Pablo Neruda: Poetry will not have Sung in Vain

Pablo Neruda has for decades nourished spiritually those left behind by an increasingly unequal society. His words and actions inspire today’s embattled revolutionaries.

Neruda

48 years ago, one of Latin America’s finest poets passed away, grieving the death of Chile’s socialist hopes, and from torment of a chronic case of prostate cancer. On September 23rd 1973, when American-backed General Augusto Pinochet ripped apart Chile with the military coup, Pablo Neruda wrote his last lines with help from Matilde Urrutia. He was dictating to his third wife a final salute to President Salvador Allende who was shot dead the day before when, himself being hunted, soldiers flooded into his house. To their commander, the ailing Neruda decried, “Look around – there’s only one thing of danger for you here – poetry.” The soldier took off his helmet with humility and replied, “Forgive me, Senor Neruda,” and left.

Born as Ricardo Neftali Reyes in 1904, Neruda had a difficult childhood growing up in southern Chile. His mother had passed away during childbirth, and his father, a rail-driver, held his son in contempt for his tendency towards the arts. He moved away, and in 1924, published his first book Twenty-one love poems and a song of despair with the pen-name Pablo Neruda, an alias he would take up for life. ‘Tonight I can write the saddest lines’, poem no. 20,  was a hauntingly beautiful love poem that made Neruda suddenly popular. A book that sold millions of copies across the world, however, bore only peanuts for the poet. Neruda’s youth years were spent in penury as a low-rung Chilean Foreign Ministry official in Burma (Myanmar) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Together with his disgust for colonial attitudes towards the natives, his sense of solidarity for the dispossessed of the world grew.

But the then-surrealist poet’s socialist underpinnings were truly forged only when he arrived in Spain in 1931. In the thralls of a resurgent right-wing, Neruda joined the progressive forces to fight the fascists. When the Spanish Republic fell to Franco’s forces, Neruda forced the Chilean government to take in political refugees escaping Spain. It was at this time that Neruda wrote his first political work Spain in My Heart (1936).

There he lamented for his dead comrades:

“They have not died! They are in the midst

of the gunpowder,

standing, like burning wicks.

Their pure shadows have gathered

in the copper-colored meadowland

like a curtain of armored wind,

like a barricade the colors of fury,

like the invisible heart of heaven itself.”

Neruda arrived in Spain as an anarchist and left as a communist. From thereon, he deliberately moved away from the obscurity of surrealist writings, and made his verses legible to those who did not have the privilege of an advanced education- the workers and peasants of Chile. Further, he propagated his stylistic shift to other poets and writers. Once, he told the Continental Congress of Culture that “We are writing for modest people who, very, very often, cannot read. And yet, on this earth, poetry existed before writing and printing. That is why we know that poetry is like bread, and must be shared by everyone, the literate and the peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of peoples.”

A year before joining the Communist Party, he ran on a Communist ticket to the Chilean Senate in 1944 and won. There he vehemently brought up increasing US interference in the country, infringement of civil liberties of workers, and defended Communist-led strikes. Soon the ruling regime declared him illegal and issued a warrant for his arrest. Neruda went underground and was helped by the Spanish refugees. During these years, he wrote the bulk of his greatest work Canto General (1950). Such was the span of this epic poem that it covered Latin America from pre-Columbian times to the present. It was a transcendental work, with the Inca ruins of Macchu Picchu at Peru becoming a symbol of utopia for Neruda.

Neruda
Pablo Neruda with Chilean President Salvador Allende

His personal life, however, was marred with base emotions of jealousy, anger, deceit, and a machismo that was characteristic of many great artists of that period, such as Pablo Picasso. In recent years, criticism has grown over his memoirs where Neruda mentioned an incident where he raped a woman of sweeper caste in Ceylon. Then there are letters to close friends and poems which expound on his controversial relationship with a Burmese woman Josie Bliss. It is becoming clear that the icon Neruda, afterall, was only human.

Pablo Neruda was a man of his times. He can be equally placed in a love poem, in an ode to nature, in self-depreciation of himself or his profession, in political struggles and hope for the future. Such was the expanse of his work that ran across 6,000 pages in many volumes. In 1971 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Karl Ragnar introduced Neruda and said “To sum up Neruda is like catching a condor with a butterfly net. Neruda, in a nutshell, is an unreasonable proposition: the kernel bursts the shell.”

Further, and most importantly, he married his art with his partisanship. Despite being let-down by Khrushchev’s rebuff of Stalinism, the invasion of Hungary, and other excesses of the USSR, he made sure to never take a public position against the Soviets, who he knew represented Communism. He would never take imperialism’s side during the Cold War. He wholeheartedly campaigned for Allende’s presidency in 1973, despite suffering from a fatal ailment, and led him to victory.

The poet died on 23 September 1973, 12 days after the military coup and three days after he had been offered asylum in Mexico.

Pablo Neruda has for decades nourished spiritually those left behind by an increasingly unequal society. His words and actions inspire today’s embattled revolutionaries. Today, we remember the great partisan on his death anniversary.

Also Read:Death of Abimael Guzman: End of the Shining Path of Peru

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March 2024
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