Book record
Venture of the infinite man
Pablo Neruda
Translated from Spanish by Jessica Powell
Pablo Neruda's Venture of the Infinite Man, translated by Jessica Powell, gives English-language readers access to one of Neruda's early avant-garde works. The title is grand, almost recklessly so, and that grandeur belongs to a young poet testing the size of his own voice against infinity, solitude, desire, and metaphysical drift. Powell's translation helps position the book beyond the familiar Neruda of love poems and odes, showing a more experimental, searching, and unstable phase. I like reading early Neruda because one can feel the future magnitude forming without yet hardening into the public figure. Venture of the Infinite Man is ambitious in the old poetic sense: a soul throwing itself against scale. It is a book of youth, abstraction, and longing, where the infinite is less a concept than a pressure the poem cannot stop touching.
- Published
- 2017
- Publisher
- City Lights
- Language
- Spanish
- Country
- Chile
- ISBN
- 9780872867192