{"id":11845,"date":"2025-11-05T19:16:54","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T23:16:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/pablo-nerudas-love-letter-to-language-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-11-05T19:16:54","modified_gmt":"2025-11-05T23:16:54","slug":"pablo-nerudas-love-letter-to-language-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/pablo-nerudas-love-letter-to-language-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Pablo Neruda\u2019s Love Letter to Language \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

\n

\"Words:<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWords are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer\u2026 feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it,\u201d Ursula K. Le Guin wrote<\/a>. Words are the invisible hands with which we touch each other, feel the shape of the world, hold our own experience. We live in language \u2014 it is our interior narrative that stitches the events of our lives into a story of self<\/a>. We love in language \u2014 it is the lever for every deep and valuable relationship, which Adrienne Rich knew to be \u201ca process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.\u201d<\/a> When two people meet in a third language, parts of each always remain unmet by the other. When two people meet in the same language, they must learn to mean the same things by the same words in order to meet in truth. And so we must love language in order to love each other well, in order to love our own lives. <\/p>\n

I know of no greater love letter to language, to its simple pleasures and its infinite complexities, than the one Pablo Neruda<\/a> (July 12, 1904\u2013September 23, 1973) tucks into his posthumously published Memoirs<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) under the heading \u201cWords\u201d \u2014 a stream-of-consciousness prose poem nested between chapters about his changing life in Chile and his eventual choice to leave Santiago, \u201ca captive city between walls of snow,\u201d half a lifetime before he was awarded the Nobel Prize<\/a> for \u201ca poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent\u2019s destiny and dreams.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Julie Paschkis from Pablo Neruda: Poet of the People<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A generation after Virginia Woolf rasped in the only surviving recording of her voice<\/a> that \u201cwords belong to each other,\u201d Neruda writes:<\/p>\n

\n

\u2026 You can say anything you want, yessir, but it\u2019s the words that sing, they soar and descend\u00a0\u2026 I bow to them\u00a0\u2026 I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down\u00a0\u2026 I love words so much\u00a0\u2026 The unexpected ones\u00a0\u2026 The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop\u00a0\u2026 Vowels I love\u00a0\u2026 They glitter like colored stones, they leap like silver fish, they are foam, thread, metal, dew\u00a0\u2026 I run after certain words\u00a0\u2026 They are so beautiful that I want to fit them all into my poem\u00a0\u2026 I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives\u00a0\u2026 And then I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them, I let them go\u00a0\u2026 I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves\u00a0\u2026 Everything exists in the word\u00a0\u2026 An idea goes through a complete change because one word shifted its place, or because another settled down like a spoiled little thing inside a phrase that was not expecting her but obeys her\u00a0\u2026 They have shadow, transparence, weight, feathers, hair, and everything they gathered from so much rolling down the river, from so much wandering from country to country, from being roots so long\u00a0\u2026 They are very ancient and very new\u00a0\u2026 They live in the bier, hidden away, and in the budding flower.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Julie Paschkis from The Wordy Book<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Nested into Neruda\u2019s passionate ode to the brightness of language is also a reminder of the darknesses out of which its light arose:<\/p>\n

\n

What a great language I have, it\u2019s a fine language we inherited from the fierce conquistadors\u00a0\u2026 They strode over the giant cordilleras, over the rugged Americas, hunting for potatoes, sausages, beans, black tobacco, gold, corn, fried eggs, with a voracious appetite not found in the world since then\u00a0\u2026 They swallowed up everything, religions, pyramids, tribes, idolatries just like the ones they brought along in their huge sacks\u00a0\u2026 Wherever they went, they razed the land\u00a0\u2026 But words fell like pebbles out of the boots of the barbarians, out of their beards, their helmets, their horseshoes, luminous words that were left glittering here\u00a0\u2026 our language. We came up losers\u00a0\u2026 We came up winners\u00a0\u2026 They carried off the gold and left us the gold\u00a0\u2026 They carried everything off and left us everything\u00a0\u2026 They left us the words.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Art by Paloma Valdivia for Pablo Neruda\u2019s Book of Questions<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We forget this, but it is a truth both uncomfortable and liberating \u2014 that there is no wasted experience, that the heartbreaks, the disasters, the plunderings of trust and territory all leave the seeds of something new in their wake. Our very world was born by brutality, forged of the debris that first swarmed the Sun four and a half billion years ago before cohering into rocky bodies that went on to pulverize one another in a gauntlet of violent collisions that sculpted the Earth and the Moon. Words too can do that \u2014 universes of perspective colliding in order to shape a habitable truth, to shape the stories we tell ourselves in order to live, the stories we tell each other and call love.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWords are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer\u2026 feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it,\u201d Ursula […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11846,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11845\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}