Friday Food Writers: Pablo Neruda

Aaaannnnddd…..I’m back! I’m finding it hard to keep up with the blog in these weird transitional days between summer and autumn. I have a lot of work to do and The Cheese-Hater hasn’t started school yet, which makes blogging challenging. Still, the light on the trees in the park across from my house has that certain slant it gets as September rolls in, so beautiful yet just a touch melancholy, and even on the most harried day I stop to look at it for a moment, usually in late morning or as the sun goes down, and it makes me calm. It reminds me of new school shoes and the clear iciness of the coming cold nights all at once.

But today’s Friday Food Writers is in honor of the season we’re leaving behind. It will be freezing and time to write of stews and beets and Thanksgiving turkeys soon enough. For now, it’s all about tomatoes. Unfortunately the great bilingual edition of Neruda’s Elemental Odes that I have seems to be out of print, which is a shame because it’s full of unbelievably wonderful poems about the many things that touch our daily lives and are usually overlooked. You can find some of them in this book, though (and maybe you’ll get lucky with a used copy of the one I have). The version I’m putting up here was translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden. And, lest you should be momentarily jarred by the mention of December in this summer poem, remember: it takes place in the Southern Hemisphere.

Ode to Tomatoes

The street
filled with tomatoes,
midday,
summer,
light is
halved
like
a
tomato,
its juice
runs
through the streets.
In December,
unabated,
the tomato
invades
the kitchen,
it enters at lunchtime,
takes
it ease
on countertops,
among glasses,
butter dishes,
blue saltcellars.
It sheds
its own light,
benign majesty.
Unfortunately, we must
murder it:
the knife
sinks
into living flesh,
red
viscera,
a coll
sun,
profound,
inexhaustible,
populates the salads
of Chile,
happily, it is wed
to the clear onion,
and to celebrate the union
we
pour
oil,
essential
child of the olive,
onto its halved hemispheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,
salt, its magnetism;
it is the wedding
of the day,
parsley
hoists
its flag,
potatoes
bubble vigorously,
the aroma
of the roast
knocks
at the door,
it’s time!
come on!
and, on
the table, at the midpoint
of summer,
the tomato,
star of earth,
recurrent
and fertile
star,
displays
its convolutions,
its canals,
its remarkable amplitude
and abundance,
no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers
its gift
of firey color
and cool completeness.

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