Biografia revela a bagunçada e brilhante vida de Pablo Neruda
'O Chamado do Poeta', de Mark Eisner, tenta explicar o extraordinário sucesso do chileno
NB. Mais abaixo, o mesmo artigo no original inglês.
4-6-2018
Neruda: el llamado del poeta
de Mark Eisner
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NOTA DE LEITURA Foi publicada recentemente na América mais uma biografia de Pablo Neruda, por Mark Eisner, enorme, com 640 páginas. O título é Neruda: The Poet’s Calling; foi publicada ao mesmo tempo a tradução espanhola com o título Neruda: el llamado del poeta. Comprei para o Kindle a tradução espanhola, bastante mais barata e com a vantagem de os poemas transcritos virem no original.
O livro é muito interessante e está lá tudo, o bom e o mau do poeta.
Como diz o autor sobre a personalidade de Neruda: “Poeta do amor, poeta
politico, poeta experimental, Neruda, o comunista, Neruda, o mulherengo,
Neruda, o marinheiro em terra”.
O verdadeiro nome de Neruda foi Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto.
Pablo Neruda deverá ser no mundo o poeta que mais livros vendeu.
Calcula-se que o livrinho “Veinte
poemas de amor y una canción desesperada”
da sua juventude terá vendido cinco milhões (!) de exemplares em
todo o mundo. Neruda era megalómano e exagerado em tudo, tinha apetites
monstruosos por comida, bebida e também por sexo. Para isso, precisava
de dinheiro e teve a sorte de conseguir remunerações elevadas no serviço
público com relativamente pouco trabalho. Mais tarde, teve ainda o
Prémio Nobel em 1971 o que representou mais uma choruda quantia.
O livro descreve em detalhe a vida amorosa de Neruda e não lhe poupa
reprovação pelo tratamento a que sujeitou algumas das suas mulheres.
Rejeitou a primeira mulher, a Holandesa Maria Antonieta Hagenaar
Vogelzang (a quem chamava “Maruca”) bem como a filha que
dela teve, a deficiente Malva Marina, hidrocéfala, (18-8-1934 - †
2-3-1943) que ele abandonou completamente. “Maruca” faleceu em 27 de
Março de 1965.
Em 1936 juntou-se com a Argentina Delia del Carril, vinte anos mais
velha que ele. Mulher inteligente, foi uma boa orientadora da vida do
poeta daí em diante. A esta chamava “La hormiga” ou “Hormiguita”.
Em 1949 tornou-se amante de Matilde Urrutia e foi convivendo com as duas
mulheres durante algum tempo. Em 1955, separou-se definitivamente de
Delia. Depois, em 1966, casou com Matilde Urrutia. Delia faleceu
em 26 de Julho de 1989, com 104 anos (!). A Matilde chamava “La
Pantoja”.
O autor refere ainda uma última amante de Neruda,
Alicia Urrutia Acuña,
sobrinha de Matilde, filha de seu irmão, que se separou do marido e
tinha uma filhita deste. Nascida em 1924, deveria ter cerca de 45 anos
quando se tornaram amantes. Alicia só revelou o romance em 2012 ao
juiz que investigava as causas da morte de Pablo Neruda. É ainda viva e
conserva os segredos das cartas de Pablo Neruda.
Pablo Neruda faleceu em 23 de Setembro de 1973 das complicações de um
cancro da próstata.
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O ESTADO DE S. PAULO
NB. Mais abaixo, o mesmo artigo no original inglês.
Troy Jollimore, O Estado de S.Paulo
24 Abril 2018
Poucos poetas oferecem a seus biógrafos um material tão rico quanto o ganhador do Prêmio Nobel Pablo Neruda. Nascido em Parral, no Chile, em 1904, Neruda transcendeu suas origens modestas e educação provincial para alcançar sucesso e significado muito além dos sonhos da maioria dos escritores. Livros como Vinte Poemas de Amor e Uma Canção Desesperada, Residência na Terra e Odes Elementares venderam dezenas de milhões de cópias. Quase 45 anos após a sua morte, ele continua a ser um dos poetas mais significativos do século 20.
A nova biografia de Mark Eisner, Neruda: O Chamado do Poeta, explora a complexa confluência de fatores que explicam a extraordinário sucesso de Neruda. Muito mais do que a maioria das poesias modernas, o trabalho de Neruda é bastante acessível. Movido desde cedo pela exploração dos mais desfavorecidos, ele via a existência da poesia para o benefício das pessoas comuns. “A poesia é como pão”, escreveu ele. “Deveria ser compartilhada por todos, por estudiosos e camponeses, por toda nossa vasta, incrível e extraordinária família de humanidade.” Quando não era abertamente política, sua poesia tendia a se preocupar com questões de existência cotidiana, encontrando amor e beleza.
