Essentials # 0: One Hundred Love Sonnets

«FOR MATILDE URRUTIA

My beloved lady, I suffered a lot writing these sonnets for you and they hurt me a lot and cost me a lot, but the joy of offering them to you is greater than a meadow. When proposing well, he knew that alongside each one, out of elective interest and elegance, poets of all times arranged rhymes that sounded like cutlery, crystal or cannon fire. I, with great humility, made these wooden sonnets, I gave them the sound of this opaque and pure substance and this is how they should reach your ears. You and I walking through forests and sandbanks, through lost lakes, through gray latitudes, we collect fragments of pure wood, wood subjected to the influence of water and time. From such smooth traces I built with axe, knife, penknife, these carpentry works of love and built little houses of fourteen boards so that your eyes that I adore and sing can live in them. This is how I established my reasons for love that I give you in this century: wooden sonnets that only emerged because you gave them life.

October 1959».

There have been requests to the Culture department's editorial team about greater literary content in our publications... Don't you want broth? Well, have two cups!

Finding myself faced with the first words to begin this section of recommendations, I thought that a voice with more authority than myself would better handle this weight. In fact, I can't think of anything or anyone better for this situation; is, neither more nor less, the prologue of One hundred love sonnets by Pablo Neruda. Personally, I think this prose that accompanies hundreds of sublime poems is more than enough reason to say that this book is not only recommended, but necessary. However, I will continue in an attempt to make my reasons more convincing than the genuine words you have just read, written by the author of the book I intend to recommend to you: somewhat swampy ground.

It can be said that Matilde Urrutia was the recipient of the greatest love letter ever written by anyone: a hundred sonnets that make up one of the most beautiful collections of poems ever seen, which in a certain way mark the direction of modern poetry. The poet's passionate ferocity grows with each of his poems, advancing from day (through noon and afternoon) to night ─the four parts into which the book is divided─, trying to explain what for everyone is inexplicable. One hundred misnamed sonnets, one hundred wooden sonnets, one hundred love loggers and one hundred little houses with fourteen tables are the beautiful way in which the author manages to reach the highest levels of romanticism written in verse; It does not present us with a delicate or pedantic love, but a raw, eternal and solid love, rooted in the deepest feeling that arises from the poet.

And it is true that the organic nature of this collection of poems is undeniably brilliant, but the rhythm is possibly in the same proportion. The author does away with the continuous traditional Alexandrian meter and the classic rhythmic schemes of the sonnet to capture, in a terribly melodic poetry, the vehement feeling that fills each of the pages. The sound of wood, that pure and opaque substance, is that of a brutal musicality with which each verse is endowed, thus creating a century that continues to resonate like cutlery, crystals and cannon shots in subsequent generations.

In each line he captures the ideas he seeks to express through a tremendously expressive language and an intense content that makes each sonnet imply its re-reading and, consequently, its re-reading. In addition to being a hundred reasons and traces of love, there are a hundred merits for which Neruda is, without a doubt, the Nobel Prize for Literature and one of the greatest writers in history.

I could continue writing with the impression that nothing equals the prologue that opens the entry or with the aim of verbalizing the tingling I felt when reading this wonderful book, but, to be honest, I can't come up with anything more sincere to tell you. , of my deepest feeling, that you share with me the sensations that your reading awakens and so that it may be so: please, read it.

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