"The greatest poet of the twentieth century - in any language." - Gabriel Garcia Marquez Fully Empowered was first published in Spanish in 1962 and was one of Neruda's favourites among his own works, and he specifically asked his finest translator, Alastair Reid, to translate it into English. Neruda loved this collection partly because it grew from the most fruitful period of his own life but also because it was a representative selection of the vast range of his poetry. The thirty-six poems vary from short, intense lyrics, ...
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"The greatest poet of the twentieth century - in any language." - Gabriel Garcia Marquez Fully Empowered was first published in Spanish in 1962 and was one of Neruda's favourites among his own works, and he specifically asked his finest translator, Alastair Reid, to translate it into English. Neruda loved this collection partly because it grew from the most fruitful period of his own life but also because it was a representative selection of the vast range of his poetry. The thirty-six poems vary from short, intense lyrics, characteristic Neruda odes, whimsical addresses to friends, and his magnificent mediations on the role of the poet. Within Fully Empowered are many poems among the greatest of Neruda's work, including 'The People', his most celebrated later poem. In his last years Neruda was preoccupied with the contradictions of human experience, and in this volume he fully explores the theme of the poet as a cluster of different, often contradictory, selves. Anyone familiar with Neruda's work is aware that there are many Nerudas, many distinct poetic styles, and Fully Empowered demonstrates the dazzling diversity, in style and theme, of the most inexhaustible poet of the twentieth century.
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Add this copy of Fully Empowered (New Directions Paperbook) (English and to cart. $2.72, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Atlanta rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Austell, GA, UNITED STATES, published 1995 by New Directions.
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Very Good + (NDP792) A bilingual edition with parallel Spanish text and English translation on facing pages. Translated with an introduction by Alastair Reid. Paz won the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature. A clean, unmarked copy.
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Pablo Neruda is the quintessential Latin American poet. When he recevied the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, the Swedish Academy described him as "the poet of violated human dignity" who "brings alive a continent's destiny and dreams." Published in 1962, Fully Empowered (Plenos poderes) is late, autumnal work and one of my favorite volumes, because it incorporates Neruda's many modes.
In his early twenties, Neruda became famous with the publication of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924). The surrealism of Residence on Earth reflects the poet's alienation in Asia. Canto General is Neruda's attempt to write a poetic history of Latin America that includes those rendered invisible in official histories--miners, peasants, soldiers--and honors the anonymous worker. The Elemental Odes was marked by a simplification of style and celebration of the ordinary. In 1973, he died in a Santiago clinic aggravated by his distress over the military coup that overthrew the government of Salvador Allende, whom Neruda had helped bring to power.
Alastair Reid, arguably Neruda's finest translator, worked on the poems in Fully Empowered. These are the opening lines of "The Poet's Obligation": "To whoever is not listening to the sea / this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up / in house or office, factory or woman / or street or mine or dry prison cell. . ." The speaker addresses those who suffer confinement or incarceration, and, with elemental power, he becomes the agent of their liberation: "I arrive and open the door of his prison. . . / and the sea beats, dies, and goes on beating." It is, then, the poet's "destiny" to listen to the primal call, so that "wherever they suffer the sentence of the autumn," the speaker can affirm "freedom and the sea" in response to "the shrouded heart."
Reid has said that Neruda's poetry has a vast "range of manners and levels, from the whimsical and self-mocking, through the meditative, the sardonic, and the impassioned, the heights of vatic affirmation." Fully Empowered encompasses with mastery all those various modes.