A política nunca esteve longe de Neruda, e a história de sua vida é, em grande parte, concomitante com a história política do século 20. A capital chilena de Santiago, quando ele chegou lá em 1921, foi o centro de um movimento estudantil ativo que ansiava pela poesia progressista. Nos anos 1930, ele assistiu, de seu posto como diplomata em Barcelona, a Espanha cair em guerra civil. Neruda já se inclinou para o socialismo como resultado de suas experiências chilenas; agora, observando a entrada da União Soviética para apoiar os republicanos espanhóis contra os fascistas de Franco, enquanto o resto do mundo permanecia indiferente, ele se tornou um comunista partidário de Stalin.
As origens da estima de Neruda por Stalin, portanto, são compreensíveis. Mas sua lealdade persistirá muito tempo depois que relatos da realidade brutal do regime ditatorial de Stalin começaram a surgir.
Já no Chile, ele sempre esteve do lado oposto aos ditadores. Quando, no final da década de 1940, o Partido Comunista do país foi proibido e os protestos dos mineiros foram brutalmente reprimidos, Neruda criticou o governo na imprensa internacional e no plenário do Senado chileno. Quando o governo tentou prendê-lo, ele fez uma fuga dramática a cavalo pela fronteira com a Argentina.
Ele retornou ao Chile na década de 1950 e passaria a maior parte do resto de sua vida lá. Sua morte por câncer, em 23 de setembro de 1973, ocorreu apenas 12 dias depois do golpe apoiado pelos EUA, no qual as forças de Augusto Pinochet tomaram o controle do presidente democraticamente eleito Salvador Allende. O funeral de Neruda tornou-se uma demonstração pública de resistência ao novo regime. Enquanto os soldados olhavam, armados com metralhadoras, a multidão gritava: “Ele não está morto, ele não está morto! Ele só adormeceu!”.
A bagunça da vida pessoal de Neruda, que foi tão agitada quanto a sua vida pública e que serve como evidência de sua natureza apaixonada e impulsiva, nem sempre o exibe de uma maneira admirável. Ele negligenciou e depois abandonou sua primeira mulher, mal reconhecendo a existência de sua filha, que nasceu gravemente incapacitada. Ele parecia muito apaixonado por sua segunda esposa; ainda assim, enquanto estavam juntos, ele começou um caso com a mulher que se tornaria sua terceira. Perto do fim de sua vida, ele a trairia também.
Uma ótima história que já contada antes na biografia de 2004 de Adam Feinstein, Pablo Neruda: Uma paixão pela vida. A necessidade de uma nova biografia não é inteiramente óbvia; e infelizmente, o homem que está no centro de todos esses redemoinhos turbulentos, pessoais e políticos permanece estranho e distante na narração de Mark Eisner.
Apesar de seu trabalho em um documentário sobre Neruda e como tradutor de O Essencial Neruda: Poemas Selecionados (2004), nessa biografia, Eisner tende a manter o assunto distante e pouco se percebe da vida interior do homem.
Além disso, a prosa de Eisner é, no geral, bastante trivial, exceto por algumas ocasiões infelizes em que se esforça, de maneira pouco sensata, por uma espécie de poeticismo à la Neruda.
Finalmente, Neruda: O Chamado do Poeta não é tão satisfatório quanto se poderia esperar. Ainda assim, a vida de Neruda continua sendo uma fonte de fascinação e seu trabalho continua sendo vital. Qualquer livro que possa ajudar a trazer novas gerações de leitores a ele é valorizado apenas por esse motivo. / TRADUÇÃO DE PEDRO RAMOS
EL PAÍS
10 JUL 2004
CENTENARIO DE PABLO NERUDA
Canónico, disperso, completo
Repasar la historia de las obras completas del autor de Canto general es viajar a un universo en el que los libros más populares conviven con materiales variopintos pero no menos imprescindibles. El responsable de la edición más reciente traza aquí el relato de ese viaje.
El primero que pensó en imprimir unas obras completas de Pablo Neruda, en Santiago de Chile, fue un español. Y español será también el segundo en Buenos Aires. Aquel primero se llamaba Arturo Soria, hijo del urbanista que proyectó Ciudad Lineal en Madrid. Arturo, emigrado a Chile, en los años cuarenta fundó allí una pequeña pero muy fina casa editora, Cruz del Sur, cuyo catálogo incluyó a clásicos españoles y a autores chilenos de alto nivel. Los diez encantadores tomitos de esa Obra poética de Pablo Neruda abarcaron todos los libros ya publicados del poeta, desde Crepusculario hasta la segunda Residencia en la tierra, más todos los poemas de Tercera residencia, pero no dispuestos como en la contemporánea edición de Losada (1947) sino mezclados con anticipaciones de un Canto general todavía en ciernes y con algunos textos sueltos como los "prólogos" a los cuatro números de Caballo Verde y la magnífica prosa 'La copa de sangre'. En suma, las obras completa de Neruda hasta 1947.
