poetry of pablo neruda

I found some poems of pablo neruda;




PABLO NERUDA
POETRY
----------
And it was at that age...Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating planations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesmal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke free on the open sky.



-SADDEST POEM
----------------------

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.

Write, for instance: "The night is full of stars,
and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance."

The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her.
How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
To think I don't have her. To feel that I've lost her.

To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.

What does it matter that my love couldn't keep her.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.

That's all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul is lost without her.

As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
My heart searches for her and she is not with me.

The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, we who were, we are the same no longer.

I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.

Someone else's. She will be someone else's. As she once
belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.
Love is so short and oblivion so long.

Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.

Although this may be the last pain she causes me,
and this may be the last poem I write for her.



CLENCHED SOUL
----------------------

We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
while the blue night dropped on the world.

I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.

Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin in my hand.

I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.

Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?
The book fell that always closed at twilight
and my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.

Always, always you recede through the evenings
toward the twilight erasing statues.

Pablo Neruda – Nobel Lecture English



Nobel Lecture, December 13, 1971

(Translation)

Towards the Splendid City



My speech is going to be a long journey, a trip that I have taken through regions that are distant and antipodean, but not for that reason any less similar to the landscape and the solitude in Scandinavia. I refer to the way in which my country stretches down to the extreme South. So remote are we Chileans that our boundaries almost touch the South Pole, recalling the geography of Sweden, whose head reaches the snowy northern region of this planet.

Down there on those vast expanses in my native country, where I was taken by events which have already fallen into oblivion, one has to cross, and I was compelled to cross, the Andes to find the frontier of my country with Argentina. Great forests make these inaccessible areas like a tunnel through which our journey was secret and forbidden, with only the faintest signs to show us the way. There were no tracks and no paths, and I and my four companions, riding on horseback, pressed forward on our tortuous way, avoiding the obstacles set by huge trees, impassable rivers, immense cliffs and desolate expanses of snow, blindly seeking the quarter in which my own liberty lay. Those who were with me knew how to make their way forward between the dense leaves of the forest, but to feel safer they marked their route by slashing with their machetes here and there in the bark of the great trees, leaving tracks which they would follow back when they had left me alone with my destiny.

Each of us made his way forward filled with this limitless solitude, with the green and white silence of trees and huge trailing plants and layers of soil laid down over centuries, among half-fallen tree trunks which suddenly appeared as fresh obstacles to bar our progress. We were in a dazzling and secret world of nature which at the same time was a growing menace of cold, snow and persecution. Everything became one: the solitude, the danger, the silence, and the urgency of my mission.

Sometimes we followed a very faint trail, perhaps left by smugglers or ordinary criminals in flight, and we did not know whether many of them had perished, surprised by the icy hands of winter, by the fearful snowstorms which suddenly rage in the Andes and engulf the traveller, burying him under a whiteness seven storeys high.

On either side of the trail I could observe in the wild desolation something which betrayed human activity. There were piled up branches which had lasted out many winters, offerings made by hundreds who had journeyed there, crude burial mounds in memory of the fallen, so that the passer should think of those who had not been able to struggle on but had remained there under the snow for ever. My comrades, too, hacked off with their machetes branches which brushed our heads and bent down over us from the colossal trees, from oaks whose last leaves were scattering before the winter storms. And I too left a tribute at every mound, a visiting card of wood, a branch from the forest to deck one or other of the graves of these unknown travellers.

We had to cross a river. Up on the Andean summits there run small streams which cast themselves down with dizzy and insane force, forming waterfalls that stir up earth and stones with the violence they bring with them from the heights. But this time we found calm water, a wide mirrorlike expanse which could be forded. The horses splashed in, lost their foothold and began to swim towards the other bank. Soon my horse was almost completely covered by the water, I began to plunge up and down without support, my feet fighting desperately while the horse struggled to keep its head above water. Then we got across. And hardly we reached the further bank when the seasoned countryfolk with me asked me with scarce-concealed smiles:

"Were you frightened?"
"Very. I thought my last hour had come", I said.
"We were behind you with our lassoes in our hands", they answered.
"Just there", added one of them, "my father fell and was swept away by the current. That didn't happen to you."

