Canto General: Song of the Americas

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Translated by Mariela Griffor. Pablo Neruda's epic poem CANTO GENERAL is a prodigious work that scrolls out like the chronicle of a journey through the Americas. In his most audacious and ambitious achievement, Neruda depicts history as a vast, continuous struggle against oppression. Constructed in fifteen parts, and made up of more than fifteen thousand lines, CANTO GENERAL unfolds in successive epochs, celebrating the flora and fauna and geology of Neruda's homeland and recounting episodes in the lives of explorers and conquistadors, emperors and dictators, revolutionaries and everyday laborers. Here is CANTO GENERAL seen afresh, the breathtaking beauty of Neruda's poetry fully revealed in English, with a new translation for the twenty-first century.

[Mariela Griffor's] introduction alone offers interesting reading. But in the text itself, the translator also makes Neruda's verses sing for the reader...Consider the beauty of the single line in the same opening section: 'All is silence made of water and wind' (21). Though beautiful in Neruda's Todo es silencio de agua y viento, the alliteration in English makes it even more wonderful...Griffor serves up her reader dozens and dozens of such gorgeous lines, stanzas, and poems 'transcreated' from Neruda and her work is truly worth serious attention from the reader.--Don Cellini