El segundo español fue Gonzalo Losada, de Buenos Aires, uno de los dos o tres editores máximos de América hispana durante los decenios centrales del siglo XX. En enero de 1957 puso en las librerías un volumen de casi 1.300 páginas en papel biblia y encuadernación roja: Obras completas de Pablo Neruda. Nuevas ediciones progresivamente ampliadas aparecerán en 1962, 1968 y 1973. Cada una traía un Apéndice con un número variable de textos sueltos dispuestos en simple sucesión cronológica. Para las Obras completas de Losada de 1968 y 1973 preparé una bibliografía activa del poeta, comenzando con el registro de todas las ediciones de los libros de Neruda (es decir, las compilaciones organizadas y tituladas por el poeta) y de las "anticipaciones" correspondientes, o sea, de los textos de dichos libros publicados en revistas o periódicos o antologías con anterioridad a la primera edición. Esa sección de la bibliografía (la nerudiana canónica) ocupó unas ochenta páginas. La sección sucesiva traía una novedad: era el registro cronológico, desde 1917 en adelante, de todos los textos sueltos (poemas y prosas) no incluidos por Neruda en sus libros o, lo que es igual, excluidos de la nerudiana canónica. Esta sección abarcó unas setenta páginas y la llamé nerudiana dispersa (obvio eco del título 'Oceanografía dispersa' de una notoria crónica de Neruda). Sin ese trabajo bibliográfico previo nunca habría podido dar a "mis" obras completas el perfil definidor que alcanzaron. Porque revisando esos textos me di cuenta de que su calidad media era de muy buen nivel y que reunirlos como genérico Apéndice no les hacía justicia. Ni en calidad ni en cantidad. Aunque excluidos de la nerudiana canónica, no eran escritura marginal sino en reducido porcentaje. Ocurrió por ese tiempo, además, que conversando con Neruda le pregunté una vez por qué la prosa 'La copa de sangre' de 1938, un texto que yo admiro mucho, no había sido incluido en ninguno de sus libros canónicos. Tras un silencio, y sin mirarme, respondió sólo: "Demasiado personal". Comprendí que aludía al irresuelto conflicto con su padre y que, por tanto, también para él era un texto especial. Si lo dejaba fuera de sus libros no era porque lo considerase marginal. Al contrario. Algunos meses después me pidió viajar a Isla Negra, donde me regaló, dedicadas y firmadas, las pruebas de imprenta de 'La copa de sangre': "Ahí tienes eso, para que no me fastidies más", me dijo socarrón. Con otras prosas había integrado un volumen bellísimo bajo el título La copa de sangre / y otros poemas. (Mi ejemplar con dedicatoria me fue sustraído por algún militar durante el allanamiento de mi casa en 1973).
Fue entonces que surgió en mí la estructura de las Obras completas de Neruda que Círculo de Lectores y Galaxia Gutenberg me han dado la oportunidad de realizar, con la complicidad del editor Nicanor Vélez -porque esta tercera vez el editor fue un colombiano avecindado en Barcelona-. Con esto quiero decir que los cinco volúmenes (1999-2002) no traen unas obras completas más un gordo apéndice, sino dos líneas de obras completas : la nerudiana canónica (volúmenes 1-3) y la nerudiana dispersa (volúmenes 4-5).
Sobre la nerudiana canónica, bien poco podría yo agregar a las anotaciones de críticos (el primer grande fue también un español, Amado Alonso, en 1940) y de lectores especiales, como Julio Cortázar en su magnífico 'Neruda entre nosotros' de 1974. Señalo sólo que en ese territorio mi trabajo principal fue la fijación de textos fiables y el casi centenar de páginas de notas que trae cada uno de los tres volúmenes. El lector interesado podrá, así, asomarse al taller secreto de Neruda a través de mis notas, donde encontrará por ejemplo el proceso de la composición del poema 15 o cómo en 1967 advertí a Neruda, para sorpresa suya, que a Canto general le faltaba un poema desde la primera edición.
