THERE is something preposterous about picking individual poems or even collections out of this boundlessness," the Swedish Academy's secretary said last week of Pablo Neruda's work. It is "like bailing a 50,000-tonner with a teaspoon." Herewith a teaspoonful:
. . . look at me from the depths of the earth, tiller of fields, weaver, reticent shepherd . . . jeweler with crushed fingers . . . say to me: here I was scourged because a gem was dull or because the earth failed to give up in time its tithe of corn or stone. Point out to me the rock on...
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