I don"t want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses
II.
Pablo Neruda was born on July 12th, 1904, in a small frontier town in Southern Chile, the son of a railroad worker. The father was killed in a fall from his train while Neruda was still a boy. He said, "My father is buried in one of the rainiest cemeteries in the world." He described his childhood in Temuco in an essay called "Childhood and Poetry," printed as a preface to his Collected Poems. His given name was Neftali Beltran, and his pseudonym was taken very young out of admiration for a 19th century Czech writer.
In 1920, when he was sixteen, Neruda was sent off to Santiago for high school. His poem "Friends on The Road" is written about those days. He was already composing poems, a poetry of high animal spirits and enthusiasm. At nineteen, he published a book called Twenty Poems of Love and One Ode of Desperation, which is still loved all over South America.
I remember you as you were that final autumn.
You were a gray beret and the whole being at peace.
In your eyes the fires of the evening dusk were battling,
And the leaves were falling in the waters of your soul.
He said later that "love poems were sprouting out all over my body."
Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,
when you surrender, you stretch out like the world.
My body, savage and peasant, undermines you
and makes a son leap in the bottom of the earth.
In the preface to a short novel he wrote at this time, he said: "In my day to day life, I am a tranquil man, the enemy of laws, leaders, and established inst.i.tutions. I find the middle cla.s.s odious, and I like the lives of people who are restless and unsatisfied, whether they are artists or criminals."
The governments of South America have a tradition of encouraging young poets by offering them consular posts. When Neruda was twenty-three, he was recognized as a poet, and the Chilean government gave him a post in the consular service in the Far East. During the next five years, he lived in turn in Burma, Siam, China, j.a.pan, and India. Neruda remarks in the interview printed later in this book that those years were years of great isolation and loneliness. Many of the poems that appear in the first two books of Residencia En La Tierra were written during those years.
Neruda came back to South America in 1932, when he was twenty-eight years old. For a while he was consul in Buenos Aires; he met Lorca there, when Lorca came to Argentina on a lecture tour. Residencia I was published in 1933. In 1934 he was a.s.signed to Spain.
The Spanish poets had already known his wild poems for several years, and greeted him with admiration and enthusiasm. The house in Madrid where Neruda and his wife Delia lived soon became overflowing with poets-Lorca and Hernndez especially loved to come. Residencia II was published in Spain in 1935. Lorca, Hernndez and many others published their surrealist poems in Neruda"s magazine Caballo Verde por la Poesa (Green Horse for Poetry). Spain had been for fifteen years in a great period of poetry, the most fertile for Spanish poetry since the 1500s. This period was brought to an end by the Civil War.
On July 19th, 1936, Franco invaded from North Africa. Neruda, overstepping his power as consul, immediately declared Chile on the side of the Spanish Republic. After being retired as Consul, he went to Paris, where he raised money for Spanish refugees, helped by Breton and other French poets, and by Vallejo. Neruda"s poetry now became seriously political for the first time. Neruda had come to love Spain, living there, and he shared the shock of the Spanish poets, which was the shock of losing their country to the right wing. The growth of political energy in his poetry was probably inevitable in any case. In Residencia I and II, the outer world is seen with such clarity, and with such a sense of its suffering, that the later development of political poetry does not come as a surprise. He returned to America in 1940, and served as Chilean consul to Mexico during 1941 and 1942. The poems he had written about the Spanish Civil War were incorporated into Residencia, under the t.i.tle of Residencia III.
In 1944, the workers from Antofogasta, the nitrate mining section of Chile, asked Neruda to run for Senator from their district. He did, and was elected. He now found himself in his country"s Senate, as Yeats had. He took a keen interest in Chilean politics. Several years later he described in a long poem written to the Venezuelan poet, Miguel Otero Silva, how happy the Senators would have been if he had remained a love poet: When I was writing my love poems, which sprouted out from me everywhere, and I was dying from depression, nomadic, abandoned, gnawing the alphabet, they said to me: "What a great man you are, Theocritus!"
I am not Theocritus: I took hold of life, and faced her, and kissed her until I subdued her, and then I went through the tunnels of the mines to see how other men live.
And when I came out, my hands stained with depression and garbage, I held up my hands, and showed them to the generals, and said, "I do not take responsibility for this crime."
