Pablo Neruda loved the rural, claiming that his poetry “gathers up earth and rain and fruit.” Yet he also loved the energy of cities, the music of busy marketplaces. He was loyal to his people of Chile even as their government persecuted him. Like his hero Walt Whitman, Neruda embraced contradictions. His rich life yielded not only volumes of poetry but also news articles, speeches, a novel, a play, and memoir. Neruda’s translations range from poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. His always-open house welcomed many artists of the 20th century, including Octavio Paz, Federico García Lorca, Nazim Hikmet, Mexican painter Diego Rivera, and Spanish painter Pablo Picasso. He was a poet adored by thousands of students, miners, lovers, farmers—even soldiers and police officers.
Although he eschewed academic theory, Neruda viewed his direct language as an evolution beyond the “pure poetry” of his youth. He relished the “impurity” in poetry of everyday life, “worn away as if by acid by the labor of hands, impregnated with sweat and smoke, smelling of lilies and urine, splashed by the variety of what we do, legally or illegally.” Neruda drafted his poems in green ink—the color, he noted, of hope.
Pablo Neruda was born Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto on July 12, 1904, in Parral, Chile. His mother, Rosa Neftalí Basoalto de Reyes, died within weeks. His father, José de Carmen Reyes Morales, moved them to Temuco to marry Trinidad Candia, who would nurture the sickly “Neftalí,” as he was called, and to whom Neruda would dedicate his earliest poems. With his half-siblings Rodolfo and beloved “Laurita,” Neftalí grew up in the extreme but beautiful landscape of coastal mountains. Class stratifications of the region made an impression; his father, a freight conductor for the railway, did not approve of Neftalí’s hope to join the precarious ranks of artists.
Though geographically isolated, Neftalí found refuge in the library and became a voracious reader of Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Walt Whitman, and other seminal influences. The teenage Neftalí contributed articles to local newspapers. As he began publishing poems, he adopted the name “Pablo Neruda,” asserting independence from his father. Most believe the poet created the name from “Paolo,” popular in Italian poetry, and the surname of Jan Neruda, a Czech author he admired.
Neruda moved to Chile’s capital, Santiago, for university study. He joined the bohemians with his distinctive costume of black cape and wide-brimmed hat. At only 23 Neruda sold his possessions to fund publication of Crepusculario (The Book of Twilight), which incorporated the aesthetics of French poet Charles Baudelaire and other symbolists. This first book received a surprising degree of attention but generated little income. After several years of struggling to earn a living tutoring French, Neruda parlayed his reputation as a poet into an appointment as consul ad honorem to Rangoon, Burma (Myanmar), the first of many homes abroad.
In 1924 Neruda’s second book was published, Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair), from which he gained a large and fervent audience. Poems such as “I Like for You to Be Still” and “Tonight I Can Write” fixed Neruda’s place in the hearts of young lovers and scholarly critics, who admired his tonal balance between that of mournful adult and enthralled child. The women of his poems bridge the void between an ascetic male speaker and the delights of the natural universe. Pressed to identify his muses, Neruda demurred: “Marisol and Marisombra: Sea and Sun, Sea and Shadow. Marisol is love in the enchanted countryside . . . dark eyes like the wet sky of Temuco . . . Marisombra is the student in the city. Gray beret, very gentle eyes. . . .” These dichotic figures had real-life counterparts, pursued by the poet in what would be a pattern of simultaneous love affairs.
While traveling as consul to Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Java (in Indonesia), and Singapore, Neruda wrote the first poems for Residencia en la tierra (Residence on Earth). According to the poet the title refers to his residence in language, using his native tongue as if to taste the soil of Chile. Surrounded by English-speaking colonists, burdened with paperwork, the poet felt disconnected. Residencia’s three volumes span 1925 to 1947 and hold some of his darkest and most surreal work, including “Walking Around,” “Ars Poetica,” “Ode with a Lament,” “Sexual Water” and “Ode to Federico García Lorca.” In 1933 Neruda met and bonded with Lorca, whose later assassination by Franco supporters during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) would harden the devastated Neruda’s communist stance. Later poems in Residencia, such as “Song to Stalingrad” and “Tina Modotti Is Dead,” reflect the poet’s increasing awareness of political unrest.
In 1939 Neruda’s consulship moved to Paris. He pulled off a diplomatic feat, securing ocean passage to Chile for 2,000 Spanish refugees, mostly Republicans fleeing Franco. The poet began work on his most ambitious book, Canto General, which includes paeans to land such as “Amor America (1400)” and the sequence “The Heights of Macchu Picchu,” inspired by a 1943 visit to these Inca ruins in Peru.
In 1945 Neruda won the National Prize for Literature in Chile and was elected to the senate, representing constituents from mining regions. He soon came in conflict with President Gabriel González Videla, who used force to break up striking workers. Neruda’s Canto radiates anger in texts such as “Standard Oil Co.,” “United Fruit Co.,” and the incendiary 1948 speech to the Chilean senate, “I Accuse,” in which he named 628 people being detained in Pisagua concentration camp without formal charges. After this speech Videla revoked Neruda’s office and ordered his arrest. Communists and other supporters smuggled the poet into Argentina. Years of travel to Europe, China, and the USSR followed. By 1950, when the epic Canto General was published, Neruda had become a poet of worldwide fame, a political exile, and an enthusiastic Stalinist.
