Pablo Neruda and translation's losses

It seems fair enough that some licence is granted when rendering poems in a different language, but dropping entire cantos is surely taking things too far

Perhaps it’s down to his wonderfully refreshing manifesto for “an impure poetry” or maybe (whisper it not) it’s due to the seduction of David Soul, whose one-man show featured gloriously on the books podcast, but I’ve become more than usually obsessed with Chile’s Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda. What’s not to love about a poet who wrote odes to artichokes and laundry and argued for “a poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behaviour, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts, affirmations and taxes.”

So it was great to learn that a tiny US press is to publish an English translation of 20 lost poems that were discovered last year. Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda will be out from Copper Canyon Press in April 2016 in a translation by Forrest Gander.

Related: David Soul performs Pablo Neruda – books podcast