Pablo Neruda

Posted on by

~~~

Someday, somewhere — anywhere, unfailingly, you’ll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life.

Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904 – September 23, 1973) was a Chilean poet, born Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (in full, Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto)

See also: Canto General

Quotes

  • Debajo de tu piel vive la luna.
    • The moon lives in the lining of your skin.
    • Oda a la Bella Desnuda (Ode to a Beautiful Nude), from Nuevas Odas Elementales (1956), trans. Nathaniel Tarn in Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda [Houghton Mifflin, 1990, ISBN 0-395-54418-1] (p. 349)
  • ¿Sabes que en las calles no hay nadie
    y adentro de las casas tampoco?    Sólo hay ojos en las ventanas.
    Si no tienes dònde dormir
    toca una puerta y te abrirán,
    te abrirán hasta cierto punto
    y verás que hace frío adentro,
    que aquella casa está vacía,
    y no quiere nada contigo,
    no valen nada tus historias,
    y si insistes con tu ternura
    te muerden el perro y el gato.

    • Don’t you know there is no one in the streets
      and no one in the houses?There are only eyes in the windows.
      If you don’t have a place to sleep,
      knock on a door and it will open,
      open up to a certain point
      and you will see that it is cold inside,
      and that that house is empty
      and wants nothing to do with you,
      your stories mean nothing,
      and if you insist on being gentle,
      the dog and the cat will bite you.
    • Soliloquio en Tinieblas (Soliloquy at Twilight) from Estravagario (Book of Vagaries) (1958)
  • Y algo golpeaba en mi alma,
    fiebre o alas perdidas,
    y me fui haciendo solo,
    descifrando
    aquella quemadura
    y escribí la primera línea vaga,
    vaga, sin cuerpo, pura,
    tontería
    pura sabiduría
    del que no sabe nada,
    y vi de pronto
    el cielo
    desgranado
    y abierto.

    • And something started in my soul,
      fever or forgotten wings,
      and I made my own way,
      deciphering
      that fire,
      and I wrote the first faint line,
      faint, without substance, pure
      nonsense,
      pure wisdom
      of someone who knows nothing,
      and I suddenly saw
      the heavens
      unfastened
      and open.
    • Poesía (Poetry) from Memorial de Isla Negra (Memorial of Isla Negra) (1964), Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda [Houghton Mifflin, 1990, ISBN 0-395-54418-1] (p. 457)
  • Allí en Rangoon comprendí que los dioses
    eran tan enemigos como Dios
    del pobre ser humano.
    Dioses
    de alabastro tendidos
    como ballenas blancas,
    dioses dorados como las espigas,
    dioses serpientes enroscados
    al crimen de nacer,
    budhas desnudos y elegantes
    sonriendo en el coktail
    de la vacía eternidad
    como Cristo en su cruz horrible,
    todos dispuestos a todo,
    a imponernos su cielo,
    todos con llagas o pistola
    para comprar piedad o quemarnos la sangre,
    dioses feroces del hombre
    para esconder la cobardía,
    y allí todo era así,
    toda la tierra olía a cielo,
    a mercadería celeste.

    • There in Rangoon I realized that the gods
      were enemies, just like God,
      of the poor human being.
      Gods
      in alabaster extended
      like white whales,
      gods gilded like spikes,
      serpent gods entwining
      the crime of being born,
      naked and elegant buddhas
      smiling at the cocktail party
      of empty eternity
      like Christ on his horrible cross,
      all of them capable of anything,
      of imposing on us their heaven,
      all with torture or pistol
      to purchase piety or burn our blood,
      fierce gods made by men
      to conceal their cowardice,
      and there it was all like that,
      the whole earth reeking of heaven,
      and heavenly merchandise.
    • Religión en el Este (Religion in the East) from Memorial of Isla Negra [Memorial de Isla Negra] (1964), trans. by Anthony Kerrigan in Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda [Houghton Mifflin, 1990, ISBN 0-395-54418-1] (p. 463)
  • Es la hora, amor mío, de apartar esta rosa sombría,
    cerrar las estrellas, enterrar la ceniza en la tierra:
    y, en la insurrección de la luz, despertar con los que despertaron
    o seguir en el sueño alcanzando la otra orilla del mar que no tiene otra orilla.

    • It is time, love, to break off that sombre rose,
      shut up the stars and bury the ash in the earth;
      and, in the rising of the light, wake with those who awoke
      or go on in the dream, reaching the other shore of the sea which has no other shore.
    • La Barcarola Termina (The Watersong Ends) (1967), trans. Anthony Kerrigan in Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda [Houghton Mifflin, 1990, ISBN 0-395-54418-1] (p. 500)
  • Sólo con una ardiente paciencia conquistaremos la espléndida ciudad que dará luz, justicia y dignidad a todos los hombres. Así la poesía no habrá cantado en vano.
    • Only with a burning patience can we conquer the splendid City which will give light, justice and dignity to all mankind. In this way the song will not have been sung in vain.
    • Nobel lecture, Hacia la ciudad espléndida (Towards the Splendid City) (1971-12-13). In the passage directly preceding these words, Neruda identified the source of his allusion:”It is today exactly one hundred years since an unhappy and brilliant poet, the most awesome of all despairing souls, wrote down this prophecy: ‘À l’aurore, armés d’une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides Villes.’ ‘In the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid Cities.’ I believe in this prophecy of Rimbaud, the Visionary.” (Hace hoy cien años exactos, un pobre y espléndido poeta, el más atroz de los desesperados, escribió esta profecía: “À l’aurore, armes d’une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides Villes”. “Al amanecer, armados de una ardiente paciencia, entraremos a las espléndidas ciudades.” Yo creo en esa profecía de Rimbaud, el Vidente.)The quotation is from Arthur Rimbaud‘s poem “Adieu” from Une Saison en Enfer (1873)
  • Un pilar soportando consuelos
    Y no me digan nada
    ¿Y bien? ¿Te sana el metaloide pálido?
    Tengo un miedo terrible de ser un animal
    íY, si después de tantos palabras
    La cólera que quiebra al hombre en niños

    • One pillar holding up consolations
      And don’t bother telling me anything
      And so? The pale metalloid heals you?
      I have a terrible fear of being an animal.
      And what if after so many words,
      The anger that breaks a man down into boys.
    • From Espana, aparta de mi este caliz, Masa, Neruda and Vallejo: selected poems, By Robert Bly, John Knoepfle, James Arlington Wright, Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, copyright 1971, Beacon Press. Translations by Robert Bly, John Knoepfle, and James Wright. ISBN 0-8070-6480-0

Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Canción Desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair) (1924)

trans. William S. Merwin [Penguin Classics, 1993, ISBN 0-140-18648-4]

  • ¿Quién escribe tu nombre con letras de humo entre las estrellas del sur?
    Ah déjame recordarte cómo eras entonces, cuando aún no existías.

    • Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
      Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.
    • “Every Day You Play” (Juegas Todos los Días), XIV, p. 35
  • Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos.
    • I want to do with you what spring does with cherry trees.
    • “Every Day You Play” (Juegas Todos las Días), XIV, p. 35
  • Me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente,
    y me oyes desde lejos, y mi voz no te toca.

    • I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent,
      and you hear me from far away and my voice does not touch you.
    • “I Like for You to be Still” (Me Gustas Cuando Callas), p. 37
  • Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
    • Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
    • “Tonight I Can Write” (Puedo Escribir), XX, p. 49
  • Es tan corto el amor y tan largo el olvido.
    • Love is so short and forgetting is so long.
    • “Tonight I Can Write” (Puedo Escribir), XX, p. 51

Residencia en la Tierra (Residence on Earth) (1933)

trans. William Merwin in Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda [Houghton Mifflin, 1990, ISBN 0-395-54418-1]

  • Estoy solo entre materias desvencijadas,
    la lluvia cae sobre mí, y se me parece,
    se me parece con su desvarío,solitaria en el mundo muerto,
    rechazada al caer, y sin forma obstinada.

    • I am alone with rickety materials,
      the rain falls on me, and it is like me,
      it is like me in its raving, alone in the dead world,
      repulsed as it falls, and with no persistent form.
    • Débil del Alba (Weak with the Dawn or The Dawn’s Debility), Residencia I (Residence I), I, stanza 5
    • Alternate translation by Donald D. Walsh:
      I am alone among rickety substances,
      the rain falls upon me and it seems like me,
      like me with its madness, alone in the dead world,
      rejected as it falls, and without persistent shape.
  • Enterrado junto al cocotero hallarás más tarde
    el cuchillo que escodí allí por temor de que me mataras,
    y ahora repentinamente quisiera oler su acero de cocina
    acostumbrado al peso de tu mano y al brillo de tu pie:
    bajo la humedad de la tierra, entre las sordas raíces,
    de los lenguajes humanos el pobre sólo sabría tu nombre,
    y la espesa tierra no comprende tu nombre
    hecho de impenetrables y substancias divinas.

    • Later on you will find buried near the coconut tree
      the knife which I hid there for fear you would kill me,
      and now suddenly I would be glad to smell its kitchen steel
      used to the weight of your hand, the shine of your foot:
      under the dampness of the ground, among the deaf roots,
      in all the languages of the men only the poor will know your name,
      and the dense earth does not understand your name
      made of impenetrable divine substances.
    • Tango del Viudo (The Widower’s Tango), Residencia I (Residence I), III, stanza 3
    • Alternate translation by Donald D. Walsh:
      Buried next to the cocoanut tree you will later find
      the knife that I hid there for fear that you would kill me,
      and now suddenly I should like to smell its kitchen steel
      accustomed to the weight of your hand and the shine of your foot:
      under the moisture of the earth, among the deaf roots,
      of all human labguages the poor thing would know only your name,
      and the thick earth does not understand your name
      made of impenetrable and divine substances.
  • No quiero para mí tantas desgracias.
    No quiero continuar de raíz y de tumba,
    de subterráneo solo, de bodega con muertos
    ateridos, muriéndome de pena.

    • I do not want to be the inheritor of so many misfortunes.
      I do not want to continue as a root and as a tomb,
      as a solitary tunnel, as a cellar full of corpses,
      stiff with cold, dying with pain.
    • Walking Around, Residencia II (Residence II), II, stanza 4-5
    • Alternate translation by Donald D. Walsh:
      I do not want for myself so many misfortunes.
      I do not want to continue as root and tomb,
      just underground, a vault with corpses
      stiff with cold, dying of distress.
  • Si me preguntáis en dónde he estado
    debo decir “Sucede.”
    Debo de hablar del suelo que oscurecen las piedras,
    del río que durando se destruye:
    no sé sino las cosas que los pájaros pierden,
    el mar dejado atrás, o mi hermana llorando.
    ¿Por qué tantas regiones, por qué un día
    se junta con un día? ¿Por qué una negra noche
    se acumula en la boca? ¿Por qué muertos?

    • If you should ask me where I’ve been all this time
      I have to say “Things happen.”
      I have to dwell on stones darkening the earth,
      on the river ruined in its own duration:
      I know nothing save things the birds have lost,
      the sea I left behind, or my sister crying.
      Why this abundance of places? Why does day lock
      with day? Why the dark night swilling round
      in our mouths? And why the dead?
    • No Hay Olvido (Sonata) (There’s No Forgetting (Sonata) or There is No Oblivion (Sonata)), Residencia II (Residence II), VI, stanza 1
    • Alternate translation by Donald D. Walsh:
      If you ask me where I have been
      I must say “It so happens.”
      I must speak of the ground darkened by stones,
      of the river that enduring is destroyed:
      I know only the things that the birds lose,
      the sea left behind, or my sister weeping.
      Why so many regions, why does a day
      join a day? Why does a black night
      gather in the mouth? Why dead people?
  • Preguntaréis: ¿Y dónde están las lilas?
    ¿Y la metafísica cubierta de amapolas?
    ¿Y la lluvia que a menudo golpeaba
    sus palabras llenándolas
    de agujeros y pájaros?

    • You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
      and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
      and the rain repeatedly spattering
      its words and drilling them full
      of apertures and birds.
    • Explico Algunos Cosas (I’m Explaining a Few Things or I Explain a Few Things), Tercera Residencia (Third Residence), IV, stanza 1
    • Alternate translation by Donald D. Walsh:
      You will ask: And where are the lilacs?
      And the metaphysical blanket of poppies?
      And the rain that often struck
      your words filling them
      with holes and birds?
  • Preguntaréis ¿por qué su poesía
    no nos habla del sueño, de las hojas,
    de los grandes volcanes de su país natal?    Venid a ver la sangre por las calles,
    venid a ver
    la sangre por las calles,
    venid a ver la sangre
    por las calles!

    • And you will ask: why doesn’t his poetry
      speak of dreams and leaves
      and the great volcanoes of his native land?Come and see the blood in the streets.
      Come and see
      the bloods in the streets.
      Come and see the blood
      in the streets!
    • Explico Algunos Cosas (I’m Explaining a Few Things or I Explain a Few Things), Tercera Residencia (Third Residence), IV, stanza 9
    • Alternate translation by Donald D. Walsh:
      You will ask: why does your poetry
      not speak to us of of sleep, of the leaves,
      of the great volcanoes of your native land?Come and se the blood in the streets,
      come and see
      the blood in the streets,
      come and see the blood
      in the streets!

External links

Wikipedia

Wikipedia has an article about:

