Residence on Earth/Residencia en la Tierra [Paperback]

Pablo Neruda (Author)

Book Description

Series: New Directions Books | Publication Date: January 1973

New Directions celebrates the Pablo Neruda Centennial.

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Pablo Neruda's birth, New Directions is pleased to announce the reissue of a classic work in a timeless translation by Donald D. Walsh and fully bilingual. Residence on Earth is perhaps Neruda's greatest work. Upon its publication in 1973, this bilingual publication instantly became "a revolution... a classic by which masterpieces are judged" (Review). "In Residence on Earth," wrote Amado Alonso, "the tornado of fury will no longer pass without lingering, because it will be identified with [Neruda's] heart."

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Residence I: Adonic Angela [angela Adonica]
Residence I: Alliance (sonata) [alianza]
Residence I: Ars Poetica [arte Poetica]
Residence I: Burial In The East [entierro En El Este]
Residence I: Cold Work [trabajo Frio]
Residence I: Contradicted Communications
Residence I: Daily Mourner [diurno Doliento]
Residence I: Dead Gallop [galope Muerto]
Residence I: Dream Horse [caballo De Los Suenos]
Residence I: It Means Shadow [significa Sombras]
Residence I: Joachim's Absence [ausencia De Joaquin]
Residence I: Madrigal Written In Winter [escrito En Invierno
Residence I: Mat Monsoon [monzon De Mayo]
Residence I: Nocturnal Collection [coleccion Nocturna]
Residence I: Nocturnal Establishments
Residence I: Phantom [fantasma]
Residence I: Ritual Of My Legs [ritual De Mis Piernas]
Residence I: Serenade [serenata]
Residence I: Single Gentleman [caballlero Solo]
Residence I: Slow Lament [lamento Lento]
Residence I: Somber System [sistema Sombrio]
Residence I: Sonata And Destructions [sonata Y Destrucciones
Residence I: Songs [cantares]
Residence I: Taste [sabor]
Residence I: The Dawn's Debility [debil Del Alba]
Residence I: The Ghost Of The Cargo Boat
Residence I: The Night Of The Soldier
Residence I: The Uninhabited One [el Deshabitado]
Residence I: The Widower's Tango [tango Del Viudo]
Residence I: The Young Monarch [el Joven Monarca]
Residence I: Tyranny [tirania]
Residence I: Unity [unidad]
Residence I: We Together [juntos Nosotros]
Residence Ii: Alberto Rojas Jimenez Comes Flying
Residence Ii: Autumn Returns [vuelve El Otono]
Residence Ii: Barcarole [barcarola]
Residence Ii: Disaction [desespediente]
Residence Ii: Entrance To Wood [entrada A La Madera]
Residence Ii: Illness In My Home [enfermedades En Mi Casa]
Residence Ii: Josie Bliss
Residence Ii: Maternity [maternidad]
Residence Ii: Melancholy In The Families
Residence Ii: Nuptial Substance [material Nupcial]
Residence Ii: Ode To Federico Garcia Lorca
Residence Ii: Ode With A Lament [oda Con Un Lamento]
Residence Ii: One Day Stands Out [un Dia Sobresale]
Residence Ii: Only Death [solo La Muerte]
Residence Ii: Ordinance Of Wine [estatuto Del Vino]
Residence Ii: Sexual Water [agua Sexual]
Residence Ii: The Apogee Of Celery [apogeo Del Apio]
Residence Ii: The Clock Fallen Into The Sea
Residence Ii: The Destroyed Street [la Calle Destruida]
Residence Ii: The Disinterred One (count Of Villamediana)
Residence Ii: The Southern Ocean [el Sur Del Oceano]
Residence Ii: There Is No Oblivion (sonata)
Residence Ii: Three Material Songs [tres Cantos Materiales]
Residence Ii: Walking Around
Residence Iii: 7th Of November - Ode To A Day Of Victories
Residence Iii: A New Love Song To Stalingrad
Residence Iii: A Song For Bolivar [un Canto Para Bolivar]
Residence Iii: Alliance (sonata) [alianza]
Residence Iii: Born In The Woods [naciendo En Los Bosques]
Residence Iii: Brussels [bruselas]
Residence Iii: Furies And Sorrows [las Furias Y Las Penas]
Residence Iii: Harsh Elegy [dura Elegia]
Residence Iii: Meeting Under New Flags
Residence Iii: Song On Death & Resurrection Of Luis Companys
Residence Iii: Song To Stalingrad [canto A Stalingrado]
Residence Iii: Song To The Red Army At The Gates Of Prussia
Residence Iii: Song To The Rivers Of Germany
Residence Iii: Spain In Our Hearts [espana En El Corazon]
Residence Iii: The Abandoned One [el Abandonado]
Residence Iii: The Drowned Woman Of The Sky
Residence Iii: Tina Modotti Is Dead [ha Muerto]
Residence Iii: Waltz [vals]
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Language Notes

Text: English, Spanish --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 359 pages
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation (January 1973)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811204677
• ISBN-13: 978-0811204675
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,180,126 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Pablo Neruda is regarded as the greatest Latin American poet of the 20th century. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971, his breadth of vision and wide range of themes are extraordinary, and his work continues to inspire new generations of writers.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent collection of candid poems of emotion., May 15, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Los Angeles, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Residence on Earth/Residencia en la Tierra (Paperback)

Neruda delivers an uninhibited glimse at human emotions and panges of life in this collection of poems. Neruda jars the soul by explaining in simple verse, how tragic life can be. The reflections and odes collected in this work are a superb display of the skill Neruda has. Residence on Earth is a compilation of poetry from a mature poet who willfully takes risks, and carries through with beautiful prose. Nerudas candid emotional stylizations convince one of the feeling of being consumed by the poetry itself. Neruda is boundless in structure. The easy style allow for the reader to atempt to understand the abundant imagery and symbolism contained traditionally within Nerudas works. One must read this compilation, as one would consume a fine port wine, or richly decadent chocolate-with trepidation. Time to reflect and savor the splendor of this poet is most definately required.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Here is honest poetry that everyone can enjoy, February 19, 2006

By 

Eric Bryant "dissident librarian" (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Residence on Earth (Paperback)

So many poets explore the conditions of the world, attempting to form them together into a theme or idea. Neruda takes the opposite tack, the course of the true dreamer; he takes themes and ideas and tries to form them together into a real world.

