a ee MINION oMeverateerise WilMul“Experimental, obscure, timeless, essential, v published two years after his famous Twenty Low Despair, set Pablo Neruda on his course toward be et in the history of the Spanish language. Its publication in English is a historic event, above all today, above all in this moment, ab all, now.” —RaOL ZURITA, author of Anteparaiso ly twenties and after the enormous success of Twenty Song of Despair, Neruda surprised e hanging aesthetic gears in this book that was at once innovative and emblem- atic. The effort was part of what would ultimately become his c ess embrace of change as the sit c. Jessica Powell dae: inders rendering these cantos firs time into English, filling ina gap his legion of admirers will be thankful for. This isn't only an. unseen Neruda but an unforeseen one too.” —iLAN STAVANS, editor of The Poetry of Pablo Neruda “What an act of generosity this book is. Eisner’s introduction contextu alizes and informs precisely as needed, and Jessica Powell's translation achieves astonishing beauty and refreshing truth. She has listened eply to Neruda’s text.” KATHERINE SILVER, translatorventure of the infinite a nventure of the infinite Sen FranciseINTRODUCTION In Santiago, Chile, 1925, a twenty-one-year-old poet named Pablo Neruda found himself at a crossroads. Despite the sensa tional success of his second book, the widely celebrated Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, published just a year before, Neruda was in sad shape. “Pablo's state of mind was anxious, disconcerted,” his friend Rubén Acécar noted. "It seemed to me that his soul was spinning around itself, seeking its own center. . . . [He] wanted to renew himself in some way, t0 ex amine himself from a different dimension. This desire for self-exploration, the craving for new per spectives through which he might ground himself, led Neruda to experiment once again with his style. Despite the love po ems’ unique +, he was already determined to break with their lyrical realism, with poetry's traditional forms in general His intention was to “strip poetry of al its objectiveness and to say what I have to say in the most serious form possible.”What resulted was his discovery of a unique form, repre pieces, but single unified work, the poer announce senting a stark stylistic departure from the love poems. Most red type directly after the title page that this was a “Poem by scrikingly, he discarded rhyme, meter, punctuation and Pablo Nerudi ion in an attempt to better replicate the subconsc Though Neruda would later call venture “one of the most ice, to, in his words, bring his poetry even closer to “irre important books of may poetry,” the work failed to gamer the lucible purty, the closest approximation to naked thought, critical and popular reception he had been hoping for. Indeed intimate labor of the soul.” Indeed, he rejected capital in 1950, twenty-five years afterhe finished writing it, Nerud zation even in the title of the book that would be the result noted that venture was “the least read and least studied of all of his experiment: tentativa del hombre infinito (venture of the work,” a lament that, unforunately holds true today. een mnfinive man) ure has continued t set over, primarily because ofits entire ofthe infinite man, frst published in 1926, just ewo heavy avant-garde experimentalism, which, on the one han ears after Twenty Love Poems, is an avant-garde lyrical narea makes it so exceptional and rich, yet on the other, has caused tive, comprised of fifteen uniquely composed, but intimate ritics and publishers (and transators) to shy away from its un linked, cantos. They are ver forty-four pages, divi conventional form. up and placed on each page in an inconsisietut but not random de Costa wrore in his seminal book, The Poetry fashion, the spacing serving as an element of the oneiric book, of Pablo Neruda, “Critics who liked his love poetry were at to signal that the book was not a compilation of disparal first dismayed by this book, for in it Neruda seemed to haveabandoned not only thyme and meter but also, according to off by the experimental nature of venture. Was there actually some, any semblance of meaning. The problem was that in his supposed to be a cohesive are across this whole “poem,” as Jesire to purify his poctic language, to rid it entirely of the hol Neruda was calling it, or were these just unrelated strips of low rhetoric of the past, he created a work that was so strange drcam-like images? Was there any substance eo it? Was it and unfamiliar co most readers of the time that they were un even poetry? They just couldn't it, for, as de Costa able and unwilling to make any sense out of it.” notes, “Most readers in 1926 reacted, quite naturally, to what The critics’ bewilderment, which extended even t The so-called ‘formlessne: abered. ition to apprec Neruda's own friends, was emblematic of the book's rece One of the most influential reviewers referred to it as “going Readers today are ina the way of the absurd.”