Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda (1960)

Ugh, gross, a love poem. If the thought of intimacy doesn’t make you shudder and say “Yech,” you might already know and love this one, as it has made its way through pop culture quite successfully.

To be honest, this sonnet has not aged well with me. But there was a time when I loved it almost as much as I loved Edna St. Vincent Millay.

That time was 1997, when I was In Love with my high school boyfriend, maybe because, due to circumstances, he could never truly love me back. Nevertheless, we two shared an intimacy built from and despite of our individual concealments. To this day, I believe we were star-crossed, and I regret that we were too young and clumsy to see our situation at its face value. Instead, we fumbled at romanticism and tried to make a unique relationship adhere to societal expectations of what a boy and a girl should share.

He gave me a copy of this poem when we went off to colleges on separate coasts. He was Mexican-American, but his Spanish (as his mom constantly reminded him) was poor, and I didn’t speak it at all. So he wrote out the English translation below and presented it to me in a glass frame, along with a photo of us.

When I dropped his gift and the frame shattered, he said it was probably a sign. It makes me laugh now, but back then…eesh.

My relationship with Sonnet XVII has changed. At first the words were a humbling declaration, a promise that wanted to be kept. Now they are a portrait of what one form of love can be, should people wish to pursue it, and a reminder that love lives in millions of forms, including in a kind that leaves you wondering what, exactly, you’re supposed to do with it.

Even if you don’t know Spanish, I encourage a read-through of the original version to get a sense of Neruda’s sound and rhythm.

Short Stuff:

• Neruda’s given name was Ricardo Eliezer Neftali Reyes y Basoalto. He changed it to the one we all know when he was a young teenager.
• He was extremely politically active, serving as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party (!). After it was outlawed, his arrest was issued, but he escaped!
• His death was also suspicious, and not-totally-unbelievable-theories suggest he was poisoned on Pinochet’s orders.

Topics

love; intimacy; snoozles; identity

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Sonnet XVII

No te amo como si fueras rosa de sal, topacio
o flecha de claveles que propagan el fuego:
te amo como se aman ciertas cosas oscuras,
secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma.

Te amo como la planta que no florece y lleva
dentro de sí, escondida, la luz de aquellas flores,
y gracias a tu amor vive oscuro en mi cuerpo
el apretado aroma que ascendió de la tierra.

Te amo sin saber cómo, ni cuándo, ni de dónde,
te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo:
así te amo porque no sé amar de otra manera,

sino así de este modo en que no soy ni eres,
tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mía,
tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.

I don’t love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don’t know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

–Pablo Neruda

Translation by Stephen Mitchell