I have been lucky enough to wander around Pablo Neruda’s house in Valparaiso, Chile. My host gave me “I Explain a Few Things” which is a translated selection of some of Neruda’s poems. I came across the poem “Verb”. It’s all about the rawness of the words which resonate in your guts, positively or negatively. I blogged about ideophonetic language recently and this poem seemed to sum up the ideas in this post.
Take the poem any way you want. For me it could be about words or phrases. for example if the word(s) were ‘splitting headache’, a metaphorical term which seems to have lost some its power due to overuse, the poem could be about seeking deeper and different ways of expression, ultimately an increasingly powerful DIM. Equally perhaps the poem is a call to alter old embedded language and to find new SIM like language in more ideophonetic and textural words which may well embrace wider and newer brain areas.
VERB
I’m going to wrinkle this word,
twist it,
yes,
it’s too smooth,
as if the tongue
of a big dog or a big river’s water
had washed it
for years and years.
I want to see
roughness in the word,
ironlike salt,
earth’s
toothless strength,
the blood
of those who spoke out and those who didn’t.
I want to see thirst
Deep in its syllables.
I want to touch fire
In the sound.
I want to feel
The darkness of a scream.
I want rough words
Like virginal stones.
Pablo Neruda (2007) I Explain a Few Things. Stavans I (ed). Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.
-David Butler
comments