my favorite pablo poem

Your choices were divine girls, I love the poems. This one is my favorite. I am almost positive I’ve posted it before, but it’s so good it deserves another post. And being able to read pablo neruda’s poems in the native form is one of the main reasons I’m pursuing Spanish at school. Well that and the whole “I’m a mexican” thing. This translation by the way is done by a teacher of mine from Emerson, who also wrote the book “half the house” which was an amazing book that I’ve mentioned before and I think the whole world should read.

I always wondered what this poem might be like translated by a different person, but I haven’t been able to find it anywhere else. I want the original Spanish version.

Anyway, here it is:

Don’t Ask Me
by Pablo Neruda (tr. R Hoffman)

My heart is worn out
with knowing so many things,
as if I were lugging rocks
of different sizes in a sack,
or as if rain is falling
ceaselessly in my memory.

Don’t ask me.
I don’t know what to say.
I have no idea what happened.

Nobody else knew either,
so I kept going, in a fog,
convincing myself that nothing had occurred,
looking for fruit in the streets,
ideas in the fields,
and I came to the conclusion
everyone was right–
I have been asleep too long.

So let them go ahead and load me down,
not only rocks this time but shadows, too,
and not only shadows but blood.

So that’s how things are with me, boy,
but they’re also not like that at all
because, in spite of everything, I’m alive,
my health is excellent,
both my fingernails and my soul are still growing,
I come and go across frontiers,
make claims, take readings, get my bearings.
If they want to know more,
I get confused about where I’ve been,
But if they think they hear grief’s howl
Around my house, they’re wrong.
Love is clear weather,
Weeping is time wasted.

So, about what I remember
and about what I don’t,
about what I know and used to know,
and all I’ve forgotten
of what is by now long gone,
about the dead, who never heard from me,
and wanted, maybe, to see me,
they had best not ask. Instead

let them put a hand here on my vest
and they’ll feel me trembling,
a big sack of heavy rocks.

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