Neruda, p.1
Neruda, page 1
Epigraph
If you ask me what my poetry is, I’d have to say: I don’t know. But if you ask my poetry, she’ll tell you who I am.
—PABLO NERUDA, 1943
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Introduction
1: To Temuco
2: Where the Rain Was Born
3: Awkward Adolescence
4: The Young Poet
5: Bohemian Twilights
6: Desperate Songs
7: Dead Gallop
8: Afar
9: Opium and Marriage
10: An Interlude
11: Spain in the Heart
12: Birth and Destruction
13: I Picked a Road
14: América
15: Senator Neruda
16: The Flight
17: Exile and Matilde
18: Matilde and Stalin
19: Fully Empowered
20: Triumph, Destruction, Death
21: The Flowers That Sleep
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Appendix I: Selected Poems in Their Full Length
Appendix II: On the Importance of Poetry in Chile
Basic Chronology
Books by Pablo Neruda and Their Selected In-Print English Translations
Selected Bibliography of Secondary Sources
Notes
Index
Photos Section
Credits
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
The word
was born in the blood,
grew in the dark body, beating,
and flew through the lips and the mouth.
—“The Word”
At the break of dawn on September 11, 1973, generals of the Chilean armed forces launched a coup d’état against the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende, a Marxist-Socialist. The air force bombed the presidential palace; soldiers swarmed the grounds. Allende shot himself rather than face capture.
Twelve days later, Pablo Neruda, central figure of the Chilean Left and beloved poet, died in a Santiago hospital. He had been gravely ill with metastatic prostate cancer. Many say he died of a broken heart as well, as terror swept across his beloved country, as his friends were tortured, as all the social progress they had struggled for was quickly destroyed. While he lay in the hospital, the military ransacked his home.
Neruda’s funeral became the first public act of resistance against the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. As thousands of Chileans were being arrested by the regime and many more were beaten or “disappeared,” Neruda’s friends and fans, his people—those who had not already been forced into hiding—marched through the streets of Santiago with his coffin, crying out his name. Throughout his life, Neruda had fought for peace and justice for his people both on the page and off. Now that the military had stripped them of their liberties, he spoke for them—even in death—once more.
His close friends and foreign ambassadors escorted Neruda’s coffin from his poetically distinctive home to the cemetery. Word spread like wildfire through Santiago that morning, about the growing crowds joining Neruda’s funeral procession. Hundreds came out—despite the soldiers who lined the streets armed with automatic rifles—to invoke him as a champion of courage and truth, and to give voice to their pain over what had happened in the thirteen days since the coup. The marchers mourned the death of their poet, they mourned the death and disappearance of friends and family members, and they mourned the death of their democracy.
Neruda had become a symbol. Throughout his life, he had actively positioned himself to play this role. From his arrival in Santiago in 1921 as a shy, young anarchist, through his sudden designation by the student movement as the voice of his generation, through Allende’s election and Chile’s turbulent transition to socialism, Neruda had fulfilled his own sense of the poet’s calling. This sense encompassed the poet’s duty, a social obligation, a vocation and impulse. In turn, many working people and progressive activists—not just in Chile, not just in Latin America, but all over the world—had adopted him as their hero, claimed him as their own. He was the quintessential “people’s poet.”
From all walks of life, from all corners of the sprawling city of Santiago, citizens joined the long procession. They marched with their grief and sang their way through the streets, in resistance, fists raised in solidarity. With their sadness came a unifying strength. The soldiers may have held their guns as if they were ready, but they could only watch. Pinochet didn’t dare do anything, because this was Pablo Neruda, and international news cameras were capturing the streets. The world was watching.
The mourners walked beside the hearse and lined the narrow streets. The flower-covered casket rode atop the vehicle rather than within it, so that his pueblo could see the Poet one last time. Solemnly, defiantly, they sang the Socialist anthem, “The Internationale,” fists in the air: “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation! Arise, ye wretched of the earth! For justice thunders condemnation: A better world’s in birth!”
Over the grief came the chants: “He isn’t dead, he isn’t dead! He has only fallen asleep, just like the flowers sleep when the sun has set. He isn’t dead, he isn’t dead! He has only fallen asleep!”
When the procession reached Santiago’s main cemetery, the coffin was carried to the grave, draped in the red, white, and blue of the Chilean flag. With her hand like a megaphone up to her mouth, a woman unflinchingly yelled, “¡Jota! ¡Jota! Juventudes Comunistas de Chile!” “Communist Youth of Chile!” Then she yelled, “¡Compañero Pablo Neruda!”
The crowd answered, “¡Presente!” “He is present!”
“¡Compañero Pablo Neruda!”
* * *
In film footage of this historic moment, its intense emotion is crystallized in the image of a grief-stricken man with a timeworn face, carefully groomed hair, and missing teeth, whose eyes fill with tears as he struggles to choke out the word “¡Presente!” along with the crowd. This man embodies the love Chile had for Neruda—not just the literati or the militant Communists, but the everyman, the everywoman. Beyond the political, for many, this march was about Chile’s soul, the hope and pride of the people, and Neruda was its catalyst.
