Pablo Picasso – illustratör

Brilliant English translation of beloved poems by Pablo Neruda, who is the subject of the film Neruda starring Gael García Bernal and directed by Pablo Larraín 

A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, with French flaps

First published in 1924, Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada remains among Pablo Neruda’s most popular work. Daringly metaphorical and sensuous, this collection juxtaposes youthful passion with the desolation of grief. Drawn from the poet’s most intimate and personal associations, the poems combine eroticism and the natural world with the influence of expressionism and the genius of a master poet. This edition features the newly corrected original Spanish text, with masterly English translations by award-winning poet W. S. Merwin on facing pages.

   •  Includes twelve sketches by Pablo Picasso    •  New introduction by Cristina García For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Jean Tardieu’s poetry has an almost child-like simplicity, and in France his work is studied both in universities and in primary schools. Yet while he is a household name in France and has been translated into most European languages, his poetry remains little known in the English-speaking world, despite its immediacy and sense of fun.Tardieu is a writer of enormous range, and his poetry addresses problems of experience and language central to modern literature, bringing lively wit and humour to bear upon an anguished interrogation of the world. His father was a successful painter and his mother an accomplished musician, and his fascination with the art of the writer on the one hand, and paintings and music on the other, is another constant presence in his work.Tardieu was born in 1903, and this selection spans 80 years of his writing. In his early years the dif?culties of writing lyric poetry in a schizophrenic age led him to a multiplication of poetic voices, and so to working for the stage, and he was writing what was subsequently dubbed Theatre of the Absurd before Beckett’s and Ionesco’s plays had ever been performed in public. He died in 1995.This selection includes the sequence Space and the Flute (1958), which Tardieu wrote for drawings by his friend Pablo Picasso. Their poems and drawings are reproduced together in this edition.