The Language of Love

Love has been, for centuries, a recurrent topic for poets. Poetry has expressed the beauty and anguish of love affairs in a way than no other art has been able to do. That is why, on Valentine’s day, we want to pay tribute to some of the most notable poets that have use their language capabilities to create verse as sublime and intense that, even after centuries, are still able to commove us. We want to salute:

For obvious reasons we have just selected a small number of notable love poets and we apologized for excluding many other talented poets.

These geniuses of the language have assembled words in such a way to represent the passion, heartbreak and delusion of love and celebrate it as the main motivation of life.

Love poetry becomes notable in the 17^th century but archetypes of love songs can be traced to ancient Egypt and 8^th Mozarabic Spain. The Renaissance was predominantly romantic with the raise of troubadours’ songs. During last century, poets focused more in the formal structure than in the content and many artists were more concern about their own existential dilemmas than in the relationship with their beloved ones. Nevertheless, the work of Pablo Neruda, Ángel González, Jane Hirshfield and T S Eliot was enough to keep love poems gaining followers around the world.

Alongside with society, love poetry has evolved but the essence remains. After all, human heart has not changed in 2,000 years.

As a way to commemorate this especial day we share with you Neruda’s Sonnet LXXXI.

Happy Valentines’ Day!

And now you’re mine. Rest with your dream in my dream.
Love and pain and work should all sleep, now.
The night turns on its invisible wheels,
and you are pure beside me as a sleeping amber.

No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go,
we will go together, over the waters of time.
No one else will travel through the shadows with me,
only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.

Your hands have already opened their delicate fists
and let their soft drifting signs drop away;
your eyes closed like two gray wings, and I move

after, following the folding water you carry, that carries
me away. The night, the world, the wind spins out their destiny.
Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.

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Literary Translation