Winter Garden

Winter Garden

In this authorized translation, the late Nobel Laureate faces his own imminent death and the fall of his country’s socialist government. Neruda sees humanity struggling against the forces of darkness and solitude, and, at the end of a long and prolific career, he embraces solitude as a positive force and Nature as the source of regeneration. Between the solitude and the public voice, between political realities and personal experience, between the approach of winter and the sea’s constant rebirth, he addresses his own sense of responsibility in a remarkably unified and lyrical suite of poems. William O’Daly translates these poems into English versions with great sensitivity for both the tone and the definition of the original Spanish which is presented en face.

Citing this bilingual edition as a Book of the Year, The Bloomsbury Review wrote that Winter Garden was one of the “most valuable Neruda books we have today.”

“Elegantly timeless and fresh…. O’Daly has made a noble effort to retain both the literal sense of the poet’s words and his awe-inspiring tone.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Here, as in much of Neruda’s poetry, the personal and the pokitical collide, driven by his overriding concern: how does one person—a writer—change the world? His poems always plumb the unfathomable ambiguities of life, surfacing, finally, with a kind of balanced appreciation for the knowable as well as the mysterious.”
— Library Journal