In the Library
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Pablo Neruda, 1924
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 15 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by Translated for The Daily Canon
- Original
- Original es
- Chapters
- Chapters 21
- Length
- Length 4k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Sonnets from the Portuguese
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Barrett Browning counts the ways with the same breathless devotion, but in Victorian corsets where Neruda writes shirtless.
£1.99
Gypsy Ballads
Federico García Lorca
Lorca writes from the same Spanish-language tradition of blood and moonlight, but the lovers are doomed where Neruda's are alive.
£1.99
About the book
Tonight I can write the saddest lines, a boy of nineteen tells himself, and a century of readers have whispered the same words back into their own dark rooms. Here Pablo Neruda makes a woman out of landscape, a body of white hills and white thighs that looks, he writes, like a world lying in surrender, and turns the oldest ache there is into something that feels like it happened to you last week. The poems move from the heat of having someone to the cold of the bed where she used to lie, and the closing Song of Despair goes down like a ship sinking with all its cargo of memory. He never pretends the grief is noble. He just says it, plainly: I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. To read this is to be nineteen and wrecked by someone all over again.