Residence on Earth

Pablo Neruda

New Directions Publishing, 2004 - Literary Criticism - 366 pages

A bilingual collection of Neruda's poems mostly written when Neruda was a self-exiled diplomat in isolated regions of South Asia. A vortex of time, of loneliness, cycles of the natural world, decay, destruction, silence, resurrection; of luminous solitude, blue oblivion, and of such deep melancholy that at one time Neruda considered renouncing the whole book and withdrawing it from circulation; of the erotic night, love's impulse, and memory's persistence; of odes to Lorca and lovers, elegies, songs, sonatas, and barcaroles; of the magnificent series of poems, Spain in our Hearts, that Republican soldiers of the Spanish Civil War printed at the eastern front; of sea waves, landslides, jellyfish and a planet of swords.--From publisher description.

Contents

• Fantasma Phantom: 12
• Colección nocturna Nocturnal Collection: 26
• Juntos nosotros We Together: 32
• III: 142
• Agua sexualSexual Water: 150
• Apogeo del apio The Apogee of Celery: 158
• V: 170
• Alberto Rojas Jiménez viene volando: 180
• El desenterrado The Disinterred One: 188
• VI: 194
• No hay olvido Sonata There Is No Oblivion Sonata: 202
• La ahogada del cielo The Drowned Woman of the Sky: 212
• TRANSLATORS NOTE: 361

About the author

Pablo Neruda was born Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in Ferral, Chile on July 12, 1904. In 1923 he sold all of his possessions to finance the publication of his first book, Crepusculario (Twilight), which he published under the pseudonym Pablo Neruda. Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Cancion Desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair), which was published the following year, made him a celebrity and allowed him to stop his studies to devote himself to poetry. His other works include España en el Corazón, Canto General, Las Uvas y el Viento, and Para Nacer He Nacido. He received numerous awards including the World Peace Prize with Paul Robeson and Pablo Picasso in 1950, the Lenin Peace Prize and the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953, and the Nobel Prize for Literature for his poetry in 1971. He died of leukemia on September 23, 1973.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Residence on Earth; Volume 992 of New Directions paperbook; Poetry bilingual
• Author: Pablo Neruda
• Translated by: Donald Devenish Walsh
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing, 2004
• ISBN: 0811215814, 9780811215817
• Length: 366 pages
• Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / Spanish & Portuguese; Poetry / Caribbean & Latin American; Poetry / General