Today, Chilean time, 103 years ago was the birthday of one of the greatest poets of the 20th century: Pablo Neruda. I love poetry as an artform, but generally I am more focused on individual poems rather than poets - with very few exceptions, such as Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire and Pablo Neruda. These poets deeply touch my soul, probably because their minds were shaped by the arising new spirit of their times, causing them to breach conventions and to rebel against the established order. And in doing so, they found expressions of passion and sensitivity, of rawness and beauty, of subtleness and yet often strongly announced intellectually clarity that makes me feel as if they speak for my own innermost depth.
Pablo Neruda was born in Parral, Chile on July 12, 1904 as Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto. ‘Pablo Neruda’ became his pen name (derived from Czech writer and poet Jan Neruda) and later became his legal name. Neruda was not just a poet but also a passionate socialist, politician. During his lifetime, Neruda occupied many diplomatic posts; from 1927 to 1945 he was the Chilean consul in Rangoon, in Java, and then in Barcelona. Between 1970 and 1973 he served in Allende’s Chilean Government as ambassador to Paris. Neruda joined the Communist Party after the Second World War and served a stint as senator for the Chilean Communist Party.
His political views often got him into trouble. When Conservative Chilean President González Videla outlawed communism in Chile, a warrant was issued for Neruda’s arrest. Friends hid him for months in a basement of a home in the Chilean port of Valparaíso. Neruda then escaped into exile through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. And Neruda’s political views were even an obstacle to formal international recognition: it was only in 1971 that Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - after several years of being overlooked for his political activism.
What Pablo Neruda though is most famous for is his poetry. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language”. Having his works translated into dozens of languages, Pablo Neruda is considered one of the greatest and most influential poets of the 20th century. Neruda’s poetry had not only an incredible depth; he also was accomplished in a wide variety of styles, ranging from erotically charged love poems (such as “White Hills”), surrealist poems, historical epics, and overtly political manifestos. Some of Neruda’s most beloved poems are his “Odes to Broken Things,” collected in several volumes.
Neruda’s poetic power and personal charisma found many more expressions of course than the few above given sketchy details of his life suggest. For example, he gave readings to the probably two largest audiences any poet had in history. On July 15, 1945 at Pacaembú Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil, he read to 100,000 people at an event in honour of Communist revolutionary Luis Carlos Prestes. And upon returning to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Salvador Allende invited Neruda to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.
His public and personal appeal even became an expression against Augusto Pinochet’s brutal rule. Neruda was hospitalised with cancer at the time of the CIA sponsored Pinochet’s coup d’état in which his close friend Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile, was murdered together with thousands of others of his country men and women. Neruda died of heart failure twelve days later on September 23, 1973. Already a legend in life, Neruda’s death became charged with an intense symbolism that reverberated around the world. Pinochet had denied permission to transform Neruda’s funeral into a public event, but thousands of grieving Chileans disobeyed the curfew, flooding the streets in tribute. Neruda’s funeral became the first public protest against the Chilean military dictatorship.
[For a detailed view of Neruda’s life and work click here. There are many sites on the Internet where his poetry can be found, like Poem Hunter or Famous Poets and Poems.]
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,
and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.
translated by Nathaniel TarnWhen I close a book
I open life.
I hear
faltering cries
among harbours.
Copper ignots
slide down sand-pits
to Tocopilla.
Night time.
Among the islands
our ocean
throbs with fish,
touches the feet, the thighs,
the chalk ribs
of my country.
The whole of night
clings to its shores, by dawn
it wakes up singing
as if it had excited a guitar.
The ocean’s surge is calling.
The wind
calls me
and Rodriguez calls,
and Jose Antonio–
I got a telegram
from the “Mine” Union
and the one I love
(whose name I won’t let out)
expects me in Bucalemu.
No book has been able
to wrap me in paper,
to fill me up
with typography,
with heavenly imprints
or was ever able
to bind my eyes,
I come out of books to people orchards
with the hoarse family of my song,
to work the burning metals
or to eat smoked beef
by mountain firesides.
I love adventurous
books,
books of forest or snow,
depth or sky
but hate
the spider book
in which thought
has laid poisonous wires
to trap the juvenile
and circling fly.
Book, let me go.
I won’t go clothed
in volumes,
I don’t come out
of collected works,
my poems
have not eaten poems–
they devour
exciting happenings,
feed on rough weather,
and dig their food
out of earth and men.
I’m on my way
with dust in my shoes
free of mythology:
send books back to their shelves,
I’m going down into the streets.
I learned about life
from life itself,
love I learned in a single kiss
and could teach no one anything
except that I have lived
with something in common among men,
when fighting with them,
when saying all their say in my song.
translated by W.S. MerwinThe memory of you emerges from the night around me.
The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.
Deserted like the dwarves at dawn.
It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!
Cold flower heads are raining over my heart.
Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.
In you the wars and the flights accumulated.
From you the wings of the song birds rose.
You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank!
It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.
The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.
Pilot’s dread, fury of blind driver,
turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!
In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.
Lost discoverer, in you everything sank!
You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,
sadness stunned you, in you everything sank!
I made the wall of shadow draw back,
beyond desire and act, I walked on.
Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost,
I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.
Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness.
and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.
There was the black solitude of the islands,
and there, woman of love, your arms took me in.
There was thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and ruins, and you were the miracle.
Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me
in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms!
How terrible and brief my desire was to you!
How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.
Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,
still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.
Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,
oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.
Oh the mad coupling of hope and force
in which we merged and despaired.
And the tenderness, light as water and as flour.
And the word scarcely begun on the lips.
This was my destiny and in it was my voyage of my longing,
and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank!
Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you,
what sorrow did you not express, in what sorrow are you not
drowned!
From billow to billow you still called and sang.
Standing like a sailor in the prow of a vessel.
You still flowered in songs, you still brike the currents.
Oh pit of debris, open and bitter well.
Pale blind diver, luckless slinger,
lost discoverer, in you everything sank!
It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour
which the night fastens to all the timetables.
The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore.
Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate.
Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
Only tremulous shadow twists in my hands.
Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything.
It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!
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