Note: It may appear that elementary English capitalization conventions are not followed in the Spanish titles of some poems. Neruda often capitalized only the first word in his poems’ titles; I have followed the majority opinion of the cited sources in leaving his capitalization intact. English translations of titles are capitalized according to usual English convention.
Tony Miller
Prof. Ann Hostetler
English 210
23 March 2011
Pablo Neruda: A Poet of Chilean Communism
For a decade after World War II, the Communist Party was outlawed in Chile. But while the party could not meet openly and many of its members were forced into hiding, that period gave rise to one of the 20th century’s most notable poets. Despite the prohibition of Communism, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda became a global household name in the 20th century, even prompting American diplomats to grant him a visa into the country in 1966 when Communists were barred from crossing American borders (Marzán 675). In short, Pablo Neruda was a notable Latin American poet of the mid-1900s because he was not just a Latin American poet – his poems were globally interpretable, even if they were based on the South American continent.
An example of Neruda’s poetry transcending national borders, even though it does so in a less-than-favorable light, is in his “Canto general,” a sort of Latin American history document published in 1950. The third section, “Los conquistadores” {The Conquerors} fittingly covers the Spanish conquerors of the colonial age, who first took much of Latin America from the natives and continued to rule it until the 19th century. In his article, “Redefining Civilization: Historical Polarities and Mythologizing In ‘Los conquistadores’ of Pablo Neruda's ‘Canto general,’ ” commentator Mark Mascia remarks that Neruda looks at the incoming Spaniards as having committed heinous crimes on the land. In that interpretation, the Spanish went as far as “corruption, rape, and dismemberment […] upon the uncorrupted soil of Latin America's original inhabitants” (Mascia, “Redefining” 140). It is never popular to argue that a government has built a trusting relationship and then violated it, no matter how far that government has been removed from ruling; that is, however, what Neruda did here. The poem that prompted such remarks was published after the Communist Party had already been banned. When someone publishes an unpleasant allegory while in disagreement with another, quite often the second person perceives themselves as the allegorical aggressor, then responds that way. Thus, with the publication of that section, Neruda criticized the oppressive Spanish government and did himself no favors with the anti-Communist Chilean one.
“There is no insurmountable solitude” (qtd. in Stavans np). These words are taken directly from Neruda’s acceptance speech for the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature, and they can be interpreted as speaking to the months in 1948 that Neruda spent hiding in a friend’s Valparaíso basement before crossing the border into Argentina. These months were just a few in a slightly absurd life trajectory, one which produced some results that do not seem to fit with the image of a world-famous poet and Nobel laureate. Putting things a bit more bluntly in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Ilan Stavans writes, “to be sure, Neruda also left us a large dose of bad poetry. How could he not, when his [complete works total] 6,000 pages? His late works are passable at best and disheveled at worst” (“A Life Consumed”). Stavans proceeds to note that when he published a Neruda anthology in 2003, a year before the article quoted here was published, multiple translators chastised him for including the full arc – low-quality to high-quality to lower-quality – of the poet’s work, preferring to look only at the top section of the curve and ignore the dregs below it. An all-too-literal interpretation of “dregs” brings to mind one of the poems included in that section of the curve, “The Great Urinator,” which begins “The great urinator was yellow / and the stream that came down / was bronze-colored rain,” and whose quality only falls from there. The final lines of that poem are the following:
I am a pale and artless poet
not here to work out riddles
or recommend special umbrellas.
Hasta la vista! I greet you and go off
to a country where they won't ask me questions.
It is worth noting that I don’t have an advanced poetry degree, but the tone of the final section is fairly clear: “I point this out, and then cut you off and leave before I have to explain why I notice it.”
Neruda, it is well-known and several times above referenced, was a fervent Communist. The lesser-understood implication of this is that he would support that party almost unfailingly, a position which almost always put him at odds with the Republican, Cold War¬-era United States government. Perhaps nowhere is less explanation required of Neruda’s stance toward America than in the title of his 1973 book: Incitación al Nixonicidio y alabanza de la revolución chilena {A Call for the Destruction of Nixon and Praise for the Chilean Revolution} – although, of course, Nixon would soon destroy his own political career with skillfully-placed erasures. Ilan Stavans notes that Fidel Castro was another Neruda favorite, giving rise to what the biographer calls “cheap propaganda” such as “Fidel, the people are grateful/for word in action and deeds that sing.” To further beat this dead horse, by the time of his death, the mythical stickers on Pablo’s suitcase included Communist Cuba, socialist Chile, Spain under Franco, North Vietnam, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. In short, if there was a government making the world unsafe for democracy (to borrow from Wilson entering World War I), Neruda had been there. That he was permitted entry to America in order to speak at Columbia in 1971 is nothing short of a minor miracle.
While the poet in question was born in Chile, he maintained an international appeal because he traveled extensively and saw his leftist political views embodied at least in part by many other groups/ A portion of Neruda’s traveling, certainly, was diplomatic, as a Nobel laureate or the Chilean ambassador to France (Marzán 675). But another large section of that traveling was not undertaken by the poet himself. Stavans refers to him as a torchbearer, his poems popping up in the ’60s counterculture and the anti-Reagan liberalism of the ’80s. And this traveling from a Latin America propped up in many cases by a Republican U.S. government before his birth to speaking out against a Republican U.S. government after his death was just some of the traveling Neruda’s poems did.
As you can see, Pablo Neruda was a force of 20th century Latin American poetry because he was Chilean only in a geographic sense. Indeed, he maintained his residences there for most of his life, but the poems that emanated therefrom went far beyond their origins in South America to speak to conflict throughout the world. In addition, Neruda’s odes to the minute details of everyday life possess a sort of every-man appeal – to use a distinctly American perspective, who hasn’t grown up in a world where things like plates, cups and backyard cookouts are taken for granted? That was exactly the form of these odes, drawing attention to the little things that never get credit. Put another way, it shone a spotlight on the pawns. Writing from lands that were so often pawns, first in imperialism, then in the Cold War, Pablo Neruda certainly managed to find the spotlight.
Works Cited
Agosin, Marjorie, and Ruth Morales. "A Poet's House Of Happiness." Americas (English Edition) 50.1 (1998). MLA International Bibliography. Web. 16 Mar. 2011.
Chasar, Mark. "The Theater of the Unattainable: Hope and Bitterness in Antonio Skarmeta's The Postman." The Midwest Quarterly (2000): 53-65. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 16 Mar. 2011.
Cooke, Stuart. "Singing up Country in the Poetry of Judith Wright and Pablo Neruda." Australian Literary Studies (2008): 407-21. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 16 Mar. 2011.
Maier, Linda S. "Between Modernismo and Vanguardismo: Tradition and Innovation in Pablo Neruda's Crepusculario." Romance Notes 45.3 (2005): 357-65. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 16 Mar. 2011.
Marzan, Julio. "Pablo Neruda's Dilemma." The Massachusetts Review (1999): 675-81. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 16 Mar. 2011.
Moran, Dominic. "‘Cuerpo De Mujer’: Neruda’s Sex Education." Hispanic Research Journal 10.1 (2009): 56-69. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 16 Mar. 2011.
Stavans, Ilan. "Pablo Neruda: a Life Consumed by Poetry and Politics." Chronicle of Higher Education 50.43 (2004). MLA International Bibliography. Web. 16 Mar. 2011.
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