Pablo Neruda's Ode to the Power of Language

3 hours ago7 min read

Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it, Ursula K.Le Guin wrote. I was thinking about that the other day while talking to a poet friend of mine in a sun-drenched café, the kind of place where conversations feel like they’re woven into the very air.She was telling me about the first time she read Pablo Neruda, how the Spanish verses, even in translation, didn’t just describe love or a lemon—they became the thing itself, a physical presence in the room that altered her breathing. It’s a feeling I’ve heard from so many people in the interviews I do; a librarian once described how a single phrase from a novel, read at the right moment, can rewire a person’s entire week, acting as a lever for a deep and valuable relationship, which Adrienne Rich knew to be a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying in its capacity to remake us.We live in language, there’s no doubt. It’s the interior narrative that stitches the random events of our lives into a coherent story of self, the quiet voice that narrates our morning commute, our anxieties, our small triumphs.But more than that, we love in language. It’s the tentative text message that bridges a silence, the shared joke that becomes a private vocabulary, the difficult, fumbling apology that lands with the weight of a thousand unspoken truths.It’s the tool we use to feel the shape of another person’s world, to hold our own experience up to the light and say, ‘This is what it’s like for me. ’ I remember a man I spoke with, a retired carpenter, who told me he’d never been much of a talker until his wife fell ill.For months, he said, he’d sit by her bed and read the newspaper aloud, not for the news, but for the simple, steadying rhythm of the words, a shared sonic space that held them both when other forms of touch had failed. That’s the power Le Guin and Neruda point toward—words as the invisible hands with which we touch each other.They are not passive symbols but active forces. A well-placed word can be a balm or a blade; a political slogan can mobilize millions; a whispered secret can dismantle a lifetime of trust.We see this play out in our daily interactions, in the way a manager’s feedback can either deflate or galvanize a team, or how a child’s first, stumbling sentence can redefine a parent’s entire universe. It’s a fragile, immense power we all wield, often without thinking, this lifelong process of speaking and listening, of building and sometimes breaking, with the raw, transformative material of language itself.

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