Ode to Olive Oil by Pablo Neruda

We want to share with you this Ode to Olive Oil by Pablo Neruda, one of the most important literary figures of the 20th century. The greatest poet of the 20th century in any language, as Gabriel García Márquez once said. In the journal «Caballo Verde», Pablo Neruda wrote: «Let this be the poetry we seek… An impure poetry, like a suit of clothes, like a body with stains of nourishment and shameful postures, with wrinkles, observations, dreams, wakefulness, prophecy, declarations of love and hatred, shaken beasts, idylls, political beliefs, denials, affirmations, taxes.» This beautiful poem Ode to Olive Oil belongs to 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 accepted on the condition that it not appear in the literary supplement, but rather on the pages dedicated to chronicles: «In this way I managed to publish a long history of this time, its things, its trades, its people, its fruits, its flowers, life itself, my position, the struggle — in short, everything I could gather anew in a vast cyclical impulse of creation». Without further delay, here are these lines filled with history and beauty:

Ode to Olive Oil

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

the olive tree

of silvered mass, severe in its lineage, in its twisted earthly heart; the graceful olives polished by the fingers that fashioned the dove and the sea snail: green, countless, the purest nipples of nature, and there in the dry olive groves where only blue sky with 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 olive oil, the olive groves of Chacabuco, in Chile, in the mornings the platinum forest feathers against the wrinkled mountain ranges, in Anacapri, high up, above the Tyrrhenian light, the despair of the olive trees, and on the map of Europe, Spain, dark basket of olives dusted with orange blossom like a sea gust.

Olive oil, hidden and supreme soul of the pot, pedestal of partridges, celestial key of mayonnaise, smooth and savoury over the lettuces and otherworldly in the hell of the archbishop's kingfish. 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 scented 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, olive oil, your inexhaustible peace, your green essence, your brimming treasure that descends from the springs of the olive tree.

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