Pero yo quisiera, sobre todo, que la nerudiana canónica fuera una invitación a explorar y a valorar, como ellos lo merecen, los libros de la última década de la producción poética de Neruda. Hay al respecto un injusto desconocimiento y más de algún prejuicio. El volumen 3 de las Obras completas de Galaxia-Círculo trae libros de gran valor literario, que por sí solos harían la gloria de cualquier poeta pero que la fama de los Veinte poemas, de Residencia y de Canto general ha oscurecido o puesto en un limbo inmerecido. Libros excelentes del Neruda tardío como Arte de pájaros (1966), Las manos del día (1968), Geografía infructuosa (1972), y entre los póstumos los titulados Jardín de invierno, Defectos escogidos y en particular El mar y las campanas.
Respecto a los dos volúmenes (4 y 5) de la nerudiana dispersa, conviene leerlos teniendo cuenta del paralelo despliegue de la nerudiana canónica. Porque entre ambos itinerarios hay una relación constante, fundada en la evolución biográfica del común autor: "Si ustedes me preguntan qué es mi poesía, debo decirles: no sé; pero si le preguntan a mi poesía, ella les dirá quién soy yo", declaró Neruda durante una lectura de sus poemas en 1943. La gran novedad y, confieso, lo que más me enorgullece de estas obras completas de Neruda es haber puesto al alcance de muchos de sus lectores una buena cantidad de gemas antes inaccesibles o ignoradas. Garantizo hallazgos sorprendentes como las magníficas 'Crónicas desde Oriente para el diario La Nación de Santiago de Chile (1927-1930)', enviadas desde Port-Said, Djibouti, Colombo, Singapur, Shanghai, Rangún, durante los años de Birmania, Ceilán y Java en que Neruda escribió también buena parte de la primera Residencia en la tierra. A los lectores que aman los Veinte poemas recomiendo vivamente las crónicas y poemas que el joven anarquista Neruda publicó entre 1921 y 1926 en la revista Claridad, órgano de la Federación de Estudiantes de Chile, y más en especial aún las decisivas prosas sentimentales del Álbum Terusa 1923, escritas como mensajes de amor para Teresa Vásquez pero que en verdad constituyen el acta de fundación del espacio mítico de Cantalao (Puerto Saavedra), ese Macondo del poeta chileno al que remitirá en última instancia toda su producción literaria futura.
Entre la nerudiana dispersa incluí las memorias de Neruda, Confieso que he vivido, porque se trata de una obra muy incompleta (Pablo proyectaba entregar a Losada los originales en mayo de 1974) que por lo mismo no alcanzó a organizar bien. Por último estas obras completas de Neruda traen un auténtico apéndice documental que merece atención, constituido por tres secciones. La primera es un Epistolario selecto, en el que destacan las cartas escritas por Neruda desde Oriente (1927-1932) a su desconocido amigo y corresponsal argentino Héctor Eandi, y también las cartas de tozudo amor del joven poeta a su deseadísima Albertina Azócar, que al parecer fue tan eróticamente sabia en la intimidad cuanto inerte y reticente a la hora de las decisiones prácticas (1921-1929). Otra sección documental está formada por una docena de entrevistas entre las que destacan una muy breve pero intensa y chispeante que le hizo nada menos que Clarice Lispector en Río de Janeiro, 1969, y otra muy extensa y fundamental, pletórica de datos curiosos y evocaciones, realizada en Isla Negra, 1970, por la norteamericana Rita Guibert.
Las obras completas se cierran con las traducciones que hizo Neruda, comenzando con Marcel Schwob ('La ciudad durmiente'), Rainer Maria Rilke (un fragmento de los Cuadernos de Malte Laurids Brigge), James Joyce (dos fragmentos de Chamber Music), siguiendo con Blake, Whitman, Baudelaire, para terminar con el Romeo y Julieta. Los conocedores de Shakespeare podrán admirar no sólo una versión en endecasílabos sino la inteligencia y la maestría de algunas soluciones de Neruda a los problemas que plantea el texto a la hora de intentar su traducción al castellano. Recomendación personal y final: no olvidéis 'La copa de sangre' de 1938.
BIBLIOGRAFIA
Obras completas Pablo Neruda (Galaxia Gutenberg/Círculo de Lectores).
Oriente Pablo Neruda. Incluye las Crónicas desde Oriente, escritas para La nación (1927-1939); los poemas de Resdiencia en la tierra, escritos en Asia; las páginas de Confieso que he vivido, dedicadas a Oriente, y cartas de esos años (Littera).
Neruda. La biografía Volodia Teitelboim (Meran).
Neruda por Skármeta Antonio Skármeta (Seix-Barral).
Neruda y España Julio Gálvez Barraza (Ril).
El Madrid de Pablo Neruda Sergio Macía Brevis (Tabla Rasa).