* * *
This biography was born twenty-one years later in 1994, the year I turned twenty-one. Fascinated by Latin America, I studied abroad in Central America as part of my junior year at the University of Michigan, where I was majoring in political science and English literature.
I had been introduced to Neruda before my trip, and I’d packed a bilingual edition of his selected poems that would accompany me on a spectacular set of voyages to come.
That year, I found myself doing fieldwork in the highlands of El Salvador, observing as the National Association of Agricultural Workers helped set up coffee cooperatives among the campesinos. This was following the first rounds of land reform, two years after peace accords had ended the country’s horrific civil war. Reading Neruda’s poetry at night made the history—the human experience of it—palpably real to me. The depth and simplicity of Neruda’s portrayal of humanity in the poems hit my soul.
A few years after I graduated, I headed south again, with the same weathered book in my tattered green pack. Eventually I reached Chile, that slender country sliding off toward Antarctica. Somehow I found myself working on a ranch in its Central Valley, nestled between the Andes and the sea. This was certainly part of Neruda’s territory, his terroir: here grew the grapes that made his velvet red wine and the red poppies that flower in his verse.
The ranch was close to the Pacific coast, the source of so many of his metaphors. His fabled eccentric house at Isla Negra was not too far up the rocky shoreline. It spread out like a boat, for he was, as he liked to say, “a sailor on land”; this was the vessel from which he wrote most of his poetry in the second half of his life. Its walls, often curved, were covered in his endless collections, everything from ship figureheads to butterflies, all overlooking the beach.
I also spent time in Neruda’s home in Chile’s capital, Santiago. Like Isla Negra and La Sebastiana—another small home he had in the funky port city of Valparaíso—it is preserved as a casa-museo, a house-museum. La Chascona was named for the wild curly hair of his third wife, Matilde Urrutia. They built the home as a refuge while he was still living with his second wife, Delia del Carril.
When I approached La Chascona from the street for the first time, adrenaline surged through me. Amid thick green vegetation, I saw that the house had been painted in a color like French blue and rested atop a street-level wall of warm gray and gold stones. A steep hill rose behind, with what seemed like rooms and outcroppings coming off a stepped path.
I entered a room behind heavy brown doors. To my dismay, it was a gift shop. I resigned myself to the limitations of the moment and bought my ticket.
Then I found myself on an open patio canopied by a wooden trellis covered in grapevines. From the patio, stairs climbed up to the living room and other rooms on both sides of the stairs. His library and writer’s cabin were situated at the top of the hill, above the bedroom. The floors alternated in color, blue and yellow, like the tiers of a multicolored and unusually shaped wedding cake; the yellow floor had rounded walls, while the blue floor above was a charming box perched among the treetops. One white door in a white wall featured a rough stone mosaic. This was clearly the house of an arti
There were sculpted metal frames on two windows off of one of the rooms on the patio; one held a P for Pablo, the other an M for Matilde, both set against a pattern of white iron waves. I wanted to run my fingers along them, but such intimacy was prohibited within the confines of the tour.
As I walked from one room to another, I realized Neruda had intricately decorated his home so that he was actually living inside of a visual poem: a double-faced painting of Matilde by friend Diego Rivera next to the stairs leading to their small bedroom; antique maps of the world and many of Chile in one room and a collection of East Asian statues in another; art deco furniture in the living room; a grand photo of Walt Whitman in one of the house’s two bars; several enchanting women figureheads from the prows of old boats; and a collection of books ranging from the maritime history of Chile to Allen Ginsberg’s poetry in his library, along with his Nobel Prize medal.
As I walked out of Neruda’s library toward his little writer’s cabin, the sunset turned the distant Andes into a glowing rigid curtain of breathtaking orange, blending into the white of the snow covering the sheer mountains.
I returned to the patio to soak it all in. There I met Verónica, who was working for the Pablo Neruda Foundation while doing graduate work in feminist Latin American literature at the University of Chile, Neruda’s alma mater. We started up a conversation, which turned into a friendship. Later that week I met her for lunch at one of the old bohemian spots near Neruda’s house. Afterward, she let me sit at Pablo’s desk, with his framed picture of Walt Whitman on it.
Neruda seemed to be everywhere. My life became saturated by his poetry, to a degree I’ve never experienced with any literature. With my Spanish now at a much more agile and precise level of fluency, I felt closer to his words than ever before and took up the art of translating his poetry at night in the little cabin I lived in on the ranch. Although there were many beautiful translations, and I had grown to love Neruda through the translations in that book brought from Ann Arbor, I now began to realize that many did not flow as I felt they should, and I often had interpretive differences with them.
