Translating Neruda: Femininity and Sensuality ... - Triceratops Home

The Way Into Wood
Nathaniel Tarn, 1970
By the skin of my reason, with my fingers,
with slow waters indolently swamped,
I fall to the imperium of the forget-me-nots,
an unforgiving air of mournfuless,
a decayed, forgotten hall
and a cluster of bitter clovers.
I fall into the shadows, to the core
of shattered things,
and I see spiders, and pasture coppices
of secret, inconclusive timbers,
pacing through soaked, uprooted fibres
at the living heart of matter and silence.
Oh lovely matter, dry-winged rose,
as I drown I climb your petals,
my feet are burning with fatigue,
I kneel down in your hard cathedral
thrashing my lips with an angel.
It is because I am myself faced with your
colour of world,
with your pale dead shoulders,
your gathered hearts,
your silent multitude.
It is I dying under your wave of odours
wrapped in autumn and resistance:
about to take a funeral journey
along the ridges of yellow scars:
I with my lamentations that have no genesis,
hungry, sleepless, alone,
threading darkened corridors,
arriving at your mysterious essence.
I see the course of your petrified currents,
the growth of frozen, interrupted hands,
I hear your oceanic vegetations
rustling by night,
enraged, intractable,
and I feel the leaves dying to the very core,
fusing their green materials
with your abandoned immobility.
Mueller 48
Pores, veins, rings of sweetness,
weight, silent temperature,
arrows struck into your fallen soul,
beings asleep in your thick mouth,
shreds of sweet pulp devoured entirely,
ashes full of extinguished souls,
gather to me, to my limitless dream,
fall into my bed where the night falls
and fall without an end like broken water,
clasp me to your life, to your death,
to your submissive materials,
to your dead, neutralized doves,
and let us make fire, and silence, and sound,
and let us burn, and be hushed among bells.