~~~~~~~~

Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda
Born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto
July 12, 1904
Parral, Chile
Died September 23, 1973 (aged 69)
Santiago, Chile
Occupation Poet, diplomat
Nationality Chilean
Notable awards International Peace Prize (1950)
Nobel Prize in Literature (1971)
Signature

Pablo Neruda (Spanish: [ˈpaβ̞lo̞ ne̞ˈɾuð̞a]; July 12, 1904 – September 23, 1973) was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet-diplomat and politician Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name after the Czech poet Jan Neruda. In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Neruda became known as a poet while still a teenager. He wrote in a variety of styles including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and erotically-charged love poems such as the ones in his 1924 collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. He often wrote in green ink, which was his personal symbol for desire and hope.

The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.”[1] Harold Bloom included Neruda as one of the 26 writers central to the Western tradition in his book The Western Canon.

On July 15, 1945, at Pacaembu Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil, he read to 100,000 people in honor of the Communist revolutionary leader Luís Carlos Prestes.[2] During his lifetime, Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions and served a term as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When President González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Neruda’s arrest. Friends hid him for months in the basement of a house in the Chilean port of Valparaíso. Later, Neruda escaped through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. Years later, Neruda was a close advisor to Chile’s socialist President Salvador Allende. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.[3]

Neruda was hospitalised with cancer at the time of the Chilean coup d’état led by Augusto Pinochet. On 23 September 1973, Neruda died of prostate cancer in his house in ‘Isla Negra’.[4] Neruda’s death reverberated around the world. Pinochet, backed by elements of the armed forces loyal to him in the military, denied permission to make Neruda’s funeral a public event. However, thousands of grieving Chileans disobeyed the curfew and crowded the streets.

