Happy Birthday, Pablo Neruda

   Pablo Neruda is one of my favorite poets. We can never forget 20 love poems and a song of despair. Actually, we might have studied at school, mainly, the poem number 20:

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry

and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.

I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.

How could one not love her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.

And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.

The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.

My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer

My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.

We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.

Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms

my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer

and these the last verses that I write for her.

   Pablo Neruda had several houses. One of them is located in Valparaiso, Chile. It is called La Sebastiana and I immediately fell in love with that building when I met it, with its boat shape, its view to the sea from a high point on the hills, the interior decoration, the stories in the air. For example, inside the house there are two portraits faced, of a woman and a man, and Pablo Neruda used to play with it, imagining they were secret lovers. Sadly, you weren't supposed to take pictures there.

   Luckily, Google has its resources

Special thanks to: blogdepasopor.blogspot.com

Special thanks to: livecolorful.com

Special thanks to: enviajes.cl

- Have you ever read to Pablo Neruda?

- Don't you think he is a genius?

See you soon! And Happy Birthday, Pablo Neruda! 

Poems on the Underground

   Hi everyone! Today it will be a short post because I slept a huge siesta. It's like I still had jet-lagged.

   I wanted to show you a jewel -everything is a jewel to me- I found when I went to take the underground two weekends before I left.

   Poems on the Underground is a project promoted by Transport for London, Arts Council England y The British Council, active since 1986; it started with the idea of the writer from The United States, Judith Chernaik, with the aim of taking the poetry to an audience even wider, and make the journey nicer and more inspiring for them.

   Do you know similar projects in another place to encourage art? I know, for example, in Romania people travel for free in buses if they do it reading.

   That is all for now. Take care and thank you for being here!

A beautiful jewel in Waterloo

   Hi again everyone. I'm in London now, not for a lot of time actually, but currently here for now. And as I am here, I wanted to talk about a little secret. The daily London book fair, or The Southbank Centre Book Market.

   It was hard at the beginning to find it, because when I looked it up on Google Maps, it appears in another place, so when I got off the bridge, I turned left. What a mistake! I walked a lot more and worse, I was completely starving.

It's true I can be disoriented sometimes.

   But in the end, after a lot of perseverance, I finally found it under the Waterloo bridge. Literally, under the bridge, next to the river Thames. 

   There, there are second hand books, quite cheap really. Some of them are great sagas and bestsellers, with a cost of two or three pounds.

   However, you can find antiques books as well, although the price could be a bit higher, not as higher as in other bookshops, though.

   Of course, there is also a place for rare books, not to say bizarre, that only could appear here.

   So, you already know now. If you ever come here, and you love books, you have to walk around this book market under the Waterloo bridge.

   Anyway, my favorite secret is another bookshop I have found, but I will talk about this one in another post, beside the other beautiful London bookshops.

Questionsss.
- Do you know any other book fair that it's hidden, waiting to be discovered?

Take care, and see you next time! Thank you for being here! :)

Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts - L'Encyclopédie

Hi everyone! I’m starting this blog, which had, and has, his partner in Spanish. And to start, let's do it with the basis of everything. 

Every writer, and other people linked to the world of letters, have drawn upon an encyclopaedia some time, even if it only has been at school to make an essay. Either through its online or physical use, these books usually delivered in several volumes don’t lose validity, because they are the first source which we must draw on.

And as this blog is related mainly to Literature, I cannot stop mentioning this one, the first French encyclopaedia, edited between 1751 and 1772 by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alambert, after the editorial success it had in England the Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, or Cyclopaedia, in 1728.

Cover of the Encyclopaedia

Some authors, whose articles can be found in the Encyclopaedia, are, among others, Montesquieu; Quesnay; Jean Jacques Rousseau -who wrote about music and political theory-; Turgot; y Voltaire -with essays about history, literature, philosophy and theology-.

One of the relevant articles, which talks about the American continent is, precisely, America:

“The history of the world doesn’t offer another event so singular, at the look of philosophers, than the discovery of the new continent, which, with the seas that surround it, form a whole hemisphere of our planet (…)”

Charles-Nicolas Cochin

 

Questionsss :)

- Have you ever used an encyclopaedia?

- Do you still use it?

Thank you for being here!

See you later! :)