Pablo Neruda: A Poet That Spoke of Both Love and Justice

 

Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was born in 1920. It was in October of that year, anyway, that a young man whose unsuspecting parents had baptized him Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto first signed with the name Neruda the poems that he felt he existed in order to write. Already, at 15, Neftalí (as his familiars addressed him until he escaped to college in the big city) had described himself, in excited drafts, not just as a poet but the poet, Mark Eisner points out in his new biography, Neruda: The Poet’s Calling.

Neruda as an adolescent poet amounted almost to a parody of the type, worryingly thin, melancholy and shy, and got up, unlike other local boys, all in black. Sickly and frail, he was unsuited to the physical labor done by most of his neighbors, and, a lazy pupil at school, he did not suggest a country doctor or lawyer in the making. He appreciated the splendors of the natural world and mooned over pretty girls but otherwise showed little aptitude or interest for anything outside of books. Among the men who didn’t recognize his promise was the poet’s own father, a former dockworker with a hard demeanor. Following the death of Neftalí’s mother mere weeks after the birth of her son, he’d installed the family in the frontier town of Temuco, halfway down the racked spine of Chile, where as the conductor of a “ballast train” he oversaw a crew of laborers continuously pouring gravel over the railroad to keep the tracks from being washed away by violent weather.

His father became so concerned that his son would learn no useful trade that he one day hurled the boy’s bookcase and papers out the window, then set them alight on the patio below. Neruda invented his pen name with the aim, he recalled some 50 years later in his Memoirs, of throwing his father “off the scent” of his published poems. Soon after the 17-year-old Neftalí Reyes enrolled at the University of Chile in Santiago, relying on his father for his meager living expenses and neglecting his studies in French pedagogy, one Pablo Neruda began to attract the notice of fellow students as a talented poet. Exotic but easy to pronounce, his adopted Czech surname became that of the preeminent twentieth-century poet in Spanish, a language whose poetry had quite a century.

Neruda said the ordeals of the era invited the poets’ breakthrough. “It has been the privilege of our time—with its wars, revolutions, and tremendous social upheavals—to cultivate more ground for poetry than anyone ever imagined. The common man has had to confront it, attacking or attacked, in solitude or with an enormous mass of people at public rallies.” A more sociological way of framing the idea would be to say that, because mass literacy and education formed a basic aspect of mass politics, poets during the middle half of the twentieth century could both come from humble backgrounds as never before and find an audience among ordinary people as never before. Neruda’s own case seemed to particularly confirm the general observation: Raised in “country-boy, petit-bourgeois” circumstances, “the people’s poet,” as he called himself, could in the decades after World War II fill stadiums and union halls, reciting to mass gatherings poems about the masses’ common pleasures and collective struggle. “A poet who reads his poems to 130,000 people,” he wrote about an occasion in São Paulo, “is not the same man and cannot keep writing in the same way.”

Neruda remains today an unusually popular poet, in utterly changed conditions. If some of his best poetry eludes easy comprehension, he more often produced verse after transparent verse. Even the surreal imagery of the early work can create a sensation of the cloudless transmission of emotion, as young people in love still frequently discover when they encounter their own throes of passion while reading Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair in their beds. (Taylor Swift credits Poem XX with inspiring her quadruple-platinum album Red.) The Elemental Odes that Neruda published in his fifties, during the 1950s, attain a more deliberate universality, as they contemplate the commonest items of human life: air or wine, copper wire or sexual coupledom, as well as sand and scissors and, in “Ode to Simplicity,” simplicity itself. Neruda’s books, said to outsell all other poetry translated into English, are often household articles in their own right.

Part of the value of Eisner’s biography is to situate a lastingly familiar and accessible body of work in its author’s exceptional experience of an irrecoverable recent past. Today the combination of a great poet who was also, in his words, “a disciplined Communist militant,” one of his country’s leading politicians, and an international celebrity is positively antediluvian. The decades since Neruda’s death in 1973—not two weeks after a right-wing coup overthrew the elected president of Chile, the poet’s “great comrade” Salvador Allende—have seen the rout of international socialism as well as a radical shrinkage in the audience, or market share, for poetry. Neruda the earth’s universal poet hails from another planet.

Neruda was just 20 when he published what remain his best-known poems. Old beyond his years and sad beyond any misfortune he’d yet suffered, he wrote in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair of “mi viejo dolor,” my old sadness. Melancholy is almost obligatory for young male poets; in other respects, Neruda spurned the genteel conventions still prevailing in love poetry of the time. The first lines of the first poem abandon any spiritualized and euphemistic presentation of romance and sex for something carnal and explicit: “Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs, / you look like a world, lying in surrender.” One of the poems’ addressees was Albertina Azócar, another Laura Arrué. The parents of both young women judged a train conductor’s son of unsatisfactory social standing for their daughters. As if to taunt them, he describes his “rough peasant’s body” that “makes the son leap from the depth of the earth.”

Some of the Twenty Poems became so well known that Neruda was annoyed: In later years he denounced XX (“Tonight I can write the saddest lines”) as the worst thing he ever wrote. The protest is unconvincing. With precocious assurance, the book shows the emotional directness and unabashed musicality that would abide across Neruda’s drastic alternations of style, along with other personality traits, as it were, of a long career. Already there is the offhand metaphorical extravagance, as if it’s merely natural and straightforward to describe oneself as a tunnel or a root, and a pressing awareness of the injuries of class society, the romantic frustrations of poor young men not least among them.


Mahbubul Islam is a lawyer
and former Secretary of
World Peace Council.