[Julie Steiner]

NOTES ON THE POEM CHOICE:

Over the centuries, countless other poets have started at a woman's toes and have moved lasciviously upward, with varying degrees of delicacy; only Neruda reverses this order, without it seeming in any way anticlimactic. (To me, anyway. Your mileage may vary.)

He starts with the hips, which are the domain of stretch marks, which is how I'm reading "delgadas huellas...centímetros quemadas, pálidas perspectivas", "thin marks...scorched centimeters, pale perspectives." I may be wrong, of course, but stretch marks do tend to be about a centimeter thick, and they do indeed look like red scorches when new, gradually fading over time to pale sunkenness. The usual Spanish word for them is estrías, "striations or grooves", but hey, it's a poem. And the word huellas is used for footprints (including animal and vehicle tracks) and fingerprints, but also for marks in general.

Gotta love a guy who can feel celebratory about a woman's stretch marks, and of the intimacy ("known by me alone") represented by the opportunity to explore them.

As so often in Neruda's poetry, we are invited to join him on an adventure that seems to be an exploration of something more or less mundane...but which is actually an exhilarating journey through Neruda's own fantastic, joyful mind.

This time, halfway along, he claims he'll never leave a certain point of interest, but of course Neruda is too hyperactive and curious to pause anywhere for long.


NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION:

The punctuation of the run-on sentence about the hips bothers me more in the translation than in the Spanish original, for some reason. Maybe I'm just more uptight in English. This is not the translator's fault. I wonder if it bothers others, too. (The punctuation, not my uptightness.)

I wonder if "spiral" might be rendered as "doodle", although "threading out a spiral" is very nice. I also wonder if "sleeping during the trip" or "sleeping as I travel" might be rendered as "sleepwalking".

I'm not sure why the translator has decided to present the knees as he/she has. I don't have a problem with the change from the original's approach--I'm just curious. After the identities are revealed, I'd love to hear the thinking behind this.

I see that agudos has dropped out of the verse translation. "toes, slow,/ pointy, peninsular' does sound a little strange in English. Perhaps agudos would fit better if it were treated a little more loosely ("slow / to taper, peninsular" or "slowly / tapering, peninsular).

I very much admire the translator's deviation from the original word order in the final lines: "blind and hungry," etc. That's wonderful. I can see that sticking more closely to the text would have been very clunky there.

I can't help thinking of a ship on fire when I read "burning vessel". Hmmm. I'm inclined to see it more as the narrator's awareness that the woman's body is a container for something else--perhaps the spark of her consciousness, perhaps the fire of her passion. I really don't think it's the stereotypical woman-as-vessel-of-a-man's-reproductive-capacities-or-passions trope. "The red-hot vessel of your being" seems a bit too heavy-handed. Again, hmmm. Perhaps others will have helpful suggestions, or will be able to assure the translator that I'm off-base and "burning vessel" is just fine as it is.