We continued till we came to a natural tunnel which perhaps had been bored through the imposing rocks by some mighty vanished river or created by some tremor of the earth when these heights had been formed, a channel that we entered where it had been carved out in the rock in granite. After only a few steps our horses began to slip when they sought for a foothold in the uneven surfaces of the stone and their legs were bent, sparks flying from beneath their iron shoes - several times I expected to find myself thrown off and lying there on the rock. My horse was bleeding from its muzzle and from its legs, but we persevered and continued on the long and difficult but magnificent path.

There was something awaiting us in the midst of this wild primeval forest. Suddenly, as if in a strange vision, we came to a beautiful little meadow huddled among the rocks: clear water, green grass, wild flowers, the purling of brooks and the blue heaven above, a generous stream of light unimpeded by leaves.

There we stopped as if within a magic circle, as if guests within some hallowed place, and the ceremony I now took part in had still more the air of something sacred. The cowherds dismounted from their horses. In the midst of the space, set up as if in a rite, was the skull of an ox. In silence the men approached it one after the other and put coins and food in the eyesockets of the skull. I joined them in this sacrifice intended for stray travellers, all kinds of refugees who would find bread and succour in the dead ox's eye sockets.

But the unforgettable ceremony did not end there. My country friends took off their hats and began a strange dance, hopping on one foot around the abandoned skull, moving in the ring of footprints left behind by the many others who had passed there before them. Dimly I understood, there by the side of my inscrutable companions, that there was a kind of link between unknown people, a care, an appeal and an answer even in the most distant and isolated solitude of this world.

Further on, just before we reached the frontier which was to divide me from my native land for many years, we came at night to the last pass between the mountains. Suddenly we saw the glow of a fire as a sure sign of a human presence, and when we came nearer we found some half-ruined buildings, poor hovels which seemed to have been abandoned. We went into one of them and saw the glow of fire from tree trunks burning in the middle of the floor, carcasses of huge trees, which burnt there day and night and from which came smoke that made its way up through the cracks in the roof and rose up like a deep-blue veil in the midst of the darkness. We saw mountains of stacked cheeses, which are made by the people in these high regions. Near the fire lay a number of men grouped like sacks. In the silence we could distinguish the notes of a guitar and words in a song which was born of the embers and the darkness, and which carried with it the first human voice we had encountered during our journey. It was a song of love and distance, a cry of love and longing for the distant spring, from the towns we were coming away from, for life in its limitless extent. These men did not know who we were, they knew nothing about our flight, they had never heard either my name or my poetry; or perhaps they did, perhaps they knew us? What actually happened was that at this fire we sang and we ate, and then in the darkness we went into some primitive rooms. Through them flowed a warm stream, volcanic water in which we bathed, warmth which welled out from the mountain chain and received us in its bosom.

Happily we splashed about, dug ourselves out, as it were, liberated ourselves from the weight of the long journey on horseback. We felt refreshed, reborn, baptised, when in the dawn we started on the journey of a few miles which was to eclipse me from my native land. We rode away on our horses singing, filled with a new air, with a force that cast us out on to the world's broad highway which awaited me. This I remember well, that when we sought to give the mountain dwellers a few coins in gratitude for their songs, for the food, for the warm water, for giving us lodging and beds, I would rather say for the unexpected heavenly refuge that had met us on our journey, our offering was rejected out of hand. They had been at our service, nothing more. In this taciturn "nothing" there were hidden things that were understood, perhaps a recognition, perhaps the same kind of dreams.



Ladies and Gentlemen,



I did not learn from books any recipe for writing a poem, and I, in my turn, will avoid giving any advice on mode or style which might give the new poets even a drop of supposed insight. When I am recounting in this speech something about past events, when reliving on this occasion a never-forgotten occurrence, in this place which is so different from what that was, it is because in the course of my life I have always found somewhere the necessary support, the formula which had been waiting for me not in order to be petrified in my words but in order to explain me to myself.

