Volume 21, Number 15 · October 3, 1974
The Poetry of Neruda
By Michael Wood
Residence on Earth
by Pablo Neruda, translated by Donald D. Walsh
New Directions, 359 pp., $3.75 (paper)
Extravagaria
by Pablo Neruda, translated by Alastair Reid
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 303 pp., $8.95
Five Decades: A Selection (Poems: 1925-1970)
by Pablo Neruda, edited and translated by Ben Belitt
Grove, 456 pp., $3.95 (paper)
'We are many' is the title of a rather unconvincing poem by Pablo Neruda about his own multiple selves. The phrase could be applied with greater force perhaps to the translators of Neruda into English. They really are many: Ben Belitt (Selected Poems, 1961, A New Decade, 1969, New Poems, 1972, Splendor and Death of Joaquín Murieta, 1972, and now Five Decades), Nathaniel Tarn (The Heights of Macchu-Picchu, 1966), W.S. Merwin (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, 1969), David Ossman and Carlos B. Hagen (Early Poems, 1969), Anthony Kerrigan (in Tarn's Selected Poems, 1970), Robert Bly and James Wright (Neruda and Vallejo, 1971), Alastair Reid (Extravagaria, published in England in 1972), Donald D. Walsh (The Captain's Verses, 1972, and Residence on Earth).
Review, 3409 words
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