Poets Translate Poets: A Hudson Review Anthology

Pablo Neruda

382 Spanish Pablo Neruda (1904–73) Ode to My Socks Maru Mori brought me a pair of socks that she knitted with her own hands of a shepherdess, two soft socks you’d say they were rabbits. In them I stuck my feet as in two jewel cases woven with threads of twilight and lamb skins. Violent socks, my feet were two fish made of wool, two long sharks of ultramarine blue shot with a tress of gold two gigantic blackbirds, two cannons: my feet were honored in this manner by Pablo Neruda 383  these celestial socks. They were so beautiful that for the first time my feet seemed to me unacceptable like two decrepit firemen, firemen unworthy of that embroidered fire, those luminous socks. Nevertheless I resisted the acute temptation to keep them as schoolboys keep fireflies, or the erudite collect sacred documents, I resisted the furious impulse to put them in a cage of gold and to feed them every day bird seed 384 Spanish and the pulp of rosey melon. Like discoverers who in the forest yield the very rare green deer to the spit and with regret eat it, I stretched out my feet and pulled over them the beautiful socks and then my shoes. And this is the moral of my ode: twice beautiful is beauty and what is good is twice good when it is two socks made of wool in winter. William Carlos Williams, 2011 ...