Pablo Neruda (1904–1973)
I Do Not Love You As If
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose
from the earth lives dimly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.
Translated by Mark Eisner.
Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) was a Chilean poet and diplomat who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. Neruda was exiled from 1948–1951 when communism was declared illegal in Chile. Later he served as a diplomat and an advisor to President Salvador Allende. When Allende was overthrown in a coup d’état that made way for Augusto Pinochet’s regime, Neruda was already dying of cancer. Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Márquez called Neruda “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.” This poem is from The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems, edited by Mark Eisner (City Lights Books, 2004).
Selected by Amy Frykholm: amy@journeywithjesus.net
