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Thursday, Jul 15, 2004

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Pablo Neruda, poet of the people

By Jorge Heine

Pablo Neruda, whose centennial we celebrate this year, changed the way we relate to Spanish, and language more generally; recast Latin America and the Americas through his metaphors; and took on the cause of the dispossessed of this world.

ALBIE SACHS, the noted South African writer, lawyer and activist (now a judge in South Africa's Constitutional Court) once told me that his body's shape (he lost an arm while opening a parcel bomb sent to him by the South African police to his home in Mozambique, where he lived in the 1980s) was really due to Pablo Neruda's influence. By that he meant that reading Neruda's kind of poetry as a teenager changed his outlook not only on literature but on life, and sent him irredeemably on the course towards that fateful day in Maputo. He may have exaggerated; Albie's father was a well-known trade unionist, so that much of his Weltanschauung may have been imbibed at home. But the very fact that my good friend Albie could tell such a story reflects the degree to which Neruda's work marked so many of our generation.

The man whom Gabriel García Márquez called the greatest poet of the twentieth century in any language, and whose centennial we celebrate this year, changed the way we relate to Spanish, and language more generally; recast Latin America and the Americas through his metaphors; and took on the cause of the dispossessed of this world.

The son of a railway worker and a primary school teacher (whom he never got to know), born in one obscure provincial town in Southern Chile and raised in another, he rose to such literary heights through sheer talent and intelligence. His poetry is wide-ranging and versatile. His Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair (in which he paraphrases one of Tagore's poems), published when he was all of twenty years old, has captured the imagination of many, but speaks especially to young lovers. His Canto General, but particularly his Heights of Macchu Picchu, confronts our American and pre-Columbian roots with a starkness no other poet has, in an effort, as he put it, "to fill with words the vast empty spaces of South America." As the Nobel citation put it, he received that award "for a poetry that impelled by a vital force, gives life to the destiny and dreams of a continent." He could be profoundly lyrical, as well as intensely political, but he also sang to that most spectacularly misnamed of oceans, the Pacific Ocean, which he loved so much (and in front of which he built his favourite house, Isla Negra), as well as to the forests, rivers, glaciers and lakes of Chile.

It has been said that nothing ordinary was alien to Neruda. He has odes to red wine and tomato, to onion and artichoke, to bees and bicycle, among other subjects.

He loved life and life's simplest things; that is why he sang to them with such directness, brio and gusto. When writing about love, he would write about the thighs and the breasts of his beloved; when about the Americas, about its minerals and volcanoes; when about politics, he would use names and last names, of countries and leaders. He did not mince words and did not use euphemisms. No abstract theorising for him, no vague metaphysical reflections. He liked what he could touch and feel, and as Federico García Lorca put it, was "closer to blood than to ink." And I would venture to speculate that is why his books have sold in the millions and some consider him to be the most widely read poet in history.

Yet despite his prodigious and diverse output, he insisted that not only his poetry, but also his personal life and his politics formed an indivisible whole, a seamless web, something apparent in a new biography by Adam Feinstein just published by Bloomsbury in London. There is Neruda the warm and charming host, the prankster for whom his birthday celebrations, in which he loved to dress up in costumes, were legendary; there is Neruda the firm believer in international solidarity and humanism, especially apparent in his efforts to help refugees of the Spanish Civil War go to Chile; there is the mentor and supporter of younger poets and writers (including so many of Chile's leading writers today, including Isabel Allende, Antonio Skármeta and Jorge Edwards) whose company he cherished and for whom he was a great inspiration; and there is the almost child-like collector of most things under the sun, from African masks to local sea-shells, still to be seen in his well-preserved homes in Santiago ("La Chascona"), Isla Negra, and Valparaíso ("La Sebastiana"), and of which a visiting foreign friend once told me, "I have never seen such a huge collection of junk assembled under one roof."

For many, his most significant work is Residence on Earth, first published in English by New Directions in New York in 1946, largely the product of what we might call his "Eastern Sojourn," his years as Consul of Chile in Rangoon first in 1927, then in Colombo, subsequently in Batavia, Java, and finally in Singapore. It was in those years that he visited India for the first time, coming to Calcutta in 1928 to attend an All-India Congress Committee session, where he met Gandhi, Nehru and other leaders of India's freedom struggle (for him, "the entire awakening of Asia" originated in India). In Madras, he was struck by Indian women and their saris, wrapped "around the body with supernatural grace, covering them in a single flame as shining silk." His poem India, 1951 resulted from his second visit, when he came to deliver a peace message to Prime Minister Nehru, and he visited Calcutta again in 1957, at the invitation of the distinguished Bengali poet Bishnu De.

In turn, his work had a strong impact on Indian, especially Bengali poets, starting with his España en el corazón, which draws on his years in Barcelona and Madrid just before the Spanish Civil War, and where he associated with Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Miguel Hernández and others of that remarkable generation of Spanish poets. Ilan Stavans's massive, 1000-page volume The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, published in 2003, has made available an excellent selection of 600 poems for the English-speaking public. And this year has seen the publication of several of his works in India, including an anthology in Hindi published by the Sahitya Akademi in a translation by Chandrabali Singh, Pablo Neruda: Kavita Sanchyan; the recent book by Professor Priyadarsi Mukherji of JNU, Cross Cultural Impressions; as well as a documentary, Soul Connection, on the relationship between a number of Latin American writers (most prominently Neruda) and India, while Professor K. Satchidanandan continues to translate and publish Neruda in Malayalam.

Neruda was very much a man and a poet of his time — the first three fourths of the twentieth century — a time very different from our own. But that does not make him any less universal. His voice remains with us and will do so for a long time.

(Jorge Heine is the Ambassador of Chile to India.)

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Pablo Neruda, poet of the people