This is one of the poems recently discovered within the “jungle” of the Chilean Pablo Neruda’s manuscripts. The Nobel Prize winner (1904-1973) writes here with a visionary sympathy about the (intellectual!) male teenage psyche.
Then Come Back: the Lost Neruda Poems, translated by Forrest Gander, are published today in a Spanish-English dual language edition by Bloodaxe Books at £12.
POEM 13
Addled adolescence, sad and sweet,
quagmire of gloom
where leaves
and bodies tumble
with words,
hard blows and acid love,
an age like space,
rootless, open
and more unknown than the night,
dragging more stars than shadow.
Time rank with unreturned
touch,
with rocks under our feet and famished eyes,
with books life’s lessons are squeezed from
that – right over there –call us to notice though we don’t,
with Baudelaire perched like a raven on a shoulder
and Lautreamont howling scot-free in his coffin.
In this manner,
far from Garcilaso and his riverbanks
festooned with swan feathers
and so half-cursed, the unhinged,
breast-fed on literature,
carrying every darkness in their hands,
derelict and delirious, go
trudging step by step,
taking to the road,
searching out bread, home, and woman
as all men must.
NB: Lautreamont was a nineteenth-century French poet born in Uruguay; Garcilaso was an influential Spanish poet of the Shakespearean era.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article