Life and career

Neruda as a young man

Early years

Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto was born on July 12, 1904, in Parral, Chile, a city in Linares Province in the Maule Region, some 350 km south of Santiago,[5] to José del Carmen Reyes Morales, a railway employee, and Rosa Basoalto, a school teacher who died two months after he was born. Neruda and his father soon moved to Temuco, where his father married Trinidad Candia Marverde, a woman with whom he had a child nine years earlier, a boy named Rodolfo.[6] Neruda also grew up with his half-sister Laura, one of his father’s children by another woman. On September 26, 1904, the young Neruda was christened “Neftalí”, his late mother’s middle name. In the winter of 1914, Neruda composed his first poems.

Early career

something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and wrote the first faint line,
faint without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom,
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open.

“
”
From “Poetry”, Memorial de Isla Negra (1964).
Trans. Alastair Reid[7]

Neruda’s father opposed his son’s interest in writing and literature, but Neruda received encouragement from others, including the future Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral, who headed the local girls’ school. On July 18, 1917, at the age of thirteen, he published his first work, an essay entitled Entusiasmo y perseverancia (Enthusiasm and Perseverance) in the local daily newspaper, La Mañana, signed Neftalí Reyes.[8] From 1918 to mid-1920 he published numerous poems, such as “Mis ojos” (“My eyes”), and essays in local magazines as Neftalí Reyes. In 1919, he participated in the literary contest Juegos Florales del Maule, where he won third place for his poem “Comunión ideal” or “Nocturno ideal”. By mid-1920, when he adopted the pseudonym Pablo Neruda, he was a published author of poetry, prose, and journalism. He is thought to have named himself “Neruda” after the Czech poet Jan Neruda. The young poet’s intention in publishing under a pseudonym was to avoid his father’s disapproval of his poetry.

In 1921, at the age of 16, Neruda moved to Santiago[7] to study French at the Universidad de Chile with the intention of becoming a teacher, but soon he was devoting all his time to poetry. In 1923, his first volume of verse, Crepusculario (Book of Twilights), was published, followed the next year by Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair),[7] a collection of love poems that was controversial for its eroticism, especially considering its author’s young age. Both works were critically acclaimed and were translated into many languages. Over the decades, Veinte poemas would sell millions of copies and become Neruda’s best-known work, though it did not go to a second edition until 1932.[7] By the age of 20, Neruda had established an international reputation as a poet, but faced poverty.[7] In 1926, he published the collection Tentativa del hombre infinito (The attempt of the infinite man) and the novel El habitante y su esperanza (The inhabitant and his hope).[9] In 1927, out of financial desperation, he took an honorary consulship in Rangoon, then a part of colonial Burma and a place he had never heard of.[9] Later, mired in isolation and loneliness, he worked in Colombo (Ceylon), Batavia (Java), and Singapore.[9] In Java he met and married his first wife, a Dutch bank employee named Maryka Antonieta Hagenaar Vogelzang. While on diplomatic service, Neruda read large amounts of poetry and experimented with many different poetic forms. He wrote the first two volumes of Residencia en la Tierra, which included many surrealistic poems.

Spanish Civil War

After returning to Chile, Neruda was given diplomatic posts in Buenos Aires and then Barcelona, Spain.[10] He later succeeded Gabriela Mistral as consul in Madrid, where he became the center of a lively literary circle, befriending such writers as Rafael Alberti, Federico García Lorca, and the Peruvian poet César Vallejo.[10] A daughter, Malva Marina Trinidad, was born in Madrid in 1934; she was to be plagued with health problems, especially hydrocephalus, during her short life.[11] During this period, Neruda slowly became estranged from his wife and began a relationship with Delia del Carril (es), an Argentine twenty years his senior.

As Spain became engulfed in civil war, Neruda became intensely politicised for the first time. His experiences of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath moved him away from distinctive, privately focused work in the direction of collective obligation. Neruda became an ardent communist, and remained so for the rest of his life. The radical leftist politics of his literary friends, as well as that of del Carril, were contributing factors, but the most important catalyst was the execution of García Lorca by forces loyal to the Spanish dictator Franco.[10] By means of his speeches and writings, Neruda threw his support behind the Republican side, publishing the collection España en el corazón (Spain in My Heart, 1938). He lost his post as consul due to his political militancy.[10] Neruda’s marriage broke down and the couple divorced in 1936. His ex-wife moved to Monte Carlo and then to the Netherlands with their only child, and he would never see either of them again.[12] After leaving his wife, Neruda lived with Delia del Carril in France.

After the 1938 election of President Pedro Aguirre Cerda, whom Neruda supported, the poet was appointed special consul for Spanish emigration in Paris. There he was responsible for what he called “the noblest mission I have ever undertaken”: transporting 2,000 Spanish refugees who had been housed by the French in squalid camps to Chile on an old ship called the Winnipeg.[13] Neruda is sometimes charged with selecting only communists for emigration, to the exclusion of others who had fought on the side of the Republic.[14] Others deny these accusations, pointing out that Neruda chose only a few hundred of the refugees personally; the rest were selected by the Service for the Evacuation of Spanish Refugees set up by Juan Negrín, president of the Spanish Republican government in Exile.