* Another, Radi Silva C been the very first to publish Neruda in the Chile what it actual Student fact, in 1975, fifty years after Neruda finis (0, who had achievernent, to “see it Federation's journal, complained: “The flesh and blood we ha die Costa, at that time a professor of Spanish at admired so much in the author's other books are missing here of Chicago, published an article calling for a IA reader] might just as well begin to read from the back a venture ofthe infinite man. He argued that while the from the front, or even the middle. One would understand the familiar manner of presentation once obscured the meaning same, that is to say, very litle.” of Neruda’s avant-gerde literature from all but the initiated,” Thus, in These early critics and readers were completely thrown today, we are more enabled and evolved as readerNeru his book, centrality tc rk as a whole, make the fact that it has been so largely overlooked indness for ind his assertion of its more remarkabie. The ne glect has compromised readers’ access to it. While the poem has been included within some compilations ard antholo- gies, unt d stand-alone edition published ir release as published by the Pablo ing sold house in Santiago, which 17. A comp Furthermore, perhaps because of how st he origi nal was, no version printed since 1926 has ever exactly rep licated that first edition (with the exception of the Neruda Foundation’s small 2016 commemorative printing). Rather, hey contain substantial changes in page and line breaks, well as the spacing and location of lines on the page, element. that are crucial to any poetic text, especially this one, as they greatly affect the intelligibility and meaning of the individual cantos as well as their interrelated cohesion. These versi also usually include changes, or “corrections,” to Neruda’ orig inal wording and spelling. The original text includes typos an misprints that Neruda did not want ro correct. According to Neruda, when his publisher—who had supported the vanguard venture, both emotionally and meteriall wed him the advance page proofs in January 1925, he made the decision not to correct thmy delight, I saw an abundance of errors that pal: pitated among my verses. Instead of correcting them I returned the proofs intact to don Carlos who, sur prised, said, “No mistakes?” “There are and I’m leaving them,” I respond Just as Neruda intentionally eschewed capitalization and punctuation marks, by leaving in these natural slips he felt he swas emulating the unmediated, free-flowing articulation of the subconscious. And so, until now, René de Costa’ call for @ reapprais al, for a re-issue of tentaiva for the contemporary reader, had Neruda did use accent marks, however in several instances they were missing in the original printing. Because the presence or absence of an accent mark in a given word in Spanish can change its meaning, and as such, drastically impact the translation, we have chosen to insere the gon sd. I visited him in C us particips ents around the ci centennial that year. There was a lot our conversations about venue particularly passionate 3 salient. [left confident in my appraisal of th wwe agreed that it was a shame thar there was no English As itis such an avant-garde book, I proposed the project to the vanguard publisher, City Lights. Lawrence Ferlinghetti dug it immediacely, and ¢ oon became excited about th publishing possibilities, as much for the book's inherent po: tic richness as for its important place in global literary histo ry. When Cit her Elaine Katze take on the project, L asked my fiend, translator Jess 0 take on the daunting task of rendering this incred ienging text in English Through her brilliant effort, readers of English are now‘our minds to simp the need to understand everything rationally, what to others “the way of the absurd’ ematic voyage th inary dimension, dreamed up of one of the most nite man was writte over a two-year period n which Neruda had begun practicing his own form of matic writing,” dipping into some of the techniques and tenets of surrealism, but is poetry in them completely wrote in che Surrealise M the superior reality isinterested play of thot Yet, as de Costa highlights, while Breton and other suree: da yle. In vencure, instead of simply voice of the subconscious, Ni alists wanted to capture only wanted to emulate its delivering a deluge of language, he some clarity throug premeditated composition following the spontaneity. He re viewed and revised the words, creating conscious construction and recurring themes, yed Neruda with ay. In fact, frus While the first reviews of the book cha p his method, he stro, whose review of the book in writing out of control, it trated by the critic nt to his failure to gr riend Rail Silva santiago’s largest newspaper had expressed his complete inability to pen fe the poem, During their conversation, Neruda stressed that he needed to clear out the clunky, impure elements of hi poetry for it to function as he di less comprehensible to the casual reader:Even proper names seem false to me, an element for eign to poetry In the frst fragment of tenture there's “only oF mmobile star its blue phos Ac first | had put: “only one star Sirius its sphorous,” but I had to take the name out of there: Sirius, which was very precise. But the name was too “objective,” it was an un: poctic element in the poem, Neruda's explanations eventually convinced Silva Castro Where in his first review he had dis for its formlessness, now he described how Neruda had gotten rid of “the dead weight of thyme and thythm” and the “unnecessary separation of functions for capi missed his friend's boy tal and lower-case letters s this poetry?” he asked, “Of course itis. Bucitisa kind of poetry.” attempt to analyze precisely what takes place in the be complicated by the fact that, as we have noted, iti likely impossible to understand everything on a purely rational level. Conceptually, while Neruda’s writing process may have been less “pure” chan surrealism’s “pure psychic automatism ventire’s narrative and textured imagery does align with the movement's desire to resolve the ly contradictory states” of dream and reali ate reality, a urreality."