Translation: “Enigma con una flor”

A new take on Pablo Neruda’s poem

Pablo Neruda, between book covers cited in the story. Composite by the author. Source: photo Wikipedia (Public Domain); Publisher’s book covers.

Why I decided to translate this poem: I had been reading Isabel Allende’s latest book, “A Long Petal of the Sea,” a historical novel whose title is taken from Neruda’s simile for Chile. Neruda is a key character in the book and each of the book’s chapters has an epigraph with lines from his poems. During a break from the book, I grabbed from my bookshelf a collection of Neruda’s poems, an old paperback that, from the inscription, had been a birthday gift in 1982. (Thanks, MM.)

The first poem in those yellowing pages was Enigma con una flor, which extended the flower motif from Allende’s title, but underwhelmed in translation. Rather than reading on, I felt inspired to come up with my own translation, mostly to see if my Spanish was good enough.

There are different translations on the internet. All were valuable for my interpretation. In my version, I wanted to stay true to the line order of the original, which some translations weren’t, and I wanted to use a tense that I thought was more appropriate. There’s also a sense of riddle in my reading of the original, which I wanted to capture.

First, the original poem in Spanish, then my translation.

ENIGMA CON UNA FLOR
- Pablo Neruda

Una victoria. Es tarde, no sabías.
Llegó como azucena a mi albedrío
el blanco talle que traspasa
la eternidad inmóvil de la tierra,
empujando una débil forma clara
hasta horadar la arcilla
con rayo blanco o espolón de leche.
Muda, compacta oscuridad del suelo
en cuyo precipicio
avanza la flor clara
hasta que el pabellón de su blancura
derrota el fondo indigno de la noche
y de la claridad en movimiento
se derraman atónitas semillas.

Original poem from New Poems (1968–1970) by Pablo Neruda, Grove Press (1972).

My translation:

ENIGMA WITH A FLOWER
- Pablo Neruda (trans. Mauricio Matiz)

A victory. It’s late, you didn’t know.
It arrived like a lily to my desires
a white stalk that breaches
the soil’s static eternity,
pushing a clear weak form
even boring through clay
with a beam of light or a beak of milk.
Silent, it subdues the ground’s murk
in whose abyss
the white flower rises
until the canopy of its whiteness
overcomes the night’s contempt
and from truth in motion
awestruck seeds are shed.

The screenshot below is a side-by-side view with the original and my translation. (For screens larger than a phone.) Columns are not permitted on Medium.

Original and translation: A work-around to display columns. Source: graphic by author.

The most common translation on the internet is available at www.best-poems.net. The translation from my paperback is by Ben Belitt:

ENIGMA WITH A FLOWER
- Pablo Neruda (trans. Ben Belitt)

Victory. It is later than you knew.
The white stalk that transfixes
earth’s unmoving eternity
rose to my need like a lily,
pushing a frail, clear form
till it struck through the clay
in a breakwater of milk, a white scintillation.
In the dark of the soil, mute and compact,
in the precipice,
the clear flower advanced
till whiteness was all, a pavilion
breaking night’s abject abysses,
and in the moved incandescence
the seeds spilled over, amazed.

(New Poems (1968–1970) by Pablo Neruda, Grove Press (1972))

I enjoyed the process of comparing the various translations, and then making word choices. I hope the curious reader, likewise, compares these versions. Of course, before I get ahead of myself, I’ve completed just one translation of the approximately seventy other poems in the paperback collection translated by Mr. Belitt.

For my posts on Medium, see medium.com/matiz