100 Love Sonnets / Cien sonetos de amor Book

I have been mesmerized with the persona of Pablo Neruda since I saw the film version of Postman, The/ Il Postino back in high school. In that depiction, Neruda is an exiled poet living in Italy during the rise of Mussolini while there befriends his mail carrier in a charming story. Later, having read many novels and memoirs by Isabel Allende, I have been privileged to learn of her Chilean perspective of Neruda as the nation's poet laureate, especially during Pinochet's 1973 coup d'état. Yet, until now I had not read any of the Nobel Laureate's poetry. As I continue my summer of reading quality poetry collections, I selected a side by side translated edition of 100 Love Sonnets and fell for the work of Neruda the poet.

100 Love Sonnets is a work in four parts, each representing a time of day. Each sonnet is written for Neruda's third wife Matilde Urrutia during the years of 1955-1957. The couple lived together until the poet's death in 1973, and Matilde passed away in 1985. The opening section Manana (Morning) speaks of Neruda's wooing of Maltide and comparing her to the fruits of the earth. He writes of how the "grain grew high in its harvest, in you, in good time the flour swelled; as the dough rose, doubling your breasts, my love was the coal waiting ready in the earth." Employing deeply sensuous language, Neruda in the first thirty three sonnets, hopes and prays that he can woo Matilde to live with him in Isla Negra, his home overlooking the sea in central Chile. With persuasive language, the laureate speaks of his love for his home, using descriptive colors like "seafoam", "orange-and-gasoline rainbow", and "heavenly and sunken blues" in attempts to get Matilde to enter his stunning seaside home.

The two middle sections Mediodia (Afternoon) and Tarde (Evening) describe a deep love between the couple. Sonnet number forty four moved me as the laureate exclaims, "You must know that I do not love and that I love you...I love you in order to begin to love you, to start infinity again, and never stop loving you..." So deep is their love that the language is extremely sensuous and charged with intimate images in each poem. The love flows from these selections, and one can only begin to imagine how deeply the couple care for one another. Sonnet sixty two speaks of the couple's life in Isla Negra with multiple images to kissing and romantic interludes while comparing their love to the "great rain from the South" that falls daily and constantly begins their love anew.

Neruda alludes to how the couple would enjoy eternal love in death in his final section Noche (Night). Sonnet eighty five talks of autumn and nocturnal bodies and how perhaps the couple would be enjoined in an infinite night. I would be remiss if I did not laud the translation by Stephen Tapscott. Noting that North Americans shy away from expressing themselves romantically, Tapscott desired to introduce them to a quality poet and selected Neruda, pointing out that many Americans had already been familiar with the poet's political stance during the fall of the Allende government. With Spanish and English side by side, the English translation is seamless in that none of Neruda's sensuous words diminish in meaning in English. I often found myself reading both the Spanish and English versions of the poems in order to fully appreciate both the depth of Neruda's work and quality of Tapscott's translations.

Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1971 for his life's body of work, 100 Love Sonnets is one of Pablo Neruda's crowning jewels. Each sonnet is as stunning as the next as the poet fully declares his love for Matilde. In a true labor of love, each of the hundred sonnets is romantically charged, sensuous, and full of enamor and adoration for Matilde. Also a love affair to the nation of Chile, which Neruda refused to leave during the government overthrow, many of these sonnets speak more of the love of a nation than of a female lover. Each sonnet is truly a work of love by a 20th century poetry giant, which I rate a full five stars.