Pablo Neruda, Oda al mar
Pablo Neruda’s Ode to the Sea, written in 1954, is not a hymn praising the beauty and grandeur of the sea. It is written from the point of view of a Chilean, whose country is especially vulnerable to the elemental force of the Pacific and also depends upon it:
we’re the tiny little / fishermen, / the men on shore, / we’re cold and hungry, / you are the enemy, / don’t hit so hard, / don’t roar like that, From today’s perspective, the poem’s threat – powerless in the 1950s – does not seem so far-fetched: and then / we’ll enter you, / we’ll cut the waves / with a fiery knife, / on an electric horse / we’ll leap over the foam, / singing / we’ll sink down until we touch the bottom / of your entrails, When we consider the current state of the world’s oceans, the prediction made in
Ode to the Sea seems to have become a reality:
men will pass by / spitting on your skin, / yanking out your fruit clusters, building you harnesses, / mounting and taming you, / controlling your soul. Neruda’s poem was printed in the original Spanish, along with the English translation by George D. Schade and the German translation by Erich Arendt, on photographs showing plastic waste in the ocean. The photos were edited on a computer and printed digitally. Text is hand-set and letterpress. In each copy of the edition the photographs appear in a different order. So each book has its own combination of photographs and printed text, in terms of the order of the photographs, no two copies are the same.
Paper board with silver embossed front title, 21.7/16 cm, 80 pages,
35 numbered and signed copies as well as 5 copies with Roman numerals. Flörsheim 2020.