Pablo Neruda< /a>, one of the most important writers of the 20th century. The greatest poet of the 20th century in any language, as Gabriel García Márquez said. In the magazine «Caballo Verde», Pablo Neruda says: «Even if the poetry we are looking for… An impure poetry like a suit, like a body with nutrition stains and shameful attitudes, with wrinkles, observations, dreams, wakefulness, prophecy , declarations of love and hate, shaken beast, idylls, political beliefs, denials, affirmations, taxes.»
Cover “New elemental odes “ where “Ode to Oil” is included
This beautiful poem Ode to Oil belongs to New elementary odes, from 1956. The direct cause for which he began to write “Las Odas” was the proposal of Miguel Otero Silva, director of the Caracas newspaper “El Nacional” for a weekly poetry collaboration. He accepted on the condition that this collaboration not form part of the literary supplement, but that it be placed on the pages dedicated to chronicles:
«Thus I managed to publish a long history of this time, of its things, of the trades, of the people, of the fruits, of the flowers, of life, of my position, of the struggle, in short, of everything that I could encompass my creation again in a vast cyclical impulse.
Without further delay, he leaves you with these lines full of history and beauty:
Ode to Oil
Near the rustling
grain, the waves
of the wind in the oats,
the olive
of silvery volume,
severe in its lineage,
in its twisted
earthly heart;
the olives
polished
by the fingers
that made
the dove
and the sea
snail: green,
innumerable,
purest
nipples
of nature,
and therein
the dry
olive groves where
only
blue sky with cicadas,
and hard earth
exist,
there
the prodigy,
the perfect
capsule
of the olive
filling
the foliage with its constellations:
later
the pots,
the miracle,
the oil.
I love
the homelands of olive oil,
the olive groves of Chacabuco
, in Chile,
in the mornings
the platinum forest
plumes
against the wrinkled
mountain ranges
in Anacapri, above,
above the tyrannical light,
the despair of the olive trees,
on the map of Europe,
Spain, like a marine gust.
Olive Oil,
hidden and supreme
condition of the pot,
pedestal of partridges,
celestial key of mayonnaise,
soft and tasty
on lettuces
and supernatural in the hell
of the archbishop’s silversides.
Olive Oil, in our voice, in
our chorus,
with
intimate
powerful softness
you sing;
you are Castilian language:
there are syllables of oil,
there are useful
and fragrant words
like your fragrant matter.
Not only wine sings,
oil also sings,
it lives in us with its ripe light
and among the goods of the earth
I set aside,
oil,
your inexhaustible peace, your green essence,
your full treasure
that descends
from
the springs of the olive tree.
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