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“No writer of
world renown is perhaps so little known to North Americans as Chilean
poet Pablo Neruda,” observed New York Times Book Review critic Selden
Rodman. Numerous critics have praised Neruda as the greatest poet
writing in the Spanish language during his lifetime, although many
readers in the United States have found it difficult to disassociate
Neruda’s poetry from his fervent commitment to communism. An added
difficulty lies in the fact that Neruda’s poetry is very hard to
translate; his works available in English represent only a small portion
of his total output. Nonetheless, declared John Leonard in the New York
Times, Neruda “was, I think, one of the great ones, a Whitman of the
South.”
Born Ricardo
Eliezer Neftali Reyes y Basoalto, Neruda adopted the pseudonym under
which he would become famous while still in his early teens. He grew up
in Temuco in the backwoods of southern Chile. Neruda’s literary
development received assistance from unexpected sources. Among his
teachers “was the poet Gabriela Mistral, who would be a Nobel laureate
years before Neruda,” reported Manuel Duran and Margery Safir in Earth
Tones: The Poetry of Pablo Neruda. “It is almost inconceivable that two
such gifted poets should find each other in such an unlikely spot.
Mistral recognized the young Neftali’s talent and encouraged it by
giving the boy books and the support he lacked at home.”
By the time he
finished high school, Neruda had published in local papers and Santiago
magazines, and had won several literary competitions. In 1921 he left
southern Chile for Santiago to attend school, with the intention of
becoming a French teacher but was an indifferent student. While in
Santiago, Neruda completed one of his most critically acclaimed and
original works, the cycle of love poems titled Veinte poemas de amor y
una canción desesperada—published in English translation as Twenty Love
Poems and a Song of Despair. This work quickly marked Neruda as an
important Chilean poet.
Veinte poemas
also brought the author notoriety due to its explicit celebration of
sexuality, and, as Robert Clemens remarked in the Saturday Review,
“established him at the outset as a frank, sensuous spokesman for love.”
While other Latin American poets of the time used sexually explicit
imagery, Neruda was the first to win popular acceptance for his
presentation. Mixing memories of his love affairs with memories of the
wilderness of southern Chile, he creates a poetic sequence that not only
describes a physical liaison, but also evokes the sense of displacement
that Neruda felt in leaving the wilderness for the city.
“Traditionally,” stated Rene de Costa in The Poetry of Pablo Neruda,
“love poetry has equated woman with nature. Neruda took this established
mode of comparison and raised it to a cosmic level, making woman into a
veritable force of the universe.”
“In Veinte
poemas,” reported David P. Gallagher in Modern Latin American
Literature, “Neruda journeys across the sea symbolically in search of an
ideal port. In 1927, he embarked on a real journey, when he sailed from
Buenos Aires for Lisbon, ultimately bound for Rangoon where he had been
appointed honorary Chilean consul.” Duran and Safir explained that
“Chile had a long tradition, like most Latin American countries, of
sending her poets abroad as consuls or even, when they became famous, as
ambassadors.” The poet was not really qualified for such a post and was
unprepared for the squalor, poverty, and loneliness to which the
position would expose him. “Neruda travelled extensively in the Far East
over the next few years,” Gallagher continued, “and it was during this
period that he wrote his first really splendid book of poems, Residencia
en la tierra, a book ultimately published in two parts, in 1933 and
1935.” Neruda added a third part, Tercera residencia, in 1947.
Residencia en
la tierra, published in English as Residence on Earth, is widely
celebrated as containing “some of Neruda’s most extraordinary and
powerful poetry,” according to de Costa. Born of the poet’s feelings of
alienation, the work reflects a world which is largely chaotic and
senseless, and which—in the first two volumes—offers no hope of
understanding. De Costa quoted Spanish poet García Lorca as calling
Neruda “a poet closer to death than to philosophy, closer to pain than
to insight, closer to blood than to ink. A poet filled with mysterious
voices that fortunately he himself does not know how to decipher.” With
its emphasis on despair and the lack of adequate answers to mankind’s
problems, Residencia en la tierra in some ways foreshadowed the
post-World War II philosophy of existentialism. “Neruda himself came to
regard it very harshly,” wrote Michael Wood in the New York Review of
Books. “It helped people to die rather than to live, he said, and if he
had the proper authority to do so he would ban it, and make sure it was
never reprinted.”