Mexican appointment

Neruda’s next diplomatic post was as Consul General in Mexico City, where he spent the years 1940 to 1943.[15] While in Mexico, he married del Carril, and learned that his daughter Malva had died from various health problems, aged eight, in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands.[15]

After the failed 1940 assassination attempt against Leon Trotsky, Neruda arranged a Chilean visa for the Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, who was accused of having been one of the conspirators in the assassination.[16] Neruda later said he did it at the request of the Mexican president, Manuel Ávila Camacho. This enabled Siqueiros, then jailed, to leave Mexico for Chile, where he stayed at Neruda’s private residence. In exchange for Neruda’s assistance, Siqueiros spent over a year painting a mural in a school in Chillán. Neruda’s relationship with Siqueiros attracted criticism and Neruda dismissed the allegations that his intent had been to help an assassin as “sensationalist politico-literary harassment”. In Mexico, Pablo Neruda met the famous Mexican writer Octavio Paz, with whom he nearly came to blows in 1942.[17]

Return to Chile

In 1943, after his return to Chile, Neruda made a tour of Peru, where he visited Machu Picchu.[18] The austere beauty of the Inca citadel later inspired Alturas de Macchu Picchu, a book-length poem in twelve parts which he completed in 1945 and which marked a growing awareness and interest in the ancient civilizations of the Americas, themes he was to explore further in Canto General. In Alturas, Neruda celebrated the achievement of Machu Picchu, but also condemned the slavery which had made it possible. In Canto XII, he called upon the dead of many centuries to be born again and to speak through him. Martín Espada, poet and professor of creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has hailed the work as a masterpiece, declaring that “there is no greater political poem”.

Communism

Bolstered by his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, Neruda, like many left-leaning intellectuals of his generation, came to admire the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin, partly for the role it played in defeating Nazi Germany and idealist views of theoretical Marxist doctrine.[19] This is echoed in poems such as “Canto a Stalingrado” (1942) and “Nuevo canto de amor a Stalingrado” (1943). In 1953 Neruda was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize. On Stalin’s death that same year, Neruda wrote an ode to him, as he also (during World War II) wrote poetry in praise of Fulgencio Batista “Saludo a Batista”, (“Salute to Batista”) and later to Fidel Castro. His fervent Stalinism eventually drove a wedge between Neruda and longtime friend Octavio Paz who commented that “Neruda became more and more Stalinist, while I became less and less enchanted with Stalin”.[20] Their differences came to a head after the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact when they almost came to blows in an argument over Stalin. Although Paz still considered Neruda “The greatest poet of his generation”, in an essay on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn he wrote that when he thinks of “Neruda and other famous Stalinist writers and poets, I feel the gooseflesh that I get from reading certain passages of the Inferno. No doubt they began in good faith […] but insensibly, commitment by commitment, they saw themselves becoming entangled in a mesh of lies, falsehoods, deceits and perjuries, until they lost their souls”.[21] Neruda called Lenin the “great genius of this century”. His speech of June 5, 1946 gives a tribute to the late Soviet leader Mikhail Kalinin, who for Neruda was “man of noble life”, “the great constructor of the future”, and “a comrade of arms of Lenin and Stalin”.[22]

Neruda later came to rue his support of the Soviet leader; after Nikita Khrushchev‘s famous Secret Speech at the Soviet 20th Party Congress in 1956, which denounced the “cult of personality” that surrounded Stalin and accused him of committing crimes during the Great Purges, Neruda wrote in his memoirs “I had contributed my share to the personality cult,” explaining that “in those days, Stalin seemed to us the conqueror who had crushed Hitler‘s armies”.[19] Of a subsequent visit to China in 1957, Neruda would write: “What has estranged me from the Chinese revolutionary process has not been Mao Tse-tung but Mao Tse-tungism.” He dubbed this Mao Tse-Stalinism: “the repetition of a cult of a Socialist deity”.[19] Despite his disillusionment with Stalin, Neruda never lost his essential faith in communist theory and remained loyal to “the Party”. Anxious not to give ammunition to his ideological enemies, he would later refuse publicly to condemn the Soviet repression of dissident writers like Boris Pasternak and Joseph Brodsky, an attitude with which even some of his staunchest admirers disagreed.[23]

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

On March 4, 1945 Neruda was elected a Communist party senator for the northern provinces of Antofagasta and Tarapacá in the arid and inhospitable Atacama Desert.[24][25] He officially joined the Communist Party of Chile four months later.[15] In 1946, Radical Party presidential candidate Gabriel González Videla asked Neruda to act as his campaign manager. González Videla was supported by a coalition of left-wing parties and Neruda fervently campaigned on his behalf. Once in office, however, González Videla turned against the Communist Party and issued the Law of Permanent Defense of the Democracy. The breaking point for Senator Neruda was the violent repression of a Communist-led miners’ strike in Lota in October 1947, where striking workers were herded into island military prisons and a concentration camp in the town of Pisagua. Neruda’s criticism of González Videla culminated in a dramatic speech in the Chilean senate on January 6, 1948, which became known as “Yo acuso” (“I accuse”), in the course of which he read out the names of the miners and their families who were imprisoned at the concentration camp.[26]