* Este artículo apareció en la edición impresa del Sábado, 10 de julio de 2004
The Washington Post
18-4-2018
The messy, brilliant life of Pablo Neruda
By Troy Jollimore
Few poets offer their biographers as rich a vein of material as the Chilean Nobel Prize-winner Pablo Neruda . Born in Parral, Chile, in 1904, Neruda transcended his modest origins and provincial upbringing to achieve success and significance far beyond the dreams of most writers . Books like “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair,” “Residence on Earth ” and “Elemental Odes” have sold tens of millions of copies . Nearly 45 years after his death, Neruda continues to be regarded as one of the most significant poets of the 20 th century. In his home country, he remains a beloved and potent national symbol.
Mark Eisner’s new biography, “Neruda: The Poet’s Calling,” explores the complex confluence of factors that accounts for Neruda’s extraordinary fame and success. Far more than most modern poetry, Neruda’s body of work is quite accessible — a fact that reflects not only his personal preferences but also his political views. Moved at an early age by the exploitation of the disadvantaged, he viewed poetry as existing for the benefit of the common people. “Poetry is like bread,” he famously wrote. “It should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.” When it was not overtly political, his poetry tended to concern itself with matters of quotidian existence, finding love and beauty in the commonplace, ordinary objects of daily human life.
Politics was never far from Neruda’s mind, and the story of his life is largely concomitant with the political history of the 20th century. The Chilean capital of Santiago, when he arrived there in 1921, was the center of an active student movement that hungered for progressive poetry. In the 1930s, he watched Spain fall into civil war from his post as a diplomat in Barcelona. Neruda already leaned toward socialism as a result of his Chilean experiences; now, watching as the Soviet Union stepped in to support the Spanish Republicans against Franco’s fascists while the rest of the world remained largely indifferent, he became a loyal communist and supporter of Stalin.
The origins of Neruda’s esteem for Stalin, then, are largely understandable. But his loyalty would persist for decades, long after reports of the brutal reality of Stalin’s dictatorial regime began to emerge, and though he did eventually repudiate that loyalty, it is not entirely clear why it took him so long. (Of course, Neruda was far from the only leftist intellectual of whom this could be said.)
Closer to home, his political activities were easier to admire. In Chile, he always managed to be on the side that opposed the dictators. When, in the late 1940s, the country’s Communist Party was outlawed and protests by coal miners were brutally suppressed, Neruda criticized the government in the international press and on the floor of the Chilean Senate. When the government tried to arrest him, he made a dramatic escape on horseback across the border into Argentina.
He returned to Chile in the mid-1950s and would spend most of the rest of his life there. His death from cancer , on Sept. 23, 1973 , occurred a mere 12 days after the U.S.-backed coup in which Augusto Pinochet ’s forces seized control from the democratically elected president Salvador Allende. Neruda’s funeral be came a spontaneous public demonstration of defiance against the new regime. While soldiers looked on, armed with machine guns but holding their fire, the crowd chanted, “He isn’t dead, he isn’t dead! He has only fallen asleep!”
The messiness of Neruda’s personal life, which was as eventful as his public one and which serves as evidence of his passionate, somewhat impulsive nature, does not always display him in a wholly admirable light. He neglected and then abandoned his first wife, barely acknowledging the existence of their daughter, who was born severely disabled. He seemed very much in love with his second wife; still, while they were together, he began an affair with the woman who would become his third. Toward the end of his life, he would cheat on her as well, with her niece.
It is, undeniably, a great story. But it is a story that has been told before — most satisfyingly, perhaps, in Adam Feinstein’s 2004 biography, “Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life.” The need for a new biography is not entirely obvious; and unfortunately, the man who lies at the heart of all these turbulent personal and political maelstroms remains oddly and frustratingly distant in Eisner’s telling. Despite his ongoing work on a documentary about Neruda and his work as a translator of “The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems” (2004), in this biography, Eisner tends to keep his subject at arm’s length. Outside of the excerpts from Neruda’s own poetry, one gets little sense of the man’s inner life.
Eisner’s prose, moreover, is on the whole, fairly pedestrian, except for a few unfortunate occasions when it strives, unwisely, for a kind of Nerudaesque poeticism. Describing his first sexual experience, for instance, Eisner writes Neruda “attempted to plow through her and reach the depths of the earth.” And his criticisms of Neruda tend to be articulated using what are by now rote, clichéd terms that make them feel like empty, obligatory gestures. Thus, Neruda is labeled as an “aggressor — even predator” in his sexual relations; an apparent sexual assault is identified as an “exercise of power and privilege”; and his general sexual behavior is at one point characterized as “imperialism perpetrated on a human scale.”
Ultimately, “Neruda: The Poet’s Calling” is not as satisfying as one might have hoped. Still, Neruda’s life remains a source of fascination, and his work remains vital. Any book that is likely to help bring new generations of readers to it is to be valued for that reason alone.
