Translating the words of love

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How do you say ‘I love you’ in Chile? Let us count the ways. Or wait, there are just too many, especially if you’re a poet.

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), Chile’s most famous maestro of meter and a national icon, penned some of the 20th-century’s most stirring verses about love (among many other themes). Much of his work is so inherently musical that modern bands have set it to haunting rock and folk arrangements.

But there’s lots more to Chilean poetry than Pablo, as one contributor to this exchange at Harvard’s indispensable Global Voices Online project points out. You can start, as one blog poster does, with Gabriela Mistral, another Chilean Nobel Prize winner for literature. And let’s not forget Nicanor Parra, or his younger sibling and musical wordsmith Violetta Parra, the Joan Baez of the Southern Cone.

Global Voices, which provides English-language translations of blogs across the world, allows you to read many comments in the original Spanish side by side with English, including some lines from Neruda’s famous ‘Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada’ (‘Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair’).

Posted by Reed Johnson in Mexico City