During the late 1960s, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was asked for his opinion of Pablo Neruda. Borges stated, “I think of him as a very fine poet, a very fine poet. I don’t admire him as a man, I think of him as a very mean man.”[27] He said that Neruda had not spoken out against Perón because he was afraid to risk his reputation, noting “I was an Argentine poet, he was a Chilean poet, he’s on the side of the Communists, I’m against them. So I felt he was behaving very wisely in avoiding a meeting that would have been quite uncomfortable for both of us.”[28]

Exile

Neruda with his wife and Erich Honecker in 1951

A few weeks later in 1948, finding himself threatened with arrest, Neruda went into hiding and he and his wife were smuggled from house to house hidden by supporters and admirers for the next thirteen months.[15] While in hiding, Senator Neruda was removed from office and in September 1948 the Communist Party was banned altogether under the Ley de Defensa Permanente de la Democracia (Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy), called by critics the Ley Maldita (Accursed Law), which eliminated over 26,000 people from the electoral registers, thus stripping them of their right to vote. Neruda moved later to Valdivia in southern Chile. From Valdivia he moved to Fundo Huishue a forestry estate in the vicinity of Huishue Lake. Neruda’s life underground ended in March 1949 when he fled over the Lilpela Pass on the Andes Mountains to Argentina on horseback. He would dramatically recount his escape from Chile in his Nobel Prize lecture.

Once out of Chile, he spent the next three years in exile.[15] In Buenos Aires, Neruda took advantage of the slight resemblance between him and his friend, the future Nobel Prize-winning novelist and cultural attaché to the Guatemalan embassy, Miguel Ángel Asturias, to travel to Europe using Asturias’s passport.[29] Pablo Picasso arranged his entrance into Paris and Neruda made a surprise appearance there to a stunned World Congress of Peace Forces[clarification needed], while the Chilean government denied that the poet could have escaped the country.[29] Neruda spent those three years traveling extensively throughout Europe as well as taking trips to India, China, Sri Lanka and the Soviet Union. His trip to Mexico in late 1949 was lengthened due to a serious bout of phlebitis.[30] A Chilean singer named Matilde Urrutia was hired to care for him and they began an affair that would, years later, culminate in marriage.[30] During his exile, Urrutia would travel from country to country shadowing him and they would arrange meetings whenever they could. Matilde Urrutia was the muse for Los versos del capitán, which he later published anonymously in 1952.

from “Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon”

Full woman, fleshly apple, hot moon,
thick smell of seaweed, crushed mud and light,
what obscure brilliance opens between your columns?
What ancient night does a man touch with his senses?

Loving is a journey with water and with stars,
with smothered air and abrupt storms of flour:
loving is a clash of lightning-bolts
and two bodies defeated by a single drop of honey.

“
”
From “Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon”,
Selected Poems translated by Stephen Mitchell (1997) [31]

While in Mexico, Neruda also published his lengthy epic poem Canto General, a Whitmanesque catalog of the history, geography, and flora and fauna of South America, accompanied by Neruda’s observations and experiences. Many of them dealt with his time underground in Chile, which is when he composed much of the poem. In fact, he had carried the manuscript with him on his escape on horseback. A month later, a different edition of five thousand copies was boldly published in Chile by the outlawed Communist Party based on a manuscript Neruda had left behind. In Mexico, he was granted honorary Mexican citizenship.[32] Neruda’s 1952 stay in a villa owned by Italian historian Edwin Cerio on the island of Capri was fictionalized in Antonio Skarmeta‘s 1985 novel Ardiente Paciencia (Ardent Patience, later known as El cartero de Neruda, or Neruda’s Postman), which inspired the popular film Il Postino (“The Postman”, 1994).[33]

Second return to Chile

By 1952, the González-Videla government was on its last legs, weakened by corruption scandals. The Chilean Socialist Party was in the process of nominating Salvador Allende as its candidate for the September 1952 presidential elections and was keen to have the presence of Neruda, by now Chile’s most prominent left-wing literary figure, to support the campaign.[32] Neruda returned to Chile in August of that year and rejoined Delia del Carril, who had travelled ahead of him some months earlier, but the marriage was crumbling. Del Carril eventually learned of his affair with Matilde Urrutia and he sent her back to Chile in 1955. She convinced the Chilean officials to lift his arrest allowing Urrutia and Neruda to go to Capri, Italy. Now united with Urrutia, Neruda would, aside from many foreign trips and a stint as Allende’s ambassador to France from 1970 to 1973, spend the rest of his life in Chile.

