Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Pablo Neruda first published Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada in 1924, when he was nineteen years old and living in Santiago, Chile. The collection contains twenty love poems followed by a single closing poem of loss. It became one of the most widely read poetry books in the Spanish language and has remained in print for over a century.

The poems draw on Neruda's early personal experiences and set desire against landscapes of sea, wind, and sky. Physical longing and the natural world run through the sequence together, with bold metaphors linking the body to earth and weather. The tone shifts across the collection, moving from intense closeness to solitude and grief. Neruda's language is direct but layered, mixing plainspoken feeling with surreal or expressionist imagery that was unusual in Latin American poetry at the time.

This English-language edition pairs the original Spanish text with translations by the American poet W. S. Merwin, presented on facing pages. Merwin, himself a recognized poet and translator, worked to carry the rhythm and concreteness of Neruda's lines into English while preserving the spare emotional force of the originals.