Sus obras y su  vida

Page by Allison Hundstad

2001

 

v     Pablo Neruda is one of the most famous Latin American poets of all time. It is remarkably difficult to pin down exactly how Neruda writes, because with each major change in his life, his poetry changed with him. A study of Neruda’s works can only be complete after connecting his works with the time in his life in which he wrote them.

 

 

v     Pablo Neruda was born on July 12, 1904 in Parral, Chile (Pablo Neruda), as Ricardo Eliecer Neftali Reyes y Basoalto (Goforth). He was born to don José del Carmen Reyes Morales, a railway worker, and Posa Basoalto de Reyes, a schoolteacher that died of tuberculosis shortly after Neruda was born (1904-1973). Neruda took his pseudonym to keep his literary efforts a secret from his critical family (Goforth). He took the last name of Neruda to honor Czechoslovak poet Jan Neruda (1834-1891) (Pablo Neruda).

v     Neruda represented Chile by holding consul positions in many different locations from Asia to Mexico. He took the consul appointments because he could not afford to work only on his poetry. The Spanish revolutions disillusioned Neruda, and he became a communist and spoke out against fascist governments (Schade).

v     In 1969 and 1970 he campaigned as the communist choice for president of Chile, but he pulled out of the race. He put his support behind his friend, the socialist candidate Salvador Allende (Schade). President Allende appointed Neruda as ambassador to France (1970-1972). On September 23, 1973, Neruda died in Santiago of leukemia. His death was probably accelerated by the assassination of President Allende during the Pinochet coup (1904-1973). In his life he received the Stalin Peace Prize of 1953, a honorary degree from Oxford University in London in 1965, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.

 

 

v     In Neruda’s life, his poetry went in four main directions, with each direction matching an aspect of his personality. The first direction, shown in his work Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924), was the tender, melancholy, sensuous, and emotional love poetry about his passionate love live. The next course, as seen in Residence on Earth (1925-1935), was material poetry in which “loneliness and depression immerse the author in a subterranean world of dark, demonic forces”; these demonic forces came out of Neruda’s nightmares and his depression that was caused by feelings of isolation in Asia. The third route was epic poetry, such as the poetry in Canto General (1950), that sprung from Neruda’s wish to express the grievances of the tyrannized and the feeble people of the world and to analyze both past and present times Latin America. His last path took him to poetry of the common, like the odes in Odas Elemenales (1954), where his “ever-present attention to details of daily life, his love of things made or grown by human hands” helped him express the wonder of everyday objects, plants and animals (Assessment).

 

 

From Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

¤  Tonight I Can Write. . .

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, "The night is shattered

and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.

I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.

How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.

And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.

The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.

My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.

My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.

We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.

Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms

my soul is not satisfied that it lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer

and these the last verses that I write for her.

¤  Neruda, Pablo. Selected Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin/

  Seymour Lawrence, 1970.

 

v     Twenty Love. . . takes the reader through one of Neruda’s relationships: the first physical attraction, the confusion about what to do, the lust for the person, the gentle love once with the person, and the end of the relationship when the narrator is alone. “Tonight I Can Write. . .” (“Puedo Escribir. . .”) comes at the end of a relationship when Neruda is recalling the passionate moments he shared with a woman and the love that he is missing now that she is out of his life and he has fallen into the consequential loneliness that follows a relationship. One of the main elements to Neruda’s love poetry is that his beloved is absent in the poem. It is obvious that the woman is not present in “Tonight I Can Write. . .” because he speaks of his love in the third person instead of the second person. Neruda’s verse is written in iambic hexameter. Every stanza except for the two one-line stanzas (ln1 and ln 4) is a couplet without rhyme. Both consonance and assonance are seen. Consonance can be found in the line “Tonight I can write the saddest lines,” and assonance is in line seventeen: “In the distance someone is singing.” Alliteration is present throughout the poem: line three “stars shiver” and line twenty-three “longer love.” The enjambment in lines two and three stresses the word “shattered” because of where the lines split. Short simple sentences that repeat a though in the before or after it, such as in line twenty-five “Another’s. She will be another’s,” and caesura do to short sentences and end-stopped lines create emphasis. Neruda also formulates emphasis by repeating lines. He repeats the first line, “Tonight I can write the saddest lines,” in lines five and eleven. Neruda is able to appeal to the simple reader by using emotional, realistic diction. Lines such as line twelve “To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her,” are not cloaked in eloquent, hard-to-understand language (Schade).

