PROFILE
The politics of poetry
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`Neruda himself thought that those who wanted to separate his political poetry from the rest were enemies of poetry.'
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AFP
Pablo Neruda with the Nobel Prize in October, 1971.
PABLO NERUDA, Chilean poet, political activist and a simple human being, became a legend in his lifetime itself. It is not a mere coincidence that in many stories and novels of Latin American writers Pablo Neruda appears as a protagonist. García Márquez's story "I sell my dreams", included in his collection entitled Twelve Pilgrim Stories (1992), revolves around a woman Frau Frida, who earns a living foretelling other peoples' lives by interpreting her dreams. In a chance encounter with Neruda she tells him about her extraordinary power of dreaming. The poet dismisses her interpretation of dreams and adds that "nothing but poetry is gifted with intuition and far sight".
Faith in poetry
Neruda's faith in the power of poetry was not because he wrote thousands of verses but because his poetry held meaning for the most common and ordinary people. This closeness of the poet with the people has been captured in a splendid manner by Antonio Skármeta in his novel Neruda's Postman, later made into the film "Il Postino". When Neruda finds that Mario, the postman, has copied one of his love poems to woo his beloved and tells him that it is plagiarism, he is told by the postman that poetry does not belong to the one who writes it but to the one who uses it. While Neruda helps transform Mario into a poet, the postman in the process of learning to compose verses becomes a revolutionary.
With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Neruda got involved in the heroic resistance against the fascist forces. He was dismissed from his consular post for his involvement and his poet friends became targets of fascist attacks. Rafael Alberti's house was torched and García Lorca was assassinated. Neruda's outrage against the events is reflected in his collection of poems entitled Spain in my Heart (1936). These poems were printed under extraordinary circumstances. Amidst the roar of guns, the soldiers learnt to print with Manuel Altolaguirre's printing machine in an old mill. These poems were so eloquent and had such "power of speech" that they became part of peoples' discourse against fascism and war.
Nine days before his death and 72 hours after the fascist coup led by Pinochet in 1973, Neruda started writing the last chapter of his Memoirs in which he described the coup as a criminal putsch against the people of Chile. His funeral became the first massive protest meeting against the military dictatorship.
These examples drive home the point that there are perhaps very few poets or writers who have had such a great impact on world literature and politics.
Subjective melancholy
Pablo Neruda (1904 - 1973) lived for 69 years out of which he wrote poetry for 55 years. Thus were born thousands of his poems and copious pages of other writings in prose. The publication of Crepusculario (1923) and Twenty Love Poems (1924) won him acclaim in Chilean literary circles at a very early age. A tone of subjective melancholy dominates the poems in these collections. Neruda's contact with the forests of Araucanía, the volcanoes, the cold torrential and interminable rain, the wind, the sound of the sea waves lashing the cliffs, left a deep impression on his young mind. Twenty Love Poems is a collection of intense and passionate poetry, about adolescent love, written in a warm, human and personal tone.
Fight against loneliness
It is often said that Neruda was a solitary person. Though it is true that he experienced extreme loneliness at several stages of his life, first in Temuco, then as Consul in the Far East where Residence on Earth (1933 - 47) was composed, and then during his years of underground activity and exile, his life and his poetry are stories of a solitary man's conscious fight against loneliness. In Residence, Neruda deals with the themes of death as a result of a slow disintegration and the decrepit objects of everyday use become symbols of the emptiness of life. The poet seems to be experiencing a kind of existential crisis in a hostile, opaque, impenetrable and uninhabitable world. Art seems to have lost its redemptive power and is incapable of overcoming this degraded reality.
Neruda was a poet with a great sense of self-criticism and self-reflection. The optimistic militant poet in Neruda was to later reject the tone of oppressive desolation and anguished desperation as one of most bitter hours of his poetry. The ideological transformation that Neruda underwent changed the context and objectives of his poetry but the symbols and metaphors that he used continued to be the same, although the language in his later poetry became simpler and more colloquial. Neruda's poetic imagination and his love for the "sounds of the universe" or his relationship with the elements of nature also continued to be an integral part of his poetics.
Neruda's last diplomatic assignment in Mexico in the early 1940s and his contact with Mexican muralists and painters made him reconsider his own poetry in the larger Latin American context and Canto General (1950) became the poetic equivalent of Diego Rivera's murals. Neruda also confessed that his visit to the Incan ruins of Macchu Picchu in Peru opened his eyes to yet another reality. This collection of epic dimensions — in length as well as in scope — seeks to narrate the history of Latin America. It contains one of the finest poetry like "Heights of Macchu Picchu" but at the same time contains pieces of combative poetry criticised by many for its pamphleteer tone.
Between past and future
The poems in this collection are extremely varied, ranging between two visions — some are hermetic, densely metaphoric and represent a return to the matrix, a vision that privileges the past and nostalgically yearns for beginnings. The other vision represents history as a progression where the future is privileged because of the faith in social revolution. In some poems the past is invoked to put into perspective the social inequalities in a post-colonial world, for example, the poems in the parts "Conquistadores" and "Liberators". "They Come for the Islands (1493)" describes the colonisation of the island of Guanahaní, (Cuba) and "Discoverers of Chile" or "The Magellan Heart" describe the destruction and violence unleashed by the colonisers. In the part entitled "Betrayed Sand" he writes against the dictators, especially González Videla, the oligarchies, the advocates of the dollar, the exploiters, the United Fruit Company, the Standard oil Co., diplomats and heavenly poets, to name just a few.
Simple and colloquial language
Between 1952 and 1957 Neruda published several collections of poetry, namely The Grapes and the Wind, a private and anonymous edition of Captain's Verses, Elementary Odes, New Elementary Odes, The Third Book of Odes, Hundred Love Sonnets, Estravagario and Navigations and Returns. In all these collections, Neruda turns to a simple style and colloquial language to talk about objects of everyday life. When Neruda was asked to make a weekly contribution of poetry for the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional, he accepted on the condition that his poems be printed in the main newspaper and not in the literary supplement. It was then that he experimented with a new form — short metre and a pleasing colloquial tone. The odes were meant for collective public readings, hence the simplicity of language and the expression of solidarity with the pain and suffering of the collective. The individual is subsumed in the collective. His "poems no longer could be a sign on the printed page, but were to be uttered and declaimed in order to elicit a response," says Jean Franco. This distinction helped Neruda understand that poetry by nature cannot be a private act, being a form of speech meant that it belonged to the public domain.
Ethics and aesthetics
Though it is often said that politics is only one dimension of a person, in our opinion, no human experience exists without this dimension. Neruda himself thought that those who wanted to separate his political poetry from the rest were enemies of poetry. Separating ethics from aesthetics would mean distancing the man from his poetry.
Neruda was always concerned about human beings and human conditions. He did not believe in no man's land in literature. Each book of poem by him meant always a new beginning and an extraordinary ending. He says in his Memoirs:
I had to suffer and struggle, to love and sing; I drew my worldly share of triumphs and defeats, I tasted bread and blood. What more can a poet want? And all the choices, tears or kisses, loneliness or the fraternity of man, survive in my poetry and are as essential part of it, because I have lived for my poetry and my poetry has nourished everything I have striven for.
Neruda is remembered today for the power of his poetry, for his protest against fascism and oppression, for the voice he gave to the people of Chile.
Vibha Maurya and Vijaya Venkataraman are with the Department of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Delhi.
VIBHA MAURYA VIJAYA VENKATARAMAN
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