Ode to Olive Oil by Pablo Neruda

We wanted to share with you this Ode to Olive Oil by Pablo Neruda, one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century. The greatest poet of the twentieth century in any language, as Gabriel García Márquez once said. In the journal «Caballo Verde», Pablo Neruda wrote: «So let the poetry we seek be… An impure poetry, like a suit of clothes, like a body with stains of nourishment and shameful attitudes, with wrinkles, observations, dreams, wakefulness, prophecy, declarations of love and hate, beasts shaken, idylls, political beliefs, negations, affirmations, taxes.» This beautiful poem Oda al Aceite is part of Nuevas odas elementales, published in 1956. The direct reason Neruda began writing «Las Odas» was a proposal from Miguel Otero Silva, editor of the Caracas newspaper «El Nacional», for a weekly poetry column. He agreed, on the condition that the contributions would not appear in the literary supplement, but on the pages reserved for chronicles: «In this way I managed to publish a long story of this era, of its things, of trades, of people, of fruits, of flowers, of life, of my position, of struggle — in short, of everything I could once again encompass in a vast, cyclical impulse within my work.» Without further ado, here are these lines, rich in history and beauty:

Ode to Olive Oil

Near the murmuring grain, the waves of wind through the oats,

the olive tree

with its silvery volume, stern in its lineage, in its twisted earthen heart; the graceful olives polished by the fingers that shaped the dove and the sea snail: green, innumerable, purest nipples of nature, and there in the dry olive groves where nothing but blue sky and cicadas, and hard earth exist, there the wonder, the perfect capsule of the olive filling the foliage with its constellations: and then the vessels, the miracle, the oil.

I love the homelands of oil, the olive groves of Chacabuco, in Chile, in the mornings the platinum forest plumes against the wrinkled mountain ranges, in Anacapri, above, over the Tyrrhenian light, the despair of the olive trees, on the map of Europe, Spain, black basket of olives dusted with orange blossoms like a sea breeze.

Oil, hidden and supreme soul of the pot, pedestal of partridges, celestial key to mayonnaise, smooth and delicious over the lettuces and otherworldly in the inferno of the archbishops' silversides. Oil, in our voice, in our chorus, with intimate and powerful softness you sing; you are the Castilian tongue: there are syllables of oil, there are words useful and fragrant like your aromatic substance. Not only wine sings, oil sings too, it lives within us with its ripe light and among the gifts of the earth I set apart, oil, your inexhaustible peace, your green essence, your brimming treasure that flows down from the springs of the olive tree.

Did you enjoy it? Don't forget to leave a comment and share! ;) Thank you for reading!