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  1. #1
    Lauren's Avatar
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    Who is Mara Mori in Pablo Neruda's "Ode to a Pair of Socks" poem?

    Okay, so i've been analyzing this poem for school. And despite all my research, i cannot for the life of me determine who Mara Mori is! Ive even tried other translations of the name, like Maru Mota.
    Anyone have any ideas on this? I feel like a direct allusion is being made, but i cannot pinpoint to whom (or what)!

    Ode to a Pair of Socks

    Maru Mota brought me
    a pair
    of socks
    that she knitted with her
    shepherdess hands,
    two socks soft
    as rabbits.
    I put my feet
    into them
    as into
    two
    cases
    knitted
    with threads of
    twilight
    and sheeps wool.

    Wild socks,
    my feet were
    two wool
    fish,
    two big sharks
    of ultramarine
    crossed
    by a golden braid,
    two giant blackbirds,
    two cannons:
    my feet
    were honored
    in this way
    by these
    heavenly
    socks.
    They were
    so beautiful
    that for the first time
    my feet seemed to me
    unacceptable
    like two decrepit firemen, firemen
    unworthy
    of that embroidered
    fire,
    of those shining
    socks.

    Anyway
    I resisted
    the sharp temptation
    to save them
    the way schoolboys
    keep
    lightning bugs,
    the way scholars
    collect
    rare books,
    I resisted
    the mad impulse
    to put them
    in a golden
    cage
    and each day
    to feed them birdseed
    and the meat of a rosy melon.
    Like explorers
    in the forest
    who give up the finest
    young deer
    to the roasting spit
    and eat it
    with regret,
    I stretched out
    my feet
    and put on
    the
    lovely
    socks
    and then
    my shoes.

    And this is
    the moral of my ode:
    beauty is twice
    beautiful
    and goodness is doubly
    good
    when
    it concerns two wool
    socks
    in winter


    any comments/suggestions would be much appreciated!

  2. #2
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    okay, listen up: Neruda wrote under a pseudonym, his real first name was Neftali, a Biblical Hebrew name whose original holder was blessed by his father (Jacob) as "a deer set free"(That's in Gen 49:21). In the poem here the "deer [is given] to the roasting spit"; in this translation it's rendered as "young deer" but in the original Spanish it's literally "green deer." In America green connotes youth and inexperience, but as green is the color of death in Chile it's more likely tobe a punning way for Neruda to say, "deer of death".
    Once you've seen that, "Mara Mori" is easier to understand. There's a common saying from old Latin: "momento mori." It means "remember you will die"; in modern bastardized Latin usage that reads as "souvenier of death"; "Mara" is a Hebrew name that means "bitter" (not necessarily in a bad way- bitter herbs, the Bible tells us, are good for you). So "Mara Mori" is "the bitterness of death".

    You've got to use- not hide- your knowledge of death to really know the beauty of life, that's one cross-section of the multiple meanings of this poem

 

 

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