 

From Odas Elementales

¤ Ode to the Clothes

Every morning you wait,

clothes, over a chair,

for my vanity,

my love,

my hope, my body

to fill you,

I have scarcely

left sleep,

I say good-bye to the water

and enter you sleeves,

my legs look for

the hollow of your legs,

and thus embraced

by your unwearying fidelity

I go out to tread the fodder,

I move into poetry,

I look through windows,

at things,

men, women,

actions and struggles

keep making me what I am,

opposing me,

employing my hands,

opening my eyes,

putting taste in my mouth,

and thus,

clothes,

I make you what you are,

pushing out your elbows,

bursting the seams,

and so your life swells

the image of my life.

You billow

and resound in the wind

as though you were my soul,

at bad moments

you cling

to my bones

empty, at night                                   

the dark, sleep,

people with their phantoms

your wings and mine.

I ask

whether one day

a bullet

from the enemy

will stain you with my blood

and then

you will die with me

or perhaps

it may not be

so dramatic

but simple,

and you will sicken gradually,

clothes,

with me, with my body

and together

we will enter

the earth.

At the thought of this

every day

I greet you

with reverence, and then

you embrace me and I forget you

because we are one

and will go on facing

the wind together, at night,

the streets or the struggle,

one body,

maybe, maybe, one day motionless.

¤  Neruda, Pablo. Selected Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin/ Seymour

  Lawrence, 1970.

v     In “Odas Elementales” (1954) he showed the “simplicity and joy in elemental things” while paying “special homage to things, inanimate objects as well as living things and a few abstractions and criticisms.” His odes are an optimistic look at things that are “humble in nature” in order to “spring them to life.” The odes seem to have been written in the moment of inspiration with a “mixture of the calculated and the impromptu.” While the odes seem to lack substance or poetic competency to the untrained reader, in reality “they are attractive to look at in their short, broken-line typographical disarray, as well as satisfying in what they have to say to us.” In “Ode to Clothes,” as in the other odes, Neruda’s tone is light and almost comical at some points, but his subject is deep and meaningful. In this poem, Neruda is searching for answers about death by considering what will happen to his clothing when he dies. He personifies the clothing as a part of him, a piece of his physical self that feels as he feels. In his odes, Neruda seems to be “searching for metaphysical answers in the concrete, we find him placing much significance on objects and things” (Schade).

v

From Cien sonetos de amor

¤ XLV

Don’t go far off, not even for a day, because—

because—I don’t know how to say it: a day is long

and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station

when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don’t leave me, even for an hour, because

the little drops of anguish will all run together,

the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift

into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;

may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.

Don’t leave me for a second, my dearest.

because in that moment you’ll have gone so far

I’ll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,

Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

¤ Neruda, Pablo. Cien Sonetos de Amor. Austin:

University of Texas Press, 1986.

 

v     In Cien Sonetos. . . Neruda’s sonnets range from those in free verse to those that are strict iambic pentameter. Unlike many sonnets, Neruda’s are completely devoid of rhyme, even in the Spanish. XLV has a tone of melancholy, as the narrator is afraid to be left to die alone. Neruda uses visual imagery to express his fear of loneliness. He compares himself without Matilde (his wife to whom he wrote Cien Sonetos. . .) to an image of an empty train station in lines three and four: “as in an empty station/ when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.” He is saying that without her he will feel emotionally drained and he will be as useless as a train that is not running. Stephen Tapscott, the translator, said, “We don’t have much of a tradition of love poetry in North America, and these poems seem to introduce attitudes of sensual joy of a sort that we--Anglophobes, at least--have never been very comfortable with, nor very adept at expressing.” So, Neruda becomes “a voice of intelligent sensual joy” (Tapscott).

 

Works Cited

v      “Assessment.” Encyclopedia Britannica. On-line. Internet. 14 May 2001.

Availiable:wysiwyg://45/http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=567

5&tocid=5186. (See also: http://www.britannica.com/)

 

 

v     Goforth, Ray. “Some Thoughts on Pablo Neruda’s Epic Poem ‘The Heights of

Manchu Picchu.’” On-line. Internet. 16 May 2001. Available: http://www.wco.com/~altaf/pablo.txt

 

 

v     “Pablo Neruda.” On-line. Internet. 12 May 2001. Available:

http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1971/neruda-bio.html

 

 

v     “Pablo Neruda (1904-1973).” On-line. Internet. 16 May 2001. Available:

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/neruda.htm

 

v     Schade, George D. “Pablo Neruda.” Scribners. CD-ROM. Vol. 3.: Latin

AmericanWriters, 1989. P.p. 1001-1018.

 

v     Tapscott, Stephen. Translator’s note. Cien Sonetos de Amor. By Pablo Neruda.

Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. vii-x.

 

Pictures gathered from:

 

v     http://www.uchile.cl/neruda/

v     http://boppin.com/neruda.html