Tonight I Can Write

by Pablo Neruda

Tonight I Can Write: Sincerity, Simplicity, Honesty, and Directness in Neruda's Work


In the following essay, the author contends that “Tonight I Can Write” is a powerful lament for a lost lover that gains strength because of Pablo Neruda’s ability to control his vivid imagination and express his turbulent emotional state with the utmost sincerity, simplicity, honesty, and directness.

Pablo Neruda’s “Puedo Escribir Los Versos” (“Tonight I Can Write”) has long stood the test of time as arguably the best poem in Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Cancion Desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair) (1924), which has been called “one of the finest books of verse in the Spanish language.” For English readers, moreover, the 1969 translation of this poem by W. S. Merwin, one of America’s foremost poet-translators of the past fifty years, comes as an added boon, for Merwin captures beautifully—and faithfully—the poem’s musical and emotional...

(The entire page is 1763 words.)

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