🦋 Repetition
The poems in Fully Empowered are kind of perfect for me to read in Spanish -- short stanzas, short lines, so I can hold them in my head while I go over Reid's translation and back over the original. And lots of repetition of words, so I can maybe get some of them into my vocabulary -- building vocabulary has always been the most difficult part of language study for me. The repetitions seem meaningful -- certain words occur in almost every poem, like "línea" (in various senses), "caer" (in various forms), words relating to the water like "mar," "océan," "ola," "espuma,"... There are also frequent references to geography and geometry, to birds,  to movement, to towers... I haven't quite put all this together yet -- the references to water make me think about Neruda being Chilean, seems like the ocean must be a pretty important part of life in Chile. (Jorge, can you speak to this?) The many repetitions of "línea" are making me think about geometry and language and again, the sea, and tying them together. I just love the rhythm of this passage, which totally does not come through in the translation; I haven't been able to make a lot of sense of the passage, with or without the translation, but the sound of it is wonderful. From the second stanza of "Pájaro":
Cuando volví de tantos viajes
me quedó suspendido y verde
entre el sol y la geografía:
vi cómo trabajan las alas,
cómo se transmite el perfume
por un telégrafo emplumado
y desde arriba vi el camino,
los manantiales, las tejas,
los pescadores a pescar,
los pantalones de la espuma,
todo desde mi cielo verde.
posted afternoon of Saturday, January 10th, 2009
➳ More posts about Pablo Neruda
➳ More posts about Readings
➳ More posts about Translation
➳ More posts about Writing Projects
➳ More posts about Projects
Well, Chile's geography surely makes an impact in Neruda's writing, as it impacts most chileans. You could tell that Chile is basically ocean and mountains, with just a bit of plain land in between, and our geography is an important part of who we are, and how many times we feel isolated from the world.
One of Neruda's houses was in Isla Negra, a beach close to Santiago. A beautiful place.
Here are some pictures of it: http://picasaweb.google.com/jorgelopezg/IslaNegraJulio07
posted morning of January 12th, 2009 by Jorge López
Those are beautiful photos -- I especially like the silhouetted picket fence.
I found an article about visiting Isla Negra at literarytraveler.com.
posted morning of January 12th, 2009 by Jeremy
|
Judith Flanders 