--Pablo Neruda

This is the centennial celebration of one of the greatest Latin American poets of the last century, Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto,( Pablo Neruda a pen name he adopted from the Czech poet, Jan Neruda, while a teenager). Neruda was born in Parral, Chile on July 12, l904, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, and died two weeks after the military coup in l973 that ‘ousted’ Salvador Allende; his friend (assassination? or ‘a suicide,’ according to the CIA) and ushered in the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (`our’ guy).

“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people.”-Henry Kissinger.

A poet, diplomat (Singapore, Java, Madrid, etc.), exile, and a member of the Communist Party who once ran for the presidency in l970, Pablo Nerruda was the epitome of the poet of conscience. “The Dictators”-An odor has remained among the sugarcane/a mixture of blood and body…; “The United Fruit Co.”-When the trumpets had sounded and all/was in readiness on the face of the earth,/Jehovah divided his universe: Anaconda/Ford Motors/Coca-Cola Inc., and similar entities:/the most succulent item of all,/The United Fruit Company Incorporated/reserved for itself: the heartland/and coasts of my country.”

I wish I could remember the first Neruda poem I read, probably in the l960’s, probably from something in one of Ferlinghetti’s City Lights publications, or perhaps the Evergreen Review. The Robert Bly translations of Neruda’s work were also beginning to emerge around then.

Most likely it was a love poem I read, because Neruda wrote love poems so drenched in sunlight and passion one could taste the words, pick them like ripe fruit, feel the heat. No one in America wrote poetry like Neruda.

You opened his book, Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Cancio’n Desesperado
(Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair) Spanish on one side, English on the other, and you could not take your eyes off the words…mixing Spanish and English, mixing the images, savoring the lines, touching mind and heart at the same time. What a magnificent title! you said to yourself. Not to mention the very titles of the poems …”Body of a Woman,” “The Light Wraps You,” “I Remember You as You Were,” “Drunk with Pines,” “Your Breast Is Enough,” “Tonight I Can Write,” etc. Here was a book of poetry that would never die. And only his second collection of poems, written at the age of twenty!

There is a beautiful and perfect surreal quality to much of his work. Something like Picasso trying to write poems with a brush. Yet it all makes sense-once you let Neruda work his spell. Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,/you look like a world, lying in surrender./My rough peasant’s body digs in you/and makes the son leap from the depth of the earth.

In his Memoirs, (published in l974), a lyrical book filled with his life of politics, poetry, friends, travels, (one chapter titled,” Poetry Is an Occupation”) he speaks of his childhood and poetry:

“I have often been asked when I wrote my first poem, when poetry was born in me.

“I’ll try to remember. Once, far back in my childhood, when I had barely learned to read, I felt an intense emotion, and set down a few words, half rhymed but strange to me, different from every day language. Overcome by a deep anxiety, something I had not experienced before, a kind of anguish and sadness, I wrote them neatly on a piece of paper. It was a poem to my mother, that is, to the one I knew, the angelic stepmother whose gentle shadow watched over my childhood. I had no way of all of judging my first composition, which I took to my parents. They were in the dining room, immersed in one of those hushed conversations that, more than a river, separate the world of children and the world of grownups. Still trembling after this first visit from the muse, I held out to them the paper with the lines of verse. My father took it absentmindedly,. read it absentmindedly, and returned it to me absentmindedly, saying: “Where did you copy this from?” Then he went on talking to my mother in a lowered voice about his important and remote affairs.

“That, I seem to remember, was how my first poem was born, and that was how I had my first sample of irresponsible literary criticism.”