Troy Jollimore’s most recent book of poetry is “Syllabus of Errors.”
MAY 8, 2018
Is Neruda still worth reading today?
BEN BOLLIG
“The last thing we need is another Neruda translation”, writes Forrest Gander in the prologue to Then Come Back, a volume of recently rediscovered poems by the Chilean Nobel Laureate, now published in English for the first time. He later recants, enthusing about the new pieces, but his assertion hangs awkwardly in the air. The canonical status of Neruda is close to unquestionable: Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924; Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair) is the most commercially successful collection of verse ever produced in Spanish. But Neruda’s oeuvre is sizeable and much of it is already available in English, including several collections in multiple versions.
What if the problem is not just proliferation, but also Neruda himself? The man matters: throughout his work, autobiography and self-fashioning are inescapable. It is not always very palatable. In his memoirs, Neruda recounts an incident in 1929 in Wellawatte, Sri Lanka, where he had been posted as a diplomat. He developed an obsession with the Tamil girl who emptied his slop bucket: “One morning, I decided to go all the way”, he recalls. “I got a strong grip on her wrist and stared into her eyes . . . . Unsmiling, she let herself be led away and was soon naked in my bed . . . . It was the coming together of a man and a statue. She kept her eyes wide open, all the while, completely unresponsive. She was right to despise me. The experience was never repeated”.
Neruda the man is certainly a problem, but critics have argued that unacceptable attitudes to women and sex course through his poetry too. The link between the silencing of women and sexual violence is underlined by Mario Vargas Llosa in his novel La Fiesta del Chivo (The Feast of the Goat), when the dictator Rafael Trujillo abuses a teenager, having recited poem fifteen of the Veinte poemas to her. Then there is the politics. A youthful anarchist, Neruda became and remained a communist, at times a Stalinist, for much of his mature career. And so we read dithyrambs to Stalin; rhapsodies about various authoritarian states, including their tractor production; and a poem unironically called “The Angel of the Central Committee”.
Megalomania is hard to avoid in Neruda’s poetry. The huge scale of his Latin American epic, Canto general (1950), has its corollary in gargantuan appetites for food and drink, as well as sex. The excess loses its charm after a while. The appetite stretched to other people’s verses. Persistent accusations of plagiarism, or unacknowledged borrowings, accompanied Neruda over the years: the Uruguayan Carlos Sabat Ercasty in the early works; Rabindranath Tagore in the Veinte poemas; or later an obscure Argentine poet, Jorge Enrique Ramponi, as a source for “Alturas de Macchu Picchu”. Across the vast stretch of the oeuvre, there are wide variations in quality. C. M. Bowra calculated – somewhat harshly – that about “half” of Neruda’s poetry was “very poor stuff indeed”. So is Neruda still worth reading today? Might these two new translations give a sense of his continued relevance, or remind us of the thrill of a first encounter with España en el corazón (1937; Spain in Our Hearts) or “Heights of Macchu Picchu”?
The Spanish original of venture of the infinite man – tentativa del hombre infinito – was published in 1926. Faithful to the original publication, this is a small square book. Neruda’s first poems were marked by strict adherence to particular forms of rhyme and metre, as inherited from the modernista movement and the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. We see this in his first collection, Crepusculario (1923). Subsequently, while mixing in bohemian literary circles in Temuco and Santiago, Neruda began to break away from his precursors, in the direction of a more flexible style. An important early project was his free-verse cycle, El hondero entusiasta (1933; The Enthusiastic Slingsman). But Neruda abandoned it when told that his poems were too close to those of his model, Sabat Ercasty, another free-verse pioneer. From this setback, Neruda returned to a less ambitious project, a short series of love poems, which mixed traditional and freer forms, the latter structured around sonic patterns and visual play. This modest sequence would become Veinte poemas. It has sold 20 million copies to date, serving as a vade mecum for lovers around the world.
Neruda refused to give up on producing an extended poetic sequence in free verse; the result of his persistence emerged in tentativa. In his attempt to break with love poetry – and traditional forms more generally – he opted for what Mark Eisner, in the introduction, calls “a stark stylistic departure”, abandoning rhyme, metre, capital letters, punctuation marks and other standard features of printed poetry – indeed, of written language tout court. For Eisner, tentativa “is an avant-garde lyrical narrative, [comprising] fifteen uniquely composed, but intimately linked, cantos”. The collection relates “its protagonist’s search for absolute wholeness, a new reality, a restored consciousness”. This involves a quest, a journey into the night, as a lost soul tries to rediscover his true self. Early in the poem this figure is described as “a man of twenty”, the age Neruda was at the time – and a reminder of just how young he was when fame, in the shape of the Veinte poemas, struck. Neruda shifts perspective, employing a lyrical first person, but also describing the protagonist in the third person, and addressing him in the second: “you ran to the shore of the country looking for it / like the sleepwalker at the edge of his dream”. There is a female character, who accompanies the protagonist on part of the journey. Other personified characters, also addressed, create a (deliberate) confusion over actor and action for much of the poem. The effect is delirious, if not nightmarish, in places. The speaker is motivated by a “thirst” (sed), a term that also appeared in his earliest surviving notebooks and the Veinte poemas as “la sed infinita”. Neither sex nor poetry can fully satiate the essential desire for infinity or transcendence.