They started to cough, became disgusted, left off saying h.e.l.lo, gave up calling me Theocritus, and ended by insulting me and a.s.signing the entire police force to arrest me, because I did not continue to be occupied exclusively with metaphysical subjects.
Neruda"s experience as a Senator ended, as he mentions, with his pursuit by the Secret Police. It came about in this way: in 1948, Gonzlez Videla, a right-wing strong man supported by United States interests, took over as dictator. Six months later Neruda, as Senator, attacked him for violations of the Chilean const.i.tution. Videla responded by charging Neruda with treason. Neruda did not go into voluntary exile, as expected, but attacked Videla once more, and Videla ordered him arrested. Neruda went underground ; miners and working people, to save his life, pa.s.sed him from one house to another at night, first in Chile, later in other South American countries. He moved about for several months. Finally he crossed the Andes on horseback, and made it to Mexico ; from there he flew out of the continent to Paris. All this time he was working on his new book, which he called Canto General; it was finished in February of 1949.
The t.i.tle suggests a poetry that refuses to confine itself to a specific subject matter or kind of poem. Neruda worked on the book for fourteen years. It is the greatest long poem written on the American continent since Leaves of Gra.s.s. It is a geological, biological, and political history of South America. The book contains 340 poems arranged in fifteen sections. The fertility of imagination is astounding. Not all of the poems, of course, are of equal quality. In some, especially those written while Neruda was being hunted by the Chilean secret police, the anger breaks through the container of the poem. We are very slow about translating poetry in the United States, so it may be fifteen or twenty years before we have a translation of this book. For that reason, I have added in this small selection, along with the poems translated from Canto General, a very brief description of each section of Canto General, to give the reader some idea of the content and movement of the book.
The book as a whole gives a depressing picture of the relations between the U.S. State Department and South American governments. Neruda"s Canto General is not a great favorite of U.S. cultural organs dealing with Pan American relations. North Americans, both in universities and in the U.S.I.S., who know Neruda"s work often say quite soberly that since Neruda became interested in politics, he has not written a poem of any value.
Neruda went from Paris to Russia for the one hundred fiftieth anniversary celebration of Pushkin"s birth, and then back to Mexico, where the first edition of Canto General was published in 1950.
When Gonzlez Videla"s government fell, Neruda returned to Chile. Since 1953 he has lived on Isla Negra, a small island off the coast near Santiago ; in recent years he has spent part of his time in Valparaiso also.
There was a considerable change in style from the inward, surrealist poems of Residencia I and II to the narrative, historical poems of Canto General. However, the style of his poetry has changed several more times since then. Both the Residencia and Canto General poems used, for the most part, the long loping line into which he could put so much power. In the middle 1950s he began writing odes using willowy lines only two or three words long. They were Odas Elementales, or "Odes to Simple Things." He wrote an ode to a wrist.w.a.tch, which Jerome Rothenberg has translated very well, an ode to air, to his socks, to fire, to a watermelon, to printing, to salt. Book after book of these odes came out until he had published a hundred or so odes in three or four years. More recently he has embarked on a book of autobiographical poems called Memorial to Isla Negra.
At the moment, Neruda entirely dominates South American poetry. I heard a young South American poet complain of Neruda"s abundance. He said that whenever a new idea appears in the air, and some younger poet manages to finish a poem on it, Neruda suddenly publishes three volumes! But, he said, "How can we be mad at Pablo? The poems continue to be good-that"s the worst part of it!"
III.
In "Childhood and Poetry," Neruda speculates on the origin of his poetry.
One time, investigating in the backyard of our house in Temuco the tiny objects and minuscule beings of my world, I came upon a hole in one of the boards of the fence. I looked through the hole and saw a landscape like that behind our house, uncared for, and wild. I moved back a few steps, because I sensed vaguely that something was about to happen. All of a sudden a hand appeared-a tiny hand of a boy about my own age. By the time I came close again, the hand was gone, and in its place there was a marvelous white sheep.
The sheep"s wool was faded. Its wheels had escaped. All of this only made it more authentic. I had never seen such a wonderful sheep. I looked back through the hole but the boy had disappeared. I went into the house and brought out a treasure of my own: a pinecone, opened, full of odor and resin, which I adored. I set it down in the same spot and went off with the sheep.
I never saw either the hand or the boy again. And I have never again seen a sheep like that either. The toy I lost finally in a fire. But even now, in 1954, almost fifty years old, whenever I pa.s.s a toy shop, I look furtively into the window, but it"s no use. They don"t make sheep like that anymore.
