Life & Wisdom Quote by Anita Diament

There is a quiet audacity in admitting you only “know a little Spanish” and still reaching for Neruda “close to the bone.” Diament frames reading as intimacy work: not the sterile consumption of a masterpiece in translation, but the desire to touch the original grain of the language, even if your fingers can’t quite feel everything. “Close to the bone” isn’t just praise for Neruda’s emotional directness; it’s a standard she’s implicitly setting for herself as a novelist, too. The line signals allegiance to writing that risks embarrassment, desire, grief - the stuff polite prose tends to sand down.

The real engine here is the translator. Diament’s pleasure isn’t merely in Neruda; it’s in watching the poem get rebuilt under pressure. “Compare the Spanish and English lines” turns reading into a kind of forensic practice: What had to be sacrificed? Where did the translator cheat, improvise, get lucky? That curiosity carries a modern, craft-forward sensibility, the same one that drives readers to annotated lyrics or director’s commentaries. It treats translation as an art with visible brushstrokes, not a transparent pane of glass.

The subtext is both humble and empowered: I may not be fluent, but I can still participate in the poem’s making. In a literary culture that often treats language barriers as hard borders, Diament suggests they can be seams - places where meaning is stitched, altered, and sometimes strengthened.