Residencia en
la tierra also marked Neruda’s emergence as an important international
poet. By the time the second volume of the collection was published in
1935 the poet was serving as consul in Spain, where “for the first
time,” reported Duran and Safir, “he tasted international recognition,
at the heart of the Spanish language and tradition. At the same time . .
. poets like Rafael Alberti and Miguel Hernandez, who had become
closely involved in radical politics and the Communist movement, helped
politicize Neruda.” When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Neruda
was among the first to espouse the Republican cause with the poem
España en el corazon—a gesture that cost him his consular post. He later
served in France and Mexico, where his politics caused less anxiety.
Communism
rescued Neruda from the despair he expressed in the first parts of
Residencia en la tierra, and led to a change in his approach to poetry.
He came to believe “that the work of art and the statement of
thought—when these are responsible human actions, rooted in human
need—are inseparable from historical and political context,” reported
Salvatore Bizzarro in Pablo Neruda: All Poets the Poet. “He argued that
there are books which are important at a certain moment in history, but
once these books have resolved the problems they deal with they carry in
them their own oblivion. Neruda felt that the belief that one could
write solely for eternity was romantic posturing.” This new attitude led
the poet in new directions; for many years his work, both poetry and
prose, advocated an active role in social change rather than simply
describing his feelings, as his earlier oeuvre had done.
This
significant shift in Neruda’s poetry is recognizable in Tercera
residencia, the third and final part of the “Residencia” series.
Florence L. Yudin noted in Hispania that the poetry of this volume was
overlooked when published and remains neglected due to its overt
ideological content. “Viewed as a whole,” Yudin wrote, “Tercera
residencia illustrates a fluid coherence of innovation with
retrospective, creativity with continuity, that would characterize
Neruda’s entire career.” According to de Costa, as quoted by Yudin, “The
new posture assumed is that of a radical nonconformist. Terra
residencia must, therefore, be considered in this light, from the dual
perspective of art and society, poetry and politics.”
“Las Furias y
las penas,” the longest poem of Tercera residencia, embodies the
influence of both the Spanish Civil War and the works of Spanish Baroque
poet Francisco Gomez de Quevedo y Villegas on Neruda. The poem explores
the psychic agony of lost love and its accompanying guilt and
suffering, conjured in the imagery of savage eroticism, alienation, and
loss of self-identity. Neruda’s message, according to Yudin, is that
“what makes up life’s narrative (‘cuento’) are single, unconnected
events, governed by chance, and meaningless (‘suceden’). Man is out of
control, like someone hallucinating one-night stands in sordid places.”
Yudin concluded that, “Despite its failed dialectic, ‘Las Furias y las
penas’ sustains a haunting beauty in meaning and tone” and “bears the
unmistakable signature of Neruda’s originality and achievement.”
While some
critics have felt that Neruda’s devotion to Communist dogma was at times
extreme, others recognize the important impact his politics had on his
poetry. Clayton Eshleman wrote in the introduction to Cesar Vallejo’s
Poemas humanos/ Human Poems that “Neruda found in the third book of
Residencia the key to becoming the twentieth-century South American
poet: the revolutionary stance which always changes with the tides of
time.” Gordon Brotherton, in Latin American Poetry: Origins and
Presence, expanded on this idea by noting that “Neruda, so prolific, can
be lax, a ‘great bad poet’ (to use the phrase Juan Ramon Jimenez used
to revenge himself on Neruda). And his change of stance ‘with the tides
of time’ may not always be perfectly effected. But . . . his dramatic
and rhetorical skills, better his ability to speak out of his
circumstances, . . . was consummate. In his best poetry (of which there
is much) he speaks on a scale and with an agility unrivaled in Latin
America.”
Neruda expanded
on his political views in the poem Canto general, which, according to
de Costa, is a “lengthy epic on man’s struggle for justice in the New
World.” Although Neruda had begun the poem as early as 1935—when he had
intended it to be limited in scope only to Chile—he completed some of
the work while serving in the Chilean senate as a representative of the
Communist Party. However, party leaders recognized that the poet needed
time to work on his opus, and granted him a leave of absence in 1947.
Later that year, however, Neruda returned to political activism, writing
letters in support of striking workers and criticizing Chilean
President Videla. Early in 1948 the Chilean Supreme Court issued an
order for his arrest, and Neruda finished the Canto general while hiding
from Videla’s forces.
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