The paradox of Neruda is the earthy quality of so many of his poems combined with the idealistic imagery. Neruda was a common man living the life of a folk hero in his own mind, who by placing that life into poetry became a folk hero of substance. He captured the hearts and minds of an entire generation of Chileans, spanish-speaking peoples, and eventually the world. And for good reason. Neruda believes in the power of words. He is a master of image placed into language, a visionary linguist in every sense.

Unlike so many English and American poets, you don't need to be an expert on Greek mythology or on other poets to understand where Neruda is coming from. This is a poetry of the people, accessible to the many, and yet effective enough that it should melt even the most stodgy teacher of English lit.

The third section, written many years after the first two, explores many political themes, as opposed to the more personal images evoked in the first two sections. It's too bad, as I personally enjoy the first two a little more. But even so, it pointed towards new directions that Neruda would explore in his later, more mature works. Yet maturity or no, this is the Neruda that I found most eminently readable, most capable of evoking a sense of obscure appreciation that I can't quite put my finger on. Neruda's poetry is not always as specific as so many authors, and so allows the reader to weave the perfect amount of personal perspective into the story or vision being woven; the words and ideas here can be interacted with on an individual level, rather than simply accepted as good or bad. It's hard not to get carried away with yourself at times: to float above the linguistic quality of the words and forget that Neruda might, at times, be writing about something in particular.

Genuine yet beautiful and ethereal, Neruda stands on his own as one of the most innovative and evocative poets of the twentieth or any other century. And here is one of his greatest works.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Minority View, February 21, 2010

By 

G. D. Geiss (Harrisburg, Pa. USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Residence on Earth (Paperback)

I am sure this will be a distinctly minority view, but I would caution the first time, non Spanish speaking reader of Neruda away from this work and this translation.

I find the poems from the first residence here almost impenetrably surrealistic and the translations overly literal in many places. The later poems are awkwardly political, violent, and at times vulgar. There are bright spots such as the Ode to Federico Garcia Lorca, but to my taste, they are few and far between.

I would, instead of this volume, recommend Stephen Mitchell's lovely translations of the later works of Neruda entitled "Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon".

Those of you who are already spitting mad that anyone would dare to find Neruda anything but brilliant need read no further, but for those wondering how I can complain about translations that everyone else praised, I will take some time with one poem to flesh out my position.

The very first poem in the collection is Galope Muerto or Dead Gallop as Mr. Walsh renders it. There's just not space to render both Spanish and English, but I've spent hours with both due to things like the translation of the very first line including the phrase "like seas peopling themselves". Now I don't care if you are a surrealist or something else, that phrase is English drivel. Two lines later we find "the crossed bells crossing," which while not exactly nonsense, does not move the meaning of the poem forward in any accessible way.

Later in the second stanza of the same poem we have "... like the pulley wild within itself,/ those motor wheels in short." Now, this make no earthly sense in English. It also ignores the punctuation of the second line in Spanish that reads " esas ruedas de los motores, en fin." I wouldn't mind that if it improved the sense of what was said, but here something seems lost without recompense. Worse yet, the translation continues: "Existing like the dry stitches in the tree's seams,/ silent, all around, in such a way,/ all the limbs mixing their tails." Again, I'm sorry, with due respect to Mr. Walsh, this is jibberish. And while he's preserved the parenthetical phrase here by rendering "de tal modo" as "in such a way" it relates to no phrase before it nor any following and so is parenthetical to nothing. It justs sits there without meaning.

Since these lines were some of the first I read and bothered me so, I spent in excess of twenty hours with on-line translators and a Spanish/English dictionary to try to decide for myself what some reasonable sense of these two stanzas might be in English. Admittedly, the Spanish is either quite figurative or idiomatic. Some of what I complain of above is pretty literally what's written. Still, when a translator is willing to render gibberish rather than trying to provide lines with reasonable meaning, I'm just never going to be able to trust what I'm reading. Certainly, you can go too far in the other direction as well, but really, tree limbs mixing their tails? Sorry, Mr. Walsh lost me and any recommendation I might have given this volume in these first two stanzas.

It's just not that hard to see that colas, the word he translates as "tails" also can mean a train, like on a dress, and that dry stitches in the seams of a tree might "combine" (another meaning for the word he translates as mixing) the limbs of the trees into such a thing. Thus, perhaps: "Existing like the sapless stitches in the seams of trees,/ silent, surrounding, so that/ all the limbs combine in a train."/.

The pulley (I think) is "mad within itself, those wheels of its motors, anyway." And "the crossed bells crossing" at the "crest of the roads", might be rendered: "the criss-crossed overlapping sound of bells". Admittedly, "seas peopling themselves,/ in the submerged slowness, in the shaplessness," was a puzzler. I settled on "...seas becoming occupied/ by submerged slowness, by formlessness,". If this is Greg Nobody saying what he thinks the Nobel Prize winning poet said, sure it is, and maybe it's off base, but at least for me, a questionable or even wrong meaning was preferable to none.

Neruda was a great poet. As a starter though, I'd send the non Spanish speaker someplace other than this volume, despite, I'm sure, that recommendation will be a minority view.