I have been a lucky man. To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvelous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses-that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.
That exchange brought home to me for the first time a precious idea: that all of humanity is somehow together. That experience came to me again much later ; this time it stood out strikingly against a background of trouble and persecution.
It won"t surprise you then that I attempted to give something resiny, earthlike, and fragrant in exchange for human brotherhood. Just as I once left the pinecone by the fence, I have since left my words on the door of so many people who were unknown to me, people in prison, or hunted, or alone.
That is the great lesson I learned in my childhood, in the backyard of a lonely house. Maybe it was nothing but a game two boys played who didn"t know each other and wanted to pa.s.s to the other some good things of life. Yet maybe this small and mysterious exchange of gifts remained inside me also, deep and indestructible, giving my poetry light.
This curious and beautiful story, which Neruda carefully links to the origins of his own poetry, is a conscious rejection of the connection between poetry and sickness, so often insisted on by Europeans. What is most startling about Neruda, I think, when we compare him to Eliot or Dylan Thomas or Pound, is the great affection that accompanies his imagination. Neruda read his poetry for the first time in the United States in June of 1966 at the Poetry Center in New York, and it was clear from that reading that his poetry is intended as a gift. When Eliot gave a reading, one had the feeling that the reading was a cultural experience, and that Eliot doubted very much if you were worth the trouble, but he"d try anyway. When Dylan Thomas read, one had the sense that he was about to perform some magical and fantastic act, perhaps painting a Virgin while riding on three white horses, and maybe you would benefit from this act, and maybe you wouldn"t. Pound used to scold the audience for not understanding what he did. When Neruda reads, the mood in the room is one of affection between the audience and himself.
IV.
We tend to a.s.sociate the modern imagination with the jerky imagination, which starts forward, stops, turns around, switches from subject to subject. In Neruda"s poems, the imagination drives forward, joining the entire poem in a rising flow of imaginative energy. In the underworld of the consciousness, in the thickets where Freud, standing a short distance off, pointed out incest bushes, murder trees, half-buried primitive altars, and unburied bodies, Neruda"s imagination moves with utter a.s.surance, sweeping from one spot to another almost magically. The starved emotional lives of notary publics he links to the whiteness of flour, s.e.xual desire to the shape of shoes, death to the barking sound where there is no dog. His imagination sees the hidden connections between conscious and unconscious substances with such a.s.surance that he hardly bothers with metaphors-he links them by tying their hidden tails. He is a new kind of creature moving about under the surface of everything. Moving under the earth, he knows everything from the bottom up (which is the right way to learn the nature of a thing) and therefore is never at a loss for its name. Compared to him, most American poets resemble blind men moving gingerly along the ground from tree to tree, from house to house, feeling each thing for a long time, and then calling out "House!" when we already know it is a house.
Neruda has confidence in what is hidden. The Establishment respects only what the light has fallen on, but Neruda likes the unlit just as well. He writes of small typists without scorn, and of the souls of huge, sleeping snakes.
He violates the rules for behavior set up by the wise. The conventionally wise a.s.sure us that to a surrealist the outer world has no reality-only his inner flow of images is real. Neruda"s work demolishes this ba.n.a.lity. Neruda"s poetry is deeply surrealist, and yet ent.i.ties of the outer world like the United Fruit Company have greater force in his poems than in those of any strictly "outward" poet alive. Once a poet takes a political stand, the wise a.s.sure us that he will cease writing good poetry. Neruda became a Communist in the middle of his life and has remained one: at least half of his greatest work, one must admit, was written after that time. He has written great poetry at all times of his life.
Finally, many critics in the United States insist the poem must be hard-bitten, impersonal, and rational, lest it lack sophistication. Neruda is wildly romantic, and more sophisticated than Hulme or Pound could dream of being. He has few literary theories. Like Vallejo, Neruda wishes to help humanity, and tells the truth for that reason.
Robert Bly from Veinte Poemas
de Amor y Una Cancin
Desesperada
(Twenty Poems of Love and
One Ode of Desperation)
1924.
1.
Cuerpo de mujer, blancas colinas, muslos blancos
te pareces al mundo en tu act.i.tud de entrega.
Mi cuerpo de labriego salvaje te socava
y hace saltar el hijo del fondo de la tierra.