Pablo Neruda / Taste

Solitudine by Vicenso Giannattasio

TASTE

by Pablo Neruda
BIOGRAPHY

Translated from Spanish by Tayne Tuason

Pablo Neruda / Sabor

Of false astrology, of somewhat mournful customs, 

discharged into the endless and always carried to the side,
I have preserved a tendency, a lonely taste.

Of conversations spent as used wood,
with humility of chairs, with words occupied
in serving like slaves of secondary will,
having that consistency of the milk, of the dead weeks,
of the air chained around the cities.

Who can boast of more solid patience?
The sanity wraps me of compact skin
of a color reunited as a snake
my creatures are born of a long rejection:
ay, with a single alcohol I can dismiss this day
that I have chosen, equal among the terrestrial days.I live filling of a substance of mutual color, silent

as an old mother, a fixed patience
as a shadow of church or repose of bones.
I go filling of those waters arranged profoundly,
prepared, falling asleep in a sad thoughtfulness.

Inside of my guitar there a old air,
dry and resonant, staying, motionless,
as a faithful nutrition, as smoke:
an element at rest, a oil living:
a bird of severity lives in my head:
a constant angel lives in my sword.

Pablo Neruda
Residencia on Earth (1925-1931) 

Residence I, Parte I