By this time, Neruda enjoyed worldwide fame as a poet, and his books were being translated into virtually all the major languages of the world.[15] He vigorously denounced the U.S. during the Cuban missile crisis and later in the decade he would likewise repeatedly condemn the U.S. for the Vietnam War. But being one of the most prestigious and outspoken left-wing intellectuals alive, he also attracted opposition from ideological opponents. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, an anti-communist organization covertly established and funded by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, adopted Neruda as one of its primary targets and launched a campaign to undermine his reputation, reviving the old claim he had been an accomplice in the attack on Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940.[34] The campaign became more intense when it became known that Neruda was a candidate for the 1964 Nobel Prize, which was eventually awarded to Jean-Paul Sartre.[35]

La Sebastiana, Neruda’s house in Valparaíso

In 1966, Neruda was invited to attend an International PEN conference in New York City.[36] Officially, he was barred from entering the U.S. because he was a communist, but the conference organizer, playwright Arthur Miller, eventually prevailed upon the Johnson Administration to grant Neruda a visa.[36] Neruda gave readings to packed halls, and even recorded some poems for the Library of Congress.[36] Miller later opined that Neruda’s adherence to his communist ideals of the 1930s was a result of his protracted exclusion from “bourgeois society”. Due to the presence of many Eastern Bloc writers, Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes later wrote that the PEN conference marked a “beginning of the end” of the Cold War.[36]

Upon Neruda’s return to Chile, he stopped in Peru, where he gave readings to enthusiastic crowds in Lima and Arequipa and was received by President Fernando Belaúnde Terry.[36] However, this visit also prompted an unpleasant backlash; because the Peruvian government had come out against the government of Fidel Castro in Cuba, July 1966 saw more than one hundred Cuban intellectuals retaliate against the poet by signing a letter that charged Neruda with colluding with the enemy, calling him an example of the “tepid, pro-Yankee revisionism” then prevalent in Latin America. The affair was particularly painful for Neruda because of his previous outspoken support for the Cuban revolution, and he never visited the island again, even after receiving an invitation in 1968.

After the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967, Neruda wrote several articles regretting the loss of a “great hero”.[37] At the same time, he told his friend Aida Figueroa not to cry for Che, but for Luis Emilio Recabarren, the father of the Chilean communist movement, who preached a pacifist revolution over Che’s violent ways.

Last years

La Chascona, Neruda’s house in Santiago.

In 1970, Neruda was nominated as a candidate for the Chilean presidency, but ended up giving his support to Salvador Allende, who later won the election and was inaugurated in 1970 as the first democratically elected socialist head of state.[32][38] Shortly thereafter, Allende appointed Neruda the Chilean ambassador to France, lasting from 1970–1972; his final diplomatic posting. During his stint in Paris, Neruda helped to renegotiate the external debt of Chile, billions owed to European and American banks, but within months of his arrival in Paris his health began to deteriorate.[32] Neruda returned to Chile two and half years later due to his failing health.

Buenos Aires 1971

In 1971, Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize,[32] a decision that did not come easily because some of the committee members had not forgotten Neruda’s past praise of Stalinist dictatorship. But his Swedish translator, Artur Lundkvist, did his best to ensure the Chilean received the prize.[39] “A poet,” Neruda stated in his Stockholm speech of acceptance of the Nobel Prize, “is at the same time a force for solidarity and for solitude.”[40] The following year Neruda was awarded the prestigious Golden Wreath Award at the Struga Poetry Evenings.[41]

As the coup d’état of 1973 unfolded, Neruda, then diagnosed with prostate cancer, was devastated by the mounting attacks on the Allende government.[32] The military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet on September 11 saw Neruda’s hopes for a Marxist Chile destroyed. Shortly thereafter, during a search of the house and grounds at Isla Negra by Chilean armed forces at which Neruda was present, the poet famously remarked: “Look around—there’s only one thing of danger for you here—poetry.” [42]

Neruda laid out in his coffin, 1974

Neruda died of heart failure on the evening of September 23, 1973, at Santiago’s Santa María Clinic;[43][44][45] The funeral took place amidst a massive police presence, and mourners took advantage of the occasion to protest against the new regime, established just a couple of weeks before. Neruda’s house was broken into and his papers and books taken or destroyed.[32]

In 1974 his Memoirs appeared under the title I Confess I Have Lived, updated to the last days of the poet’s life, and including a final segment describing the death of Salvador Allende during the storming of the Moneda Palace by Pinochet and other generals – occurring only twelve days before Neruda died.[32] Matilde Urrutia subsequently compiled and edited for publication the memoirs and possibly his final poem “Right Comrade, It’s the Hour of the Garden”. These and other activities brought her into conflict with Pinochet’s government, which continually sought to curtail Neruda’s influence on the Chilean collective consciousness. Urrutia’s own memoir, My Life with Pablo Neruda, was published posthumously in 1986.[46] Manuel Araya, his Communist Party-appointed chauffeur published a book about Neruda’s final days in 2012.[47]

Exhumation

In June 2011, a Chilean judge ordered that an investigation be launched, following suggestions that Neruda had been killed by the Pinochet regime for his pro-Allende stance and political views. Neruda’s driver, Manuel Araya, stated that doctors administered poison as the poet was preparing to go into exile.[48][49] In December 2011 Chile’s Communist Party asked Chilean Judge Mario Carroza to order the exhumation of the remains of the poet. Carroza has been conducting probes into hundreds of deaths allegedly connected to abuses of Pinochet’s regime from 1973 to 1990.[47][50] Carroza’s inquiry during 2011–12 uncovered enough evidence to order the exhumation in April 2013.[51] Eduardo Contreras, a Chilean lawyer, is leading the push for a full investigation. He commented: “We have world-class labs from India, Switzerland, Germany, the US, Sweden, they have all offered to do the lab work for free.” The Pablo Neruda Foundation has fought the exhumation.[49]

