having been aware of the connotations the term bore.