Beautiful poem, and I'm grateful you've reminded me of it. There is an error in the translation given here, following "whales." It should read (following the Spanish original): "and the man gathering salt / would look at his hurt hands." Neruda's idea here is that the man gathering salt would have a moment's rest, in which he would notice and look at his hands that are hurt by the work he does.
On Mar 24, 2020LB wrote :
Yes, please fix the translation
On Apr 10, 2020k wrote :
Agreed, the mistake totally changes the feeling of the original
On Mar 19, 2020 Ted Mayer wrote :