Tentativa is arresting for the images it conjures up. We read early on: “death rattle tree candelabra of old flames / distant fire my heart is sad”. Neruda’s poetry can operate on several planes at once; this is what makes him so amenable to biographical and text-based critics alike. His method in tentativa is cumulative, piling up objects and images as the speaker/addressee moves through a world that is both physical and dreamlike: “prow mast leaf in the storm desolation drives you on with no return / you look like the ruined tree and the water that shatters it”. The language echoes that of the Veinte poemas, but we also read the buzzwords of contemporary avant-garde poets. Neruda crafts an image that looks like a surrealist exquisite corpse, but is bound up with human apprehension of the world, made strange through a drive to create metaphors and similes out of the objects around us. Another of these flashes of brilliance is found later, in the phrase “caía la lluvia en pétalos de vidrio” (the rain was falling in petals of glass).
Much of this may read like surrealist poetry. Eisner claims a connection to the practices of André Breton et al, with Neruda “dipping into some of [their] techniques and tenets”, without ever becoming a paid-up member of the movement. Neruda is not simply channelling the subconscious – if that were ever truly possible in writing – but revising and reworking, creating what in structural terms is quite an orderly collection. His ostensibly surrealist images very often have a literary or real-world corollary, rather than being something just plucked out of the air (or the subconscious). Sometimes it feels as if we are reading a private code: “shadow of stars rise up upon the brow of a man at the bend in the road / who carries on his back a pale woman of gold who looks like herself”. Quasi-surrealism or coded autobiography, it is an extraordinary image.
We also have a foretaste of what Neruda called his “impure poetry” of the 1930s: he describes himself as a horse, “skittish anxious motionless not urinating”. This micturitional reference reappears in Residencia en la tierra (1935), in “Widower’s Tango”. The poems, in this and other collections written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, are full of physical stuff and real places: “cinematógrafos” (cinemas), and “victrolas” – the things of modern, urban life, not celebrated, as in futurist or self-consciously avant-garde poetry, but simply there. This marks the move away from modernismo and from Sabat Ercasty, into a much more tangible reality. At times we see Neruda past and future at once: “the poets the philosophers the couples in love / . . . humble enthusiast / i have the joy of a contented baker . . .”. He is quoting his earlier work, El hondero entusiasta, and looking ahead to the poem “Caballero solo” (from Residencia), with its sordid sex and lists of professions. Phrases and images from tentativa reappear frequently in the Residencia cycle. A phrase like “the joy of a contented baker” points to later poetry still, such as the three volumes of odes produced during the 1950s, with their celebration of simple pleasures and ordinary vocations.
Tentativa is a collection full of drive and rhythmic energy – what Bowra called Neruda’s unparalleled “impetus”. But there is an allied susceptibility to the ugly phrase or duff note. Despite Neruda’s high hopes, it was a critical and commercial disappointment, alienating many commentators. As René de Costa notes, tentativa “was so strange and unfamiliar to most readers of the time that they were unable and unwilling to make any sense out of it”. Writing fifty years after the poem was completed, de Costa argued that readers had grown up, that avant-garde experimentation was no longer so offputting or odd, and it was time for a “reappraisal” of the collection. Its importance was in part as a stepping stone in Neruda’s development, casting off “the hollow shell of rhyme and metre” and moving towards the “expressive system” of Residencia. Neruda himself called it one of the “true nuclei” of his writing. Here, in deft versions by Jessica Powell, a new addition to the roster of translators of Neruda into English, the poems appear with the English first and then the Spanish at the back, with identical pagination. As the tentativa is a breathless rush, this makes sense, not interrupting the surge of Neruda’s poetic journey into the night.
