All the Odes: A Bilingual Edition

by Pablo Neruda, Ilan Stavans (Editor)

Overview

A career-spanning volume charting the Nobel laureate’s work in the ode form

Pablo Neruda was a master of the ode, which he conceived as an homage to just about everything that surrounded him, from an artichoke to the clouds in the sky, from the moon to his own friendship with Federico García Lorca and his favorite places in Chile. He was in his late forties when he committed himself to writing an ode a week, and in the end he produced a total of 225, which are dispersed throughout his varied oeuvre. This bilingual volume, edited by Ilan Stavans, a distinguished translator and scholar of Latin American literature, gathers all Neruda’s odes for the first time in any language. Rendered into English by an assortment of accomplished translators, including Philip Levine, Paul Muldoon, Mark Strand, and Margaret Sayers Peden, collectively they read like the personal diary of a man in search of meaning who sings to life itself, to our connections to one another, and to the place we have in nature and the cosmos. All the Odes is also a lasting statement on the role of poetry as a lightning rod during tumultuous times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374534929
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	07/18/2017
Edition description:	Bilingual
Pages:	896
Sales rank:	133,103
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Pablo Neruda (1904–73) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. His books include Residence on Earth, Canto General, Extravagaria, and Isla Negra.

Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. He is also the editor of The Poetry of Pablo Neruda.

Date of Birth:

July 12, 1904

Date of Death:

September 23, 1973

Place of Birth:

Parral, Chile

Place of Death:

Santiago, Chile

Education:

University of Chile, Santiago

Editorial Reviews

The Chilean Nobel laureate, who died in 1973, combined stratospheric powers of invention with a fecundity that bordered on the prolix; among his many creations were 225 “odes,” almost all in very short lines, connecting accessible, democratic vocabulary to exalted emotion. Most of the odes date from the 1950s; some odes on household objects (to a lemon, to a potato) remain much imitated in English. Stavans says he is the first to gather all the odes, including very late, very early, and more formal outliers. Stavans and a few lesser-known translators account for a large majority of translations here, though W. S. Merwin and Stephen Mitchell also appear. Along with a fishing boat, an elephant, vegetables, French fries, New Year’s Day, and other this-worldly phenomena, Neruda’s odes show both his communist and romantic sides, praising love itself, “clarity,” “broken things,” and V. I. Lenin. This enormous book provides an education of sorts into Neruda’s contexts as well as his effusive mind. Daunting to read straight through, sometimes banal, the volume nonetheless has profuse delights: Neruda lauds seagulls “as you are:/ your insatiable voraciousness,/ your screech in the rain,” while “Ode to Laziness” begins “Yesterday I felt this ode/ would not get off the floor.” (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

“How could you not love this book? Put it by the bedside. Or by the porcelain convenience. Anywhere you find yourself alone with a minute. Flip pages to a random ode, and have a ball . . . These are direct, open, rapid, often joyful poems addressed to things of this world--onion, building, butterfly, eye, horse, washerwoman, envy, old poet, typography (yes!), Paul Robeson . . . . It's a grateful, grief-stricken, revolving-in-wonder song of life on Earth, a reminder, in short, skinny bursts, of the thrill of what's in front of us . . . By far most of the odes strike me as still vigorous. And Stavans' notes explain much that has gone forgotten . . . If you read All the Odes, you will live more alive to the living world.” —John Timpane, Philly.com with praise for Pablo Neruda

“There is no poetic work in the Spanish language as exuberant and multifarious as that of Neruda, a poetry that has touched so many different worlds and irrigated such diverse vocations and talents. The only comparable case I know in other languages is that of Victor Hugo . . . Undoubtedly, Neruda's work will endure and continue to bewitch future generations of readers the way it has bewitched ours.” —Mario Vargas Llosa with praise for Pablo Neruda

From the Publisher

Here, appearing in one place for the first time, are all 250 odes (including some 70 previously untranslated) written by Nobel Prize-winner Neruda, possibly the best-selling foreign-language poet of all time in the United States. Although this anthology features 20 translators, including Margaret Sayers Peden and Ken Krabbenhoft, nearly half of the translations are by Stavans, a Latin Americanist who provides an introduction and identifies obscure references. As a translator Stavans claims to be a purist, and his purism can sometimes lead to awkwardly literal phraseologies (e.g., "From how many places/ disseminated across the geography/ light from here underachieved its elevation/ in triumphant unity"). Most of Neruda's odes concern ordinary things, such as a shoe, a lemon, or a cat; some celebrate places such as Ceylon or names on the map of Venezuela; still others are addressed to individuals such as Federico García Lorca, Walt Whitman, whom Neruda recognizes as his greatest poetic influence, and Paul Robeson, who "broke the silence of the rivers/ when they were dumb / because of the blood they carried." VERDICT Readers of poetry can't afford to miss this.—Jack Shreve, Allegany Coll. of Maryland, Cumberland

Library Journal