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From bookrags:
"Tonight I Can Write" was published in 1924 in a collection of poems by Pablo Neruda
titled Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada. The collection was translated
into English in 1969 by W. S. Merwin as Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.
Although some reviewers were shocked by the explicit sexuality in the poems, the
collection became a best seller and was translated into several languages. Marjorie
Agosin writes in her article on Neruda, "One of the reasons that Twenty Love Poems
draws the reader so powerfully is the sobriety of expression and the economy of the
images." René de Costa in his article on Neruda notes that all the poems in this
collection contain "a highly charged confessional intimacy that challenged and charmed
the sensibility of its reader, creating in the process a contemporary stil nuovo which
continues to resonate in the language of love." The poems chart a love story from the
initial infatuation to the release of passion, and finally to a separation. "Tonight I Can
Write," the penultimate poem in the poetic sequence, expresses the pain the speaker
feels after losing his lover. The bittersweet sentiment recalls their passionate
relationship and his recognition that "love is so short, forgetting is so long."
XX
XX
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, 'The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
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