This superb bilingual anthology highlights the posthumous legacy of Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet and Nobel laureate, who left a vast body of unpublished work when he died in 1973. Ben Belitt, a distinguished poet in his own right, is widely regarded as the leading translator of Neruda into English. Here he has given us a Neruda as fecund and engaged as ever, ceaselessly spinning the strands of his great, seamless life's work.
"This is pure Neruda at his prime, which is to say incomparable."-Choice
"The Separate Rose represents Pablo Neruda at the peak of his art, and William O'Daly has done an important service by bringing it before American readers with such care."-The Bloomsbury Review
The coast of Easter Island-the most isolated inhabited island in the world-is adorned with gigantic and miraculous stone statues. Neruda made a single pilgrimage to Easter Island during a poignant time in his life-he was dying of cancer and taking his life's inventory. Out of this journey grew a sequence of poems that alternate between "Men" and "The Island," through which Neruda observes the latest remnants of the ancient world in direct opposition to modernity. With an introduction by William O'Daly.
"Neruda's lyricism wakes us up, even in the face of death, to the connections we have with our land, inner and outer."-Los Angeles Times Book Review
The first authorized English translation of An, considered among Neruda's finest long poems.
More aware than ever of his imminent death, these 28 cantos-written during two intensely lyrical days-launch the poet on a personal expedition in search of his deepest roots. It is a soaring tribute to the Chilean people, their history and survival that invokes the Araucanian Indians, the conquistadors who tried to enslave them, folklore, the people and places of his childhood and the sights and smells of the marketplace. As in the best poetry, Neruda's particulars become profoundly universal. With an introduction by William O'Daly.
