Heights Of Macchu Picchu

Long poem inspired by the author's journey to a ruined Inca city, Macchu Picchu, high in the Andes, symbolic not only of his physical journey but also of his spiritual adventure.

The Heights of Macchu Picchu is the finest and most famous of Neruda's longer poems and provides the key to his earlier work. It was inspired by his journey to Macchu Picchu, the Peruvian Inca city high in the Andes. Neruda's journey takes on all the symbolic qualities of a personal "venture into the interior" as the poem progresses, exploring both the roots of the poet's identity and the history of Latin America. This translation has been rendered by the distinquished poet Nathaniel Tarn and is presented in a bilingual edition, with the Spanish and English texts on facing pages.

What goes into the translating of a poem? Usually that process gets forgotten once the new poem stands intact in translation. Yet a verse translation derives from historical, biographical, and philosophical research, interpretive analysis of the original poem, and continuous linguistic and prosodic choices that parallel those the poet made. Taking as a text Pablo Neruda's brilliant prophetic sequence Alturas de Macchu Picchu (1945), the author here re-creates the entire process of translation, from his first encounter with the poem to the last shaping of a phrase that may never come right in English. This many-faceted book forms an essay on the theory and practice of literary translation, a study of Neruda's career through 1945, and an interpretation of his major poem, all of which lead to a striking new poem in English, Heights of Macchu Picchu, printed along with the original Spanish. This genesis of a verse translation also includes little-known biographical data, hitherto untranslated poems and prose from the years 1920 to 1945, and new translations of key poems from Neruda's Residence on Earth and Spain in My Heart.

The Canto General, thought by many of Neruda’s most prominent critics to be the poet’s masterpiece, is the stunning epic of an entire continent and its people.

Neruda's masterpiece epic poem about the history of a continent and its people.

"Laughter is the language of the soul," Pablo Neruda said. Among the most lasting voices of the most tumultuous (in his own words, "the saddest") century, a witness and a chronicler of its most decisive events, he is the author of more than thirty-five books of poetry and one of Latin America's most revered writers, the emblem of the engaged poet, an artist whose heart, always with the people, is literally consumed by passion. His work, oscillating from epic meditations on politics and history to intimate reflections on animals, food, and everyday objects, is filled with humor and affection. This bilingual selection of more than fifty of Neruda's best poems, edited and with an introduction by the distinguished Latin American scholar Ilan Stavans and brilliantly translated by an array of well-known poets, also includes some poems previously unavailable in English. I Explain a Few Things distills the poet's brilliance to its most essential and illuminates Neruda's commitment to using the pen as a calibrator for his age.

“I will call the voice of this poet a ‘common’ voice… a voice a poet could take into an entire lifetime of memorable writing.” —Philip Levine, Ploughshares This second collection from APR-Honickman winner Tomás Q. Morín explores love gone sideways in the lives of lovers, parents and children, humans and the divine. Patient Zero is filled with voices—of all the people, places, and things that surround a life sick with heartbreak. Doors are the wooden tongues of a house, grocery-store cashiers are gatekeepers to the infinite, and food is the all-powerful life force behind every living thing. From Patient Zero Love is a worried, old heart disease, as Son House once put it, the very stuff blues are made of, real blues that consist of a male and female, not monkey junk like the “Okra blues” or “Pay Day blues,” though I think House would agree two hearts of any persuasion are enough for a real blues, if one of them is sick, that sickly green of a frog bitten in two by the neighbor’s dog, all of which makes me wonder about the source of our disease and whose teeth first tore the heart after Adam and Eve left the garden?... Tomás Q. Morín's debut poetry collection A Larger Country was the winner of the APR/Honickman Prize. He is co-editor with Mari L'Esperance of the anthology Coming Close, and translator of The Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda. He teaches at Texas State University and in the low residency MFA program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.