All the Odes: A Bilingual Edition

Here, appearing in one place for the first time, are all 250 odes (including some 70 previously untranslated) written by Nobel Prize–winner Neruda, possibly the best-selling foreign-language poet of all time in the United States. Although this anthology features 20 translators, including Margaret Sayers Peden and Ken Krabbenhoft, nearly half of the translations are by Stavans, a Latin Americanist who provides an introduction and identifies obscure references. As a translator Stavans claims to be a purist, and his purism can sometimes lead to awkwardly literal phraseologies (e.g., “From how many places/ disseminated across the geography/ light from here underachieved its elevation/ in triumphant unity”). Most of Neruda’s odes concern ordinary things, such as a shoe, a lemon, or a cat; some celebrate places such as Ceylon or names on the map of Venezuela; still others are addressed to individuals such as Federico García Lorca, Walt Whitman, whom Neruda recognizes as his greatest poetic influence, and Paul Robeson, who “broke the silence of the rivers/ when they were dumb / because of the blood they carried.”