Only the passage of time will put Pablo Neruda in his rightful place among the greats of World literature, but, at least in terms of the 20th century, that place will surely be very close to the top. That might be a surprising statement to make, given that he wrote poetry in Spanish rather than English, and his work has not always been treated kindly by translators, but the fact remains that he received almost universal praise in his lifetime, culminating in the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.
Ricardo Eliezer Neftali Reyes y Basoalto was born on 12th
July 1904 in Parral, a small city in central Chile, the son of a railwayman father
and schoolteacher mother. However, his mother died when Ricardo was very young
and his father moved to Temuco (some distance south of Parral) and remarried.
Ricardo soon showed an interest in writing, with his first
poems being composed when he was about ten years old. His father did not
encourage him, but he was lucky to be taught by Gabriela Mistral, a highly
gifted poet who would herself become a Nobel Laureate in 1945. Ricardo had
poems published locally and won several competitions. On leaving high school he
therefore determined to move to Santiago, the country’s capital and cultural
hub, where he hoped to qualify as a French teacher, but he failed to make the
grade in this respect.
By this time he had adopted the pen name of “Pablo Neruda”. He
did so in honour of the Czech poet Jan Neruda (1834-91) and as a name that
would disguise his literary efforts from his father. Later in life he would
change his name officially, so that his pen name became his real name.
While in Santiago he completed and published a collection of
poems that, in translation, is known as “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of
Despair”. These poems, which mixed memories of love affairs with images of the
wild scenery of southern Chile, were very well received and led to his rapid recognition
as a Latin American poet of note.
In 1927 Neruda left Chile for Rangoon, Burma, having been
appointed as Chile’s honorary consul to that country. He was not really ready
for such responsibility and the experience was not a particularly happy one.
However, he was able to travel widely in the Far East and to become aware of squalor
and poverty on a huge scale. The result, in poetic terms, was “Residence on
Earth”, which eventually appeared in three volumes, published in 1933, 1935 and
1947. The poems in this collection tell
of despair and alienation but they are also powerful and brilliantly crafted.
Neruda would later seek to distance himself from this collection, but it is generally
held that many of the poems within it are among his best.
By 1935 Neruda was serving as Chile’s consul in Spain, and
he was therefore able to acquire not only an international reputation as a poet
but a political conscience, siding with the Communist cause when the Spanish
Civil War broke out in 1936. This meant that he could no longer serve as consul
and he had to leave Spain for France and then Mexico, before returning to Chile
in 1943.
Neruda’s embracing of Communism led to a change in his
poetical stance, as despair for the condition of man was replaced by the hope of
liberation from oppression. His political philosophy was explained in his long
poem “Canto Generale”, which he began in 1935 but did not complete until 1948,
by which time he had had to go into hiding to avoid arrest by the forces of
President Videla, whom Neruda had criticized in letters that supported striking
miners. By this time Neruda had already served in the Chilean Senate as a
Communist representative.
“Canto Generale” was in part a document that supported
Communist ideology, but it went much further than that to paint a picture of
Latin America history in terms of Man’s struggle for natural justice. It was
therefore not so much a political manifesto for the moment but a statement of
man’s position in the world from prehistory to the present day and beyond.
In 1953 Neruda was able to live freely again in Chile. He
continued to write prolifically, producing a large number of poems that covered
a huge range of topics. Although his political concerns were still very much
alive, much of his later work was more personal, with the emphasis being on
close observation of ordinary things and on speaking to the reader at a level
that they could understand in terms of their daily lives.
In 1971 Neruda was nominated by the Chilean Communist Party
to be their candidate for President. However, he was not particularly
interested in serving at that level and he reached an accord with the Socialist
Salvador Allende, who subsequently became President. Allende appointed Neruda
to be Chile’s ambassador to France, and it was while he was living in Paris
that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in recognition of his lifelong contribution
to literature. However, ill health forced him to resign his post and return to
Chile, which he did in 1973.
The Allende government was overthrown in September of that
year by a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet (supported by the
United States). Allende himself was killed, although the actual circumstances
of his death are still held by some to be controversial. Pablo Neruda died on
23rd September of heart failure, only twelve days after Allende’s
death. Again, there have been several conspiracy theories as to whether
Neruda's death was natural or if he was an early victim of Pinochet’s campaign
of violence against his opponents.
The world has been left with a wealth of original and approachable
poems (more than 600 in total) that many thousands of people have found to be
insightful and uplifting because they speak directly to the reader but also relate
that reader to the rest of humanity and the cosmos in general. Some people have
been put off Neruda’s work on learning about his Communist sympathies, but to
ignore his poems on that basis would be a mistake. Although Neruda’s overriding
concern for the wellbeing of humanity was expressed politically in terms of a
particular brand of left-wing ideology, that does not mean that his poems are
nothing more than Communist propaganda; indeed, it would be difficult to find
any of which this could be said. Pablo Neruda is considered to be a great poet
for a reason, and that reason is the poetry that he wrote.
© John Welford
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