I reached out to Verónica about this. She introduced me to two of her professors and the executive director of the foundation, and there was a consensus validating the dictum that Edmund Keeley, prominent translator of Greek poetry, put so well: “Translation is a moveable feast . . . there must always be room for retouching and sharpening that image as new taste and new perception may indicate.” These conversations, combined with a few I had with people back in the States, prompted me to create a new book of dynamic translations that would serve as a fresh voice of Neruda in English, involving an unprecedented collaboration with academics to better empower the translator-poets. This book was The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems, with a preface by one of my greatest literary heroes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, published by City Lights Books in April 2004 in coordination with celebrations of Neruda’s centennial birthday.
That experience was a fluid bridge to this biography, for collaboration was the precept. I worked closely with Neruda scholars—Nerudianos—as well as luminary poets and translators, both in Chile and in the United States. I owe them a tremendous debt, as the acknowledgments at the end of this volume attest in further detail. These leading minds and generous souls not only made The Essential Neruda possible but helped pave the way for this biography as well.
With the work of all of those involved in The Essential Neruda, we came closer to the bones of his words, enabling new translations that are faithful to both the original meaning and inherent beauty of Neruda’s poems. The intimacy I gained with his words, character, and world allowed me to work further toward Neruda’s core.
Based on the success of The Essential Neruda, I was asked to write this book. At first I thought, Why another book? So much had already been written on Neruda, including many works I admired. What would mine bring that others hadn’t?
I came to see a valid need for another approach, one that aims to bring Neruda’s gripping story to life in a new way. This volume is neither unbiased nor hagiographic; rather, it aims to offer a compelling narrative version of Neruda’s life and work, undergirded by exhaustive research, designed to bring this towering literary figure to a broader audience. My goal is to present the nuances of this complex, seemingly larger-than-life figure, to show all his vastness, to show both the redeeming and the cruel sides of his personal life, to show both the inspirational and the deeply troublesome sides of his political life.
In addition, I felt it was vital to unite, in a single volume, the three inseparable strands of Neruda’s legacy: his personal history, the entire canon of his poetry, and his social activism and politics both on and off the page. Each of these components depends on the other two. Each is shaped by the other two. No single thread can be understood fully without understanding the others. This book aims to deeply explore each of these three aspects of his life, while also highlighting the phenomenon behind their interrelationship. Without examining each of them extensively, the true expanse of Neruda’s story can’t be told.
From this, I also want to explore the multifaceted ways a reader can interpret Neruda as a figure in history. He was a man who gained celebrity status assuming the role of the “people’s poet,” while also acting as what some call a “Champagne Communist.” The contradictions are inherent within his multitudes, to paraphrase his hero Whitman. As Alastair Reid, Neruda’s favorite English-language translator, said to me, “Neruda is seven different poets, if not nine”: there is a Neruda for everyone. His legacy can be appreciated in different ways, but it is best understood in the context of the startling historical events in which he took part and the intense complexities of his life—from the shockingly shameful to the inspiringly heroic—while still absorbing the beauty and innovation of his poetry.
Within the examination of those three strands—poetry, personality, and politics—is an exploration of the nature of political poetry’s power and effectiveness, and how Neruda’s role as a people’s poet, a political poet, connects to the shifting political climates of this new millennium. Because Neruda was so linked, so involved with major phenomena of the twentieth century, this book takes the reader through major historical events, including the South American student, labor, and anarchist movements of the 1910s, which tied into similar ones in Europe; the Spanish Civil War; the Battle of Stalingrad; Fidel Castro, the cult of Che Guevara, and the Cuban Revolution; and Richard Nixon’s interventions in Chile and Vietnam.
* * *
There was another impetus, inspiration, and source for this book: in celebration of the centennial of Neruda’s birth in 2004, not only did The Essential Neruda come out, but I also premiered a documentary film on him that I had produced. That initial version has led to a more ambitious feature-length documentary film that is currently in production. Work on the film has produced brilliant, unique gems for this biography, this text nourished by interviews and conversations with a diverse array of characters.
Unfortunately, some of the subjects have passed since I first talked to them. Neruda was born in 1904, so many of those who knew him for most of his life are no longer with us. One of these people was Sergio Insunza, minister of justice under Allende. Insunza was in his twenties when he first met Neruda, when the Chilean Communist Party brought the poet-senator to hide out in his apartment—then-president Gabriel González Videla had ordered Neruda’s arrest for speaking out against his antidemocratic, oppressive measures on the Senate floor. Another interviewee, Juvenal Flores, was ninety-two when I spoke to him. He worked on a ranch in southern Chile and helped guide the fugitive Neruda on horseback across a snowcapped peak in the Andes, safely into exile.
Then there was an afternoon I spent at one of Santiago’s main produce markets. When I asked an effusive woman in front of a vegetable stand about Neruda’s love poetry, she spontaneously burst out, “I like it when you’re quiet. It’s as if you were absent”—the iconic first lines of Neruda’s Poem XV in Twenty Love Poems. And then, with the biggest smile and half-laughing, she said, “That’s as far as I get, but it’s a beautiful book!” She told me that although she had read the poem as a young girl, in school, it gained a heightened significance for her six years before, when, at thirty-two, she had fallen in love with a Bolivian doctor. He eventually left Chile, giving her a copy of Twenty Love Poems as a departing gift.
