The Poetry of Pablo Neruda By Pablo Neruda, Rene de Costa * Publisher: Harvard University Press * Number Of Pages: 256

* Publication Date: 1982-09 * ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0674679814 * ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780674679818 1. Introduction The Major Works One by one, I have been leaving my books behind me, substituting, reconstructing form and meaning each time. I am the foremost adversary of Nerudism. 1954 Neruda was a poet of many styles and many voices, one whose multitudinous work is central to almost every important development in twentieth-century Spanish and Spanish American poetry. He was once referred to as the Picasso of poetry, alluding to his protean ability to be always in the vanguard of change. And he himself has often alluded to his personal struggle with his own tradition, to his constant need to search for a new system of expression in each new book. Neruda was, until very recently in his later years, a poet perpetually in revolution against himself, against his own tradition. Perhaps for this reason he frequently had difficulties in finding an initial acceptance for so many of the works today recognized as major. In fact, the most famous of all his books, a text that has thus far sold several million copies and has gone through countless editions since it first appeared in Santiago over fifty years ago, was once considered unpublishable. I am referring to Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair). In 1923, just after the polite, but positive, critical reception of the traditional verses of his first book, Crepusculario~ the Chilean publishing house Nascimento refused to print the love poems. At the time it was felt that they were too "erotic" and that their publication would tarnish the good reputation of the press. Neruda's straightforward celebration of love, lovemaking, and the longing to make love was considered to be a bit too direct, hence, not sufficiently "poetic." Significantly enough, the controversial quality of the work then can help us to appreciate its uniqueness now. Love and sex, to be sure, have long been traditional subjects of poetry. However, the t!eatment of the erotic theme is usually quite conventional. Euphemism and metaphor are used to

abstract and idealize the erogenous parts of the body, while passion is somehow artistically sublimated in a kind of mystic enthrallment before the beloved. Neruda's book of 1924 challenged this genteel tradition. Idealism was replaced by sensualism, abstraction by concreteness. In Veinte poemas de amor love was not sentimental and unrequited as in the Petrarchian model; rather erotic passion and the sensual delights of the flesh were openly exalted. Thus, "Cuerpo de Mujer" (Body of Woman), the first of the twenty love poems is not written to a courtly idol; not to the conventional parts of the female anatomy made familiar by poetic tradition; not to eyes like diamonds, teeth like pearls, skin like alabaster or marble-images that the reader of love poetry since the Renaissance has almost wearily come to expect. It is to the body of woman, any woman, all women. Neruda unceremoniously set aside all these poetic conventions to celebrate the call of anonymous flesh and carnal pleasure. "Cuerpo de mujer" sets the tone of the entire book: Cuerpo de mujer, blancas colinas, muslos blancos, te pareces al mundo en tu actitud de entrega. Mi cuerpo de labriego salvaje te socava y hace saltar el hijo del fondo de la tierra. Fui solo como un tunel. De m! huian los pajaros, y en m! la noche entraba su invasion poderosa. Para sobrevivirme te forje como un arma, como una flecha en mi arco, como una piedra en mi honda. Pero cae la hora de la venganza, y te amo. Cuerpo de piel, de musgo, de leche avida y firme. Ah los vasos del pechol Ah los ojos de ausencial Ah las rosas del pubis! Ah tu voz lenta y triste! 2 Cuerpo de mujer mia, persistire en tu gracia. Mi sed, mi ansia sin limite, mi camino indeciso! Oscuros cauces donde la sed eterna sigue, y la fatiga sigue, y el dolor infinito. Body of woman, white hills, white thighs, you resemble the world in your attitude of giving. My rough peasant body digs in you and makes the son leap from the depth of the earth. I went alone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me, and night swamped me with its crushing invasion. To survive I forged you like a weapon, like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling. But the hour of vengeance falls, and I love you. Body of skin, of moss, of eager and firm milk. Ah, the goblets of your breast! Ah, the eyes of absence! Ah, the roses of your pubis! Ah, your voice so slow and sad! Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace. My thirst, my limitless desire, my undecided path! Dark riverbeds where the eternal thirst flows, and weariness

flows, and the infinite ache. Neruda was convinced that this poetry of passionate longing was artistically significant, and when the manuscript was rejected by the publisher he appealed to the established literary figures for support. In Chile it was the chaste and aristocratic Pedro Prado who responded. It is hard to imagine the author of the delicate A lsino supporting such erotic audacity, yet in the archives of the Prado family in Santiago there is an interesting letter from Neruda to Prado concerning the difficulties with the publisher. Pedro Prado was then Director of Chile's Museum of Fine Arts and one of the country's more prestigious writers. In this 1923 letter Neruda complains bitterly about Nascimento's refusal to print the love poems and his unsuccessful efforts with other Chilean publishing houses. Neruda was even willing to pay to have the book printed-but it seems that no one would have it under any conditions. The letter concludes with a prophetic phrase, which at the time must have seemed audacious, motivated as it was by resentment and youthful bravado. Neruda writes: "Le pesara, les pesara a todos" (He'll be sorry; they'll all be sorry). The owner of the publishing house didn't have to be sorry, however, because Prado convinced him that he should risk publishing the young Neruda's book of love poems. And so, it finally did come out the following year, in 1924, to the shock and delight of the critics and reading public. The book has since sold millions and millions of copies, establishing in the process a new readership and a new diction for love poetry in Spanish. In 1926, with the enthusiastic support of Nascimento and the Chilean avant-garde, Neruda published another book of poetry, Tentativa del hombre infinito (Venture of the Infinite Man), a major work that until quite recently has been somewhat misunderstood. Critics who liked his love poetry were at first dismayed by this book, for in it Neruda seemed to have abandoned not only rhyme and meter but also, according to some, any semblance of meaning. The problem was that in an effort to purify his poetic language, to rid it entirely of the hollow rhetoric of the past, he created a work that was so strange and unfamiliar to most readers of the time that they were unable and unwilling to make any sense out of it. The volume's opening lines are certainly as unusual as any: hogueras palidas revolviendose al borde de las noches corren hUffios difuntos polvaredas invisibles pallid fires turning about at the edge of the nigh ts dead smoke invisible dust clouds race on. Today. Surrealism has left us with an appreCIatIon for the suggestive power of discontinuous discourse, and these lines,

evoking the disquiet of a nocturnal scene, are not nearly so cryptic as was once believed. In retrospect it is possible to see that the techniques Neruda employed in this early experi~ mental work actually foreshadow those of Residencia en la tierra (Residence on Earth), which was not published until much later, in 1933. In 1927 Ne