Poet of the people
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Neruda's most endearing quality was his respect for poetry as an occupation, writes TISHANI DOSHI.
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THE HINDU PHOTO LIBRARY
Pablo Neruda: Forging poetry in the frontlines.
IT is now more than 31 years since the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda died in Santiago, weakened by cancer and heartbroken over the coup that ousted President Salvador Allende. It is more than a 100 years since the year of his birth in Parral, Chile, to a railroad worker father, and a mother who would die of tuberculosis two months after he was born. It has been years and years since the world has seen a poet like Neruda, who ventured out of his beloved homeland, "out of that landscape, that mud, that silence, to roam, to go singing through the world."
Perhaps Neruda's most endearing quality, aside from his self-professed likeness to a tapir, was his respect for poetry as an occupation. Even as a young man of 16, he was unashamed to announce himself as a poet. For Neruda, poetry was a deep inner calling in man. It was a fight against mystery, realism, absorption. It was the connection between a man's hands and his work, between the eyes and the viscera. He demanded, more than anyone else, that the poet take his rightful place in the street, to fight in the light and the darkness.
Born to love
His friend, the Spanish poet, Federico Garæia Lorca, whose assassination in Granada moved Neruda's poetry from out of the realms of love into politics, called Neruda "closer to blood than ink". But to bracket Neruda neatly as a "political poet" is to take the aroma of wood out of him, to drain the ocean out of his body. "I believe I was born not to pass judgement, but to love," he writes early on in his Memoirs. "Beside me, everything that existed and continued always to exist in my poetry: the distant sound of the sea, the cries of the wild birds, and love burning, without consuming itself, like an immortal bush."
The book that would announce Neruda to the world was Twenty Love Songs and A Song of Despair, which Neruda published at the age of 20, the age when he said, "Love poems were breaking out all over my body." Throughout his life, he would meet people who could recite entire poems from this collection, from presidents to peasants, and it is still undoubtedly staple fare for lovers in Latin America today. But the violent events of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and the political turmoil in the rest of the world could not escape Neruda. In his poem "Let Me Explain a Few Things," he traces this move from the inward looking self to the outer world, "You will ask: and where are the lilacs/ and the metaphysics petalled with poppies/ and the rain repeatedly spattering its words ... ..Come and see the blood in the/ streets./ Come and see/ the blood in the streets/ Come and see the blood/ in the streets!"
A poet's religion
For most of his life, Neruda did precisely this — wander the streets of the world. It was in his first foreign posting in Burma, where he realised that the streets were the poet's religion. In India, he confronted the brooding eyes of young freedom-fighters in the crowded streets; in Ceylon, the aching solitude of men who walked like tiny insects in the shadows of giant Buddhas; in Spain, the battleground of gladiators; in Latin America, the unending pampa; in Mexico, the markets where all of life was explained; in China, the throngs of workers in unanimous sky-blue overalls; in Russia, the overarching immensity, where nature was in union with man, and where revolution was life.
Neruda travelled along the length and breadth of the earth scattering his poems to men, only to return again and again to the colossal trees of his Andean forest where "leaves have been falling for centuries", and where the roots are like "overturned cathedrals". For Neruda, the forced exile imposed upon him because of his political leanings (he was an ardent communist), was difficult. He was convinced that everyman's journey should always be homeward. "I believe a man should live in his own country... I cannot live without having my feet and my hands on it and my ear against it... . My life is a long pilgrimage that is always turning on itself."
As intricate and intense as Neruda's relationship to nature was, his connection to people was equally magnetic. In his lifetime, he belonged to an impressive fraternity: Picasso, Paul Eluard, Ilya Ehrenburg, Nazim Hikmet, Garbriela Mistral, Rafael Alberti, Miguel Hernandez, and Gabriel Garciá Marquez. In his Memoirs, he recalls special moments with each of them, and with the ordinary people he encountered on the streets. He recalls the thrill of reading to crowds as large as 130,000 in Sao Paulo; drawing deep long sobs from 50 working men who listened to him on improvised benches; and in the depth of the nitrate fields of the Lota mines, where a man came to him with shining eyes and said, "I have known you for a long time brother."
Frontline poetry
Neruda believed that poetry could find a place in man's struggles. He wanted to give people the need, the hunger, for a single line of poetry. He believed, like the Russian poet Mayakovsy, that the application of poetry could work for the benefit of the majority. He did not want an isolated poetry that dealt with sublime things while the earth around was shattering like broken glass. He held a high place for the poets who sang their ballads on the front lines, for the soldiers who carried a book of verse on their long marches instead of food, for leaders like Che Guevara, who always "had a place next to his weapons for poetry."
The earth and the sea
Days before his own death, he was still devouring the newspapers for every bit of information, still writing about the events around him. His wife, Matilde, claimed that in the end, it was not the cancer that killed him, but the killing in the streets which would make him cry out in delirium, "They're shooting them. They're shooting them."
Neruda always believed in the possibility of love, despite knowing that, "the world does not cleanse itself of wars, does not wash off the blood, does not get over its hate". It was important to him that poets move away from misery and suffering, and lead the rebellion to joy. He wanted poetry to be the same kind of rebellion as the coming of Spring. His appetite for language and life was endless, "I am omnivorous... I would like to swallow the whole earth, drink the whole sea."
On September 23, 1973, when Neruda died in Santiago, it was like something he had already written about. "I want to be buried in a name, some especially chosen, beautiful-sounding name so that its syllables will sing over my bones, near the sea." His
last words were "Me voy" (I'm going).
Pablo Neruda's Memoirs (translated by Hardie St. Martin) were recently republished by Souvenir Press, London, on the occasion of Neruda's centenary along with Isla Negra (translated by Alastair Reed) and Residence on Earth (translated by Donald D. Walsh).
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