Pablo Neruda won the Nobel Prize for literature, but who would have guessed that a simple recipe for fried potatoes would number among his best known odes? Students of creative writing should follow Neruda's example, taking a favorite recipe and writing it as poetry. Neruda expresses his love of fried potatoes, ironically, with startling images.
Readers experience white potato flesh as "snowy wings/ of a morning swan." The stubby potato, so consummately fat and ordinary in the collective imagination, becomes graceful, virginal, and quite angelic. The transformation that the potato undergoes amounts to kitchen alchemy, as olive oil turns the crisp whiteness to savory amber-gold. In fact, Neruda delivers the poem in alchemical recipe form. Olive oil is not enough to complete the transformation. Magical garlic and the "pollen of pepper" complete the rustic recipe.
Ode to Fried Potatoes
by Pablo Neruda
Translated from the Spanish by Maria Jacketti
The world's joy
is spluttering,
sizzling in olive oil.
Potatoes
to be fried
enter the skillet,
snowy wings
of a morning swan –
and they leave
half-braised in gold,
gift of the crackling amber
of olives.
Garlic
embellishes the potato
with its earthy perfume,
and the pepper
is pollen that has traveled
beyond the reefs,
and so,
freshly
dressed
in a marbled suit,
plates are filled
with the echoes of potatoey abundance:
delicious simplicity of the earth.
Nobel Prize Winning Foodie
Neruda wrote many of his odes to food, some to prepared dishes, and others to simple foods such as the tomato, onion, artichoke, apple, orange, and watermelon. A deep sense of gratitude for nutrition pervades these poems; however, each one becomes more than the body's sustenance. There is always a sense of the fruit, vegetable, or dish being something transcendental and sacred: something beyond itself.
In the case of fried potatoes, Neruda exalts the potato's rich transformation and its fecundity, emphasizing it plain roots. This is certainly no haute cuisine, but rather the "simplicity of the earth." The poet recognizes that the potato is no longer just a spud. Made into a dish for human consumption, it wears a "marbled suit," and "echoes of potatoey abundance" remain in something that is new.
Neruda wrote another ode to potatoes, "Ode to the Spud," emphasizing the tuber's American roots,and takes a similar angle in his "Ode to Corn." In searching for a more complete definition of what it is to be American and caretaker of the New World, both native vegetables become objects of poetic meditation.
Over the past two decades, Neruda's poetry has fallen out of fashion with many postmodern critics, who, no doubt, do not grow their own food, despite their condition of being well-fed. Yet, his poetry has remained popular among the people who first experienced them in the depths of their imaginations, tasting the words with every sense.
Source:
"Ode to Fried Potatoes," translated from the Spanish by Maria Jacketti, from
Neruda's Garden: An Anthology of Odes: Pittsburgh: Latin American Literary Review Press, 1995.
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Maria Jacketti - I have been a writer and writing teacher for nearly thirty years. My books in print include Neruda's Garden, Maremoto: Seaquake, ...
