All the Odes

A Bilingual Edition. Edited by Ilan Stavans. Purple paper boards with raised silver lettering to spine. In dust jacket designed by Elena Giavaldi. *** Mint copy of this stunning first printing of Neruda’s Odes. Printed in two columns, with the Spanish on the left and the English translation on the right, in different fonts and shades. Several translators, including Paul Muldoon, William Carlos Williams and Ilan Stavans who edited the collection. *** Pablo Neruda wrote a total of 225 odes. As a practitioner of verso libre, the ode was unquestionably the closest to his heart. He democratized the ode by using it to celebrate the mundane. His topics are a veritable catalogue of the quotidian: a chair, an onion, a pair of shoes, a train station, the dictionary, a village theater, a lover’s hands.In other words, he championed the significance of insignificance. If forced to explain how they work, I would say that Neruda’s odes are like a beatnik’s stream of consciousness, which explains the ardent devotion he constantly awakens among young people. (From the introduction.)