In 1952 limited editions of Los versos del capitán (The Captain’s Verses) circulated. The author was anonymous; but Delia del Carril, Neruda’s second wife and editor of many years, recognized his style. Neruda had begun an affair with Matilde Urrutia, who inspired the verses and would become his third wife; he openly declared his love in 1959 with the publication of Cien sonetos de amor (One Hundred Love Sonnets).
Neruda’s romances were turbulent, sometimes tragic. Years earlier, his first wife, María Antonieta Hagenaar Vogelzang, gave birth to Neruda’s daughter, Malva Marina. Neftalí’s childhood sickliness paled in comparison to that of Malva Marina, who was diagnosed with hydroencephalitis. Her parents separated (Neruda was already involved with del Carril), and the poet’s only child died at age eight in German-occupied Holland.
Amid such sadness Neruda found comfort in nature and the simplicity of objects. He was a renowned collector of stones, seashells, flotsam, and wooden ship prows, which he displayed in his treasured houses. While escaping Chile one of his disguises was as an ornithologist; he was an expert on native birds. In 1954 Neruda published Odas elementales (Elemental Odes) as a celebration of ordinary things, using the language of ordinary people. The warmth and humor of “Ode to a Fallen Chestnut” and “Ode to Laziness” further endeared him to readers, while the politically charged “Ode to the Atom” and “Ode to Copper” confirmed his continuing activism.
His intriguing 1958 book Estravagario attempts to reconcile the poet’s dual identities as rebel exile and icon of the literary establishment.
Neruda was often rumored as a contender for the Nobel Prize, but his enemies were as dedicated as his fans. Some complaints strained credulity, such as the accusation that Neruda knowingly granted a Chilean visa to one of Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s attempted assassins. Other criticisms had heft: Neruda campaigned for artistic freedom but refused to speak against Stalinist leaders for repressing Soviet writers—even when the Kremlin banned the work of 1958 Nobel Prize winner Boris Pasternak.
Still Neruda received many awards, including the first International Peace Prize. In 1965 he received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University, the first granted to a Latin American. A year later Fidel Castro ordered 100 of Cuba’s intellectuals to sign “Carta de los Cubanos,” an open letter condemning Neruda for betraying his communist ideals with appearances in the United States and Peru. Neruda was deeply wounded and never returned to Cuba, which had once greeted him warmly.
Chile’s government, on the other hand, formed an unofficial détente with the poet: officials disliked his politics, but he was too famous to keep out of the country. By the 1960s Neruda’s health was failing; he complained of gout and phlebitis, but doctors confided to his wife a diagnosis of prostate cancer. Neruda devoted his attention to arranging his houses: La Chascona in Santiago, La Sebastiana in Valparaíso, and particularly the ocean views of Isla Negra. Visitors flowed in, and though Matilde did not permit the parties of Neruda’s glory days, she managed his households admirably.
In October 1971 Neruda received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Over a congratulatory handshake with the king of Sweden, he discovered their mutual passion for minerals and chatted about Easter Island, subject of “Rapa Nui” in Canto General. Neruda’s eloquent acceptance speech included harrowing tales of escaping Chile on horseback over the Andes. Those travails taught him that “the best poet is he who prepares our daily bread: the nearest baker who does not imagine himself to be a god.” He made a veiled apology for supporting Soviet dictator Stalin, whose crimes had since been exposed by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.
Neruda’s final years were productive despite his spreading cancer and his fear that Chile verged on civil war. Some of his work would not be published until after his death, including El mar y las campanas (The Sea and the Bells) and his memoir Confieso que he vivido. He endorsed his friend Salvador Allende’s repeated bids for the presidency. Allende eventually won, but on September 11, 1973, the Popular Unity government was overthrown in a coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. President Allende was killed in his office. An army raid came to Isla Negra, and a mourning Neruda greeted them with disdain, saying “Look around—there’s only one thing of danger for you here: poetry.”
On September 23 Neruda died of complications from cancer at a hospital in Santiago. La Chascona had been ransacked by the military; his wife insisted they hold Neruda’s wake in the house’s ruins, confronting dignitaries and the press with Pinochet’s destruction. As the poet’s casket made the journey to the cemetery, people flowed into the streets. Public demonstrations had been forbidden. Soldiers trained guns on the crowd, but they did not disperse. Their call and response placed Neruda among victims of the revolution: “Comrade Pablo Neruda—” “Present!”; “Comrade Victor Jara—” “Present!”; “Comrade Salvador Allende—” “Present!” Neruda would have cherished this defiant close to the life of a poet who, first and foremost, placed himself among his people.
Bibliography
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Pablo Neruda. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.
de Costa, René. The Poetry of Pablo Neruda. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979.
Feinstein, Adam. Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004.
Felstiner, John. Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1980.
Neruda, Pablo. Memoirs (Confieso que he vivido). Translated by Hardie St. Martin. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997.
———. Pablo Neruda; Selected Poems. Translated by Anthony Kerrigan, W. S. Merwin, Alastair Reed, and Nathaniel Tarn, edited by Nathaniel Tarn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970.
———. The Poetry of Pablo Neruda. Multiple translators, edited by Ilan Stavans. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
Poirot, Luis. Pablo Neruda: Absence and Presence. Translated by Alastair Reid. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990.
Urrutia, Matilde. My Life with Pablo Neruda. Translated by Alexandria Giardino. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004.
Categories: British Literature, Latin American Literature, Literature, World Literature
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