100 Love Sonnets

"Against the backdrop of Isla Negra - the sea and wind, the white sand with its scattering of delicate wild flowers, the hot sun and salty smells of the Pacific - Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda sets these joyfully sensual poems in celebration of his love. The subject of that love: Matilde Urrutia de Neruda, the poet's "beloved wife." "I have told [Matilde] all I feel," Neruda wrote in his Memoirs. "Perhaps these poems make clear how much she means to me." As popular in the Hispanic world as the poet's renowned Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, One Hundred Love Sonnets has never before been published in its entirety in English translation. The reasons for this astonishing neglect may lie in the historical circumstances that surrounded Neruda's "discovery" by English-speaking readers. In the United States he came to popularity during the turmoil of the Sixties, when Americans needed a politically committed poet, and much of Neruda's canon answered that need. But, in his native Chile and throughout Latin America, Neruda has always been cherished as dearly for the earthy sensuality and eroticism of his love poetry as for his statements of political belief. To know this newly translated work, then, is to understand the poet's art more truly. To read it alongside Neruda's other work is to see the poet whole, as masterful spokesman for the passions of public life and the commitments of private life as well. This bilingual edition of One Hundred Love Sonnets reproduces the text of the 1959 Spanish original en face with Stephen Tapscott's graceful English translation. Associate professor of literature at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tapscott is a widely published poet who brings to this work the sensitivity of the creative artist as well as the skills of an accomplished translator." --