{"id":11931,"date":"2025-11-19T19:30:03","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T23:30:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/pablo-nerudas-staggering-unbreakup-poem-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-11-19T19:30:03","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T23:30:03","slug":"pablo-nerudas-staggering-unbreakup-poem-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/pablo-nerudas-staggering-unbreakup-poem-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Pablo Neruda\u2019s Staggering (Un)breakup Poem \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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\"If<\/a><\/p>\n

Love is a fire that takes two to keep burning, but one to extinguish \u2014 if the hearth of either heart is too damp with doubt, both wake up one day to find their hands cupping ashes. And yet when two people have loved each other and parted, the fire is forever embering between them, however great the distance in space, in time, in thought. The wind of a single word and the gust of the smallest gesture can rekindle it in a flash, often to the surprise of both. All true love is a smoking spell against forgetting. <\/p>\n

That is the aspect of love I feel burning through \u201cIf You Forget Me\u201d by Pablo Neruda<\/a> (July 12, 1904\u2013September 23, 1973) \u2014 a breakup poem and a poem of unbreaking, one that begins as an ode, twists into an ultimatum, and finally reveals itself to be a lamentation, a hymn of longing, a bittersweet acknowledgement that once a person has entered another\u2019s heart, they always have a place in it, but also a recognition of how they ought to show up in order to honor that place. <\/p>\n

That, at least, is how I receive this poem, at this particular point in my life \u2014 for, as the teenage Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother<\/a>, \u201cOnce a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader.\u201d It is read here by two dear friends a generation apart \u2014 Karen Maldonado<\/a> in Spanish and Rose Hanzlik<\/a> in English, as translated by Donald Devenish Walsh in the bilingual pocket-sized collection of immensities Love Poems<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>). It is a poem that warrants as accompaniment nothing less than Bach\u2019s transcendent Cello Suite No. 1<\/em>, performed by none other than the great Spanish cellist Pablo Casals<\/a>.<\/p>\n