* In fact, venture's plot revolves around its onist’s search for absolute wholeness, « new reality, a restor Consciousness, a quest that mirrors Neruda’s own search for self-discovery and expression, Neruda was twenty wher. he fst started writing vento tthe beginning of the book we learn that the poem's subject is man of twenty.” We see this you with his “soul in de spair.” This is the sam Neruda just by ate in which his friend Rubén foun vegan writing venture ul “spinningFollowing the ecstasy of this encounter, he is released Jescends from your head | and fils your raised hand with from his melancholy, enlivened: “i surpr ld" Iris new poetic power created by the process of writing venture fel myself ising deliti bus under the big top / lke a lovestruck tightrope walker.” He hand, illuminating it with new skills and visions with which has tapped into his poetic ability, and he begins to meditatively he would then compose the immersive, extraordinary and moving seek his inner self: “letting the sky in deeply warching the sky poems at the beginning of his classic Residence on Earth. His voyagt i am thinking”... “i began to speak to myself in a low voic with (or through) the venture of the infinite man was the experience And while, by the final canto, it seems that the he has im there. completed his quest ("i am standin like midday Mark Eisner, 2017 earth / i want to tell it all wi the comple: tion of the book brought no personal resolution to the trio of problems with which Rubén hi love, money, and poetry.” Yer, reg noticed his friend strugel dless of its disheartening reception at the time of publication, the experience of writing venture would have its rewards. When we read venture today, Neruda’s poetic vision seems almost prophetic. At one mo: ment, the speaker, holding the night in an intimate embrace speaks tc hat does not belong to youventure of the infinite m anA POEM BY PABLO NERUDAwvisible dust clouds raceretched out in the grass my heart is a alling evening dusk rolled ther a dewy butte bind me with your bel oh coi owards which sleep adv oh moun siastic earth where i stand ertebr he distant wastar suspended between the thick night the days of tall sails dock of doubts dancer on a string you held up twilights u had in secret a dead man like a lonely roadap forth you climb he night of emeralds and mills turns the night of emeralds Im [pursuing hungeringur dark lava slides twisting to that side or beyond you continue being mine in the solitude of dusk your smile knocks in that instant vines climb to my window wind from high above lashes the hdamp clods of earth a tangled net bre: your kisses stick like snails to my bacl the calendar year spins and days slip from the world like leavesn the one wh ducks names and High constellations of de f blue walls high upon your brow - - to sing yout praises word of pure wings ink thi the one who broke his fate always where he was not for example the night tc among sil th wet with twilight tis farther to symboli distracted you halt a i would grow a stalk of wheat owisted toward a wound ob why did th from the side where I gaze at you and you are not there my little git hadow shipwreck fatefrom which they carted it awa there i shattered my heatt lik 1 in onder to walk thdow and there aletting the sky in deeply watching the sk sitting uncertainly on that edge h sky woven with water and paes the order that quiich time in search of the dawn the lost anchor mother-of-pearl arms and that is ¥ you disciple of my soul looking back at you seek you every time among the symbols of retum are full of leeping like the silence of the fore d lily you look off toward some er place id ignite the fireflies en 1u so distant you wound up the pace step up the paceh the cracklingnight taut its sail dancing Jay like that of hands halting a vehicle he quick people of eager heart i celebrated it all people of eager he netions my portrait he world that idescribe with passion nets the couples in love thecolerofa violin tht to the world ‘a bell with the scent of long distances tant and sad and therein my c barcarolero of the long waters whententativa d e 1 hombre infinitoPOEMA DE PABLO NERUDAcorren humos difccerros entre la noche de hojas tro abre la son ahf pasan ardiendo sélo yihe sin llave liente mo la ola al alga cog enturado cuando rodeas los animales del suefc artide a cara a ti misma noche de hélices negras. mbarcado mbre de veinte afios sujeta una rienda frenética es que élanetas dan v que limpian tu des buques de brasa ielta como husos entusiastas giran bscura lav reas que hacen scuando aproximo el cielo con las manos para sy salen del mundo los dias com:y el que desho| alabarte a ti pal ejemplo en |: is alld mas al que tenn busca del alba e0 una abeja rondando no existe esa abeja ahoraeo colreaadirinens pohaiane Lo} no ando la noche quiero que pas saltan como elés os habitantes acostados 10 herraduras abandon: la carpa delirante ima higubs npletanigual al de las manos que detienen débilmente ¢ barcarolero de las largas aguas cuarpescador intranquilo dé cinturén de frutas dulce la melancoli Ta comida las barrest from the shadow get fright jam filled with transparent terror a sombra 0 el sobresalto me leno de terror tramsparente atching the sky iam thinking the month of june stretched out suddenly in time with seriousn profundamente mirandb el cielo estoy pensand and exactitude el mes de junio se extendié de repente en el iempo con seriedad y h . the ruined ships the sorrows for whom did i buy the solitude i possess tonight = oa ee = caida amis pes qutn ve dice devuélveme la la sed era a rund i sce a bee circlir suddenly a seagull grows upon your brow my heart is weary ihear the silence adorn itself with successive waves