The poems in Then Come Back were found by archivists working through the poet’s papers – in notebooks, exercise books, on loose leaves, and even one written on a menu. They date from between the early 1950s and Neruda’s death in 1973, and did not find their way into his Complete Works. In his introduction, Darío Oses writes that “for their literary quality and universal importance, there is no doubt that these poems deserve to be included among Pablo Neruda’s works”. This is partly to damn them with faint praise. Neruda’s published oeuvre is nothing if not uneven, despite what those close to him described as a painstaking attitude to revision and order. These poems are not drafts or alternative versions; they are poems in their own right that, for whatever reason, never made it into print. Neruda’s great friend Jorge Edwards, who himself edited a posthumous collection, El río invisible (1980; The Invisible River), referred to them as “repetitive” and as “snippets”.
The Spanish title, Tus pies toco en la sombra (I Touch Your Feet in the Shadow), is from the first line of the opening poem. Calling the volume Then Come Back is one of a number of small but noticeable changes, not all for the better, in this visually pleasing edition. A frustrating aspect of both original and translation is that the poems do not appear in chronological order; no rationale is given for this in either volume, and only by reading through the endnotes do we discover their sequence. Missing, too, in the English version is the division into “Love Poems” and “Other Poems”. The order is also tweaked, with a poem about Russian cosmonauts rounding off the English collection, rather than a charming but minor piece about two of Neruda’s many ships’ figureheads, which closes the Spanish. As the translator, Forrest Gander, acknowledges, not all of the poems were finished. The manuscripts include crossings out, revisions and even sections that are illegible.
Many of the poems are reminiscent of the odes produced in the 50s, and date from around the same period, as he moved away from the grand scale and continental sweep of the Canto general towards the celebration of everyday things. His compositional method involved breaking up more traditional lines (hendecasyllables in particular) into shorter phrases to fit into a newspaper column. There are six love poems – dedicated to his third wife, Matilde Urrutia – and another fifteen poems on general themes. Poem 1 emerges from the same creative cycle that produced the poetic memoir Memorial de Isla Negra (1964). Gander crafts a touching love poem, but one would never know from the translation that the Spanish opens with a series of carefully measured alexandrines. The final line in Spanish has a word that is illegible, but without it this metre returns. The manuscript, the notes state, was covered in corrections. It seems that Neruda hadn’t quite got there; this may be why it was excluded – neither free verse nor a fully scanned composition.
Poem 4, one of the longest pieces in the collection, features drifting, wandering lines. The register is explicit in places: “your sex in the scorched oak’s moss like a ring in a nest”. The lover is linked to the landscape of Chile, with sex as a form of communion with nature. In part we have not progressed from the Veinte poemas; some of the vocabulary may seem very familiar: “Settle your pure hips and the bow of wet arrows / loosens into the night”. But the anguish and self-doubt of adolescence are gone. Gander gets the concreteness, the solidity of these poems: “hard-bodied dove” for dura paloma works well, and it takes some guts to translate alcantarillado (sewerage, sanitation) as “decent plumbing”, but here it just about fits. The piece plays with internal echoes which are yet more noticeable in English: “the petals that form your form”, “the shade tree that sings to the shadows”, “nocturnal night”. Gander is right not to smooth over these potentially jarring repetitions.
The rest is a miscellany; the intensity of the amorous verses is lost. The quality varies, too. As an insight into Neruda’s development it does not match the discovery of his 1919–20 Temuco notebooks, published together in the 1990s. One of the more interesting pieces, Poem 7, is a rare address to his youthful self – in the vein of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, as Oses observes. “You’re / me”, he writes, from the mountain heights, down to the lad on the shore, a Borgesian encounter with his earlier incarnation. “I look at you / and don’t believe / I’m myself / so stupid, so remote, / so abandoned / A kid”. The difference from Borges, who staged a number of such encounters, is that this is not a dialogue. The younger self has nothing to say back to the older, established poet. Neruda proposes the idea of the poeta fogonero or “stoker” poet, in Gander’s translation, adding detail to his mature conviction that the writer was just one worker among many. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1971, he spoke of the poet as a baker, rather than the “small god” promoted by avant-gardists like his compatriot Vicente Huidobro.
Can we read Neruda without having to accept the questionable attitudes and inexcusable behaviour? In his best work, the certainty and the ego break down. The Veinte poemas show how love sustains and yet breaks us. Residencia describes purposelessness and doubt; the Civil War poems how violence shatters our world. “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” sees an individualistic poetic method collapsing and having to be rebuilt, incorporating those whom history and epic verse have too often left out. Memorial de Isla Negra has fleeting moments, like “El episodio”, when Neruda appears to relax previous political certainties. In tentativa we see Neruda in flux, unsure; in Then Come Back, vulnerable, even dependent on his beloved. His genius is to show us a world that is ours but more intense, and more worthy of close attention; as we look at it, we open ourselves up, and certainties and prejudices shift and shake. These two collections serve as a reminder of the good and the not so good in Neruda.