Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Ode to the Bee

Ode to the Bee

Yes:
let the wax erect
green statues,
let honey
spill in
infinite
tongues,
let the ocean be
a
beehive,
the earth
tower and tunic
of flowers,
and the world
a waterfall,
a comet's tail, a
never-ending
wealth
of honeycombs!

~Pablo Neruda~

3 comments:

neftali said...

Great photos and great ode! Check out http://www.redpoppy.net/pablo_neruda.php
about a documentary on Neruda and the bestselling edition of translations, "The Essential Neruda"

"The call for a more accessible collection of Neruda's important poems is answered with City Lights' The Essential Neruda, a 200-page edition that offers 50 of Neruda's key poems. The editors and translators know how to extract gold from a lifetime of prolific writing. If you want a handy Neruda companion and don't know where to begin, this is it."
– The Bloomsbury Review

"What better way to celebrate the hundred years of Neruda's glorious residence on our earth than this selection of crucial works - in both languages! - by one of the greatest poets of all time. A splendid way to begin a love affair with our Pablo or, having already succumbed to his infinite charms, revisit him passionately again and again and yet again."
– Ariel Dorfman, Pulitzer-prize winner author of "Death and the Maiden"

" ...The Essential Neruda will prove to be, for most readers, the best introduction to Neruda available in English. In fact, I can think of few other books that have given me so much delight so easily. At only 234 pages (bilingual), it somehow manages to convey the fullness of Neruda's poetic arc: Reading it is like reading the autobiography of a poetic sensibility (granted, the abridged version)."
– The Austin Chronicle

Paz,
Mark

Delphyne said...

Thanks for stopping by, Mark. I fell in love with Neruda when I got the book Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon - his words and his emotions are just so palpable. I'll look for your book and keep your site bookmarked.

neftali said...

Great Delphyne. And what a beautiful name. I should have mentioned that several of Stephen's translations are in The Essential, which has a broader selection, in that Stephen's book--which I love, keeps mainly to Pablo's lighter poems, where The Essential includes some of his political and surrealistic poems as well.

Gracias y paz,
Mark