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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
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!
Who is Mara Mori in Pablo Neruda's "Ode to a Pair of Socks" poem?
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