Pablo Neruda is a Chilean poet whose body of work is written in Spanish, and many books of his poetry have been published as bilingual editions. For this post I chose a bilingual performance of “Love Sonnet 17”. As Marie-Elizabeth performs the poem in Spanish, Taylor Mali performs it in English. They begin the performance with a small anecdote, discussing hand choreography. A love poem shouldn’t be accompanied by the exaggerated hand movements Taylor Mali had proposed, but rather by the softer sweeping hand motions that Marie-Elizabeth chose. They both use hand gestures to emphasize the imagery and diction of the lines. The line “I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz, / or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off” is accompanied by a blossoming motion to punctuate the image of the growing fire. In the next line that speaks about loving “between the shadow and the soul”, Marie-Elizabeth puts out first one hand and then the other, aiding the viewer in the visualization between the two.
I noticed that they do not always use the same hand gestures. While Taylor Mali might use the more important hand gestures that punctuate the main ideas of each line, Marie-Elizabeth uses gestures with every other word. The lack of symmetry isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as instead I felt as if it was truly showing the two sides of the poem, the English side and the Spanish side. When they first speak the same line in unison in Spanish, they bring all the focus to that one line that is the volta in this sonnet. Not only are they bringing the emphasis down upon the one beautiful line, but also to the form that the poem is using. By starting to speak in unison at that particular line, it also brings attention to the shift in form that the sonnet has, from the octave to the sestet.