In June 2013 a court order was issued to find the man that prosecutors allege poisoned Neruda. Police are investigating former CIA agent Michael Townley, who is facing trial for the killings of General Carlos Prats (Buenos Aires, 1974), and ex Chancellor Orlando Letelier (Washington, 1976).[52][53]

Test results were released on 8 November 2013 of the seven-month investigation by a 15 member forensic team. Patricio Bustos, the head of Chile’s medical legal service, stated “No relevant chemical substances have been found that could be linked to Mr. Neruda’s death”.[54]

Legacy

See also: Land of poets

Neruda owned three houses in Chile; today they are all open to the public as museums: La Chascona in Santiago, La Sebastiana in Valparaíso, and Casa de Isla Negra in Isla Negra, where he and Matilde Urrutia are buried. A bust of Neruda stands on the south side of the Organization of American States building in Washington, D.C.

Music

  • Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis set to music the Canto general.
  • American composer Samuel Barber used Neruda’s poems for his cantata The Lovers in 1971.
  • Austrian avant-garde composer Michael Gielen set to music Un día sobresale (Ein Tag Tritt Hervor. Pentaphonie für obligates Klavier, fünf Soloinstrumente und fünf Gruppen zu je fünf Musikern mit Worten von Pablo Neruda. 1960-63).
  • Mexican composer Daniel Catán wrote an opera Il Postino (2010), whose premiere production featured Spanish tenor Plácido Domingo portraying Pablo Neruda.
  • Folk rock / progressive rock group Los Jaivas, famous in Chile, used Las alturas de Macchu Picchu as the text for their album of the same name.
  • Chilean composer Sergio Ortega worked closely with the poet in the musical play Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta (1967). Three decades later, Ortega expanded the piece into an opera, leaving Neruda’s text intact.
  • Peter Lieberson composed Neruda Songs (2005) and Songs of Love and Sorrow (2010) based on Cien Sonetos de Amor.[55]
  • Jazz vocalist Luciana Souza released an album called “Neruda” (2004) featuring 10 of Neruda’s poems set to the music of Federico Mompou.
  • The South African musician Johnny Clegg drew heavily on Neruda in his early work with the band Juluka.
  • On the back on Jackson Browne‘s album The Pretender, there is a poem by Neruda.
  • Canadian rock group Red Rider named their 1983 LP/CD release, Neruda.
  • Pop band Sixpence None the Richer set his poem “Puedo escribir” to music on their platinum selling self-titled album (1997).
  • The group Brazilian Girls turned “Poema 15” (“Poem 15”) from Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (20 love poems and a song of despair) into their song “Me gusta cuando callas” from their self-titled album.
  • With permission from the Fundación Neruda, Marco Katz composed a song cycle based on the volume Piedras del cielo for voice and piano.[56]Centaur Records CRC 3232, 2012.
  • The Occitan singer Joanda composed the song Pablo Neruda [57]
  • American contemporary composer Morten Lauridsen set Neruda’s poem “Soneto de la noche” to music as part of his cycle “Nocturnes” from 2005.
  • Juan Luis Guerra credits Neruda for two phrases for his song, “Bachata rosa”.[58]
  • Ezequiel Vinao composed “Sonetos de amor” (2011) a song cycle based on Neruda’s love poems.
  • Ute Lemper composed “Forever” (2013) an album of the Love poems of Pablo Neruda

Literature

  • Neruda’s 1952 stay in a villa on the island of Capri was fictionalized in Chilean author Antonio Skarmeta‘s 1985 novel Ardiente Paciencia (published as Burning Patience, later known as El cartero de Neruda, or Neruda’s Postman).[59]
  • In 2008 the writer Roberto Ampuero published a novel El caso Neruda, about his private eye Cayetano Brulé, where Pablo Neruda is one of the protagonists.
  • The Dreamer (2010) is a children’s fictional biography of Neruda, “a shy Chilean boy whose spirit develops and thrives despite his father’s relentless negativity”. Written by Pam Muñoz Ryan and illustrated by Peter Sís, the text and illustrations are printed in Neruda’s signature green ink.[60]

Film

  • The Italian film Il Postino, inspired by Antonio Skármeta‘s 1985 novel Ardiente paciencia (Ardent Patience, later known as El cartero de Neruda, or Neruda’s Postman), centres on the story of Pablo Neruda (Philippe Noiret) living in exile on Salina Island near Sicily during the 1950s. While there, he befriends the local postman and inspires in him a love of poetry.
  • Neruda is a 120 minute documentary about his life and poetry including interviews with his friends like Volodia Teitelboim, Jose Balmes, Jorge Edwards, Andrej Wosnessenski, Mikis Theodorakis. This film was directed by the German filmmaker Ebbo Demant and broadcast 2004 in the European culture TV channel ARTE and the German public-service broadcaster ARD.

See also

Portal icon Poetry portal

Leave a comment