Naomi Bernstein
on translating Pablo Neruda
This poem is about a man trying to reach a distant woman through words. This subject is reflective of Neruda’s work and the work of all poets: he is engaged in a constant practice of reaching to make contact. It is a never-ending process, an infinite necklace. In my translation, I sought to maintain the languid, sleepy mood that I feel when I read the poem in Spanish. When translating to English from Spanish, however, there will always be times when the words sound rougher than they do in their original romance language. When I found myself struggling with that, I tried to mold the roughness to be a part of the process that the poem is meditating on, part of the reaching and the growing, part of the infinite necklace.
about the author
Born in Chile in 1904, Pablo Neruda was perhaps one of the Spanish language’s most well-known poets. Though he often dealt with the themes of love and longing, he also penned politically inflected works and served in high-level positions for the communist party of Chile. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.
about the translator
Naomi Bernstein graduated from Penn with a degree in English and creative writing. She now lives in California with her parents where the average age of her friends is fifty-three and she spends her days brainstorming how she can translate poetry for a living.
photo by Yehudith Dashevsky