During this long journey I found the necessary components for the making of the poem. There I received contributions from the earth and from the soul. And I believe that poetry is an action, ephemeral or solemn, in which there enter as equal partners solitude and solidarity, emotion and action, the nearness to oneself, the nearness to mankind and to the secret manifestations of nature. And no less strongly I think that all this is sustained - man and his shadow, man and his conduct, man and his poetry - by an ever-wider sense of community, by an effort which will for ever bring together the reality and the dreams in us because it is precisely in this way that poetry unites and mingles them. And therefore I say that I do not know, after so many years, whether the lessons I learned when I crossed a daunting river, when I danced around the skull of an ox, when I bathed my body in the cleansing water from the topmost heights - I do not know whether these lessons welled forth from me in order to be imparted to many others or whether it was all a message which was sent to me by others as a demand or an accusation. I do not know whether I experienced this or created it, I do not know whether it was truth or poetry, something passing or permanent, the poems I experienced in this hour, the experiences which I later put into verse.

From all this, my friends, there arises an insight which the poet must learn through other people. There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song - but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.

The truth is that even if some or many consider me to be a sectarian, barred from taking a place at the common table of friendship and responsibility, I do not wish to defend myself, for I believe that neither accusation nor defence is among the tasks of the poet. When all is said, there is no individual poet who administers poetry, and if a poet sets himself up to accuse his fellows or if some other poet wastes his life in defending himself against reasonable or unreasonable charges, it is my conviction that only vanity can so mislead us. I consider the enemies of poetry to be found not among those who practise poetry or guard it but in mere lack of agreement in the poet. For this reason no poet has any considerable enemy other than his own incapacity to make himself understood by the most forgotten and exploited of his contemporaries, and this applies to all epochs and in all countries.

The poet is not a "little god". No, he is not a "little god". He is not picked out by a mystical destiny in preference to those who follow other crafts and professions. I have often maintained that the best poet is he who prepares our daily bread: the nearest baker who does not imagine himself to be a god. He does his majestic and unpretentious work of kneading the dough, consigning it to the oven, baking it in golden colours and handing us our daily bread as a duty of fellowship. And, if the poet succeeds in achieving this simple consciousness, this too will be transformed into an element in an immense activity, in a simple or complicated structure which constitutes the building of a community, the changing of the conditions which surround mankind, the handing over of mankind's products: bread, truth, wine, dreams. If the poet joins this never-completed struggle to extend to the hands of each and all his part of his undertaking, his effort and his tenderness to the daily work of all people, then the poet must take part, the poet will take part, in the sweat, in the bread, in the wine, in the whole dream of humanity. Only in this indispensable way of being ordinary people shall we give back to poetry the mighty breadth which has been pared away from it little by little in every epoch, just as we ourselves have been whittled down in every epoch.

The mistakes which led me to a relative truth and the truths which repeatedly led me back to the mistakes did not allow me - and I never made any claims to it - to find my way to lead, to learn what is called the creative process, to reach the heights of literature that are so difficult of access. But one thing I realized - that it is we ourselves who call forth the spirits through our own myth-making. From the matter we use, or wish to use, there arise later on obstacles to our own development and the future development. We are led infallibly to reality and realism, that is to say to become indirectly conscious of everything that surrounds us and of the ways of change, and then we see, when it seems to be late, that we have erected such an exaggerated barrier that we are killing what is alive instead of helping life to develop and blossom. We force upon ourselves a realism which later proves to be more burdensome than the bricks of the building, without having erected the building which we had regarded as an indispensable part of our task. And, in the contrary case, if we succeed in creating the fetish of the incomprehensible (or the fetish of that which is comprehensible only to a few), the fetish of the exclusive and the secret, if we exclude reality and its realistic degenerations, then we find ourselves suddenly surrounded by an impossible country, a quagmire of leaves, of mud, of cloud, where our feet sink in and we are stifled by the impossibility of communicating.

As far as we in particular are concerned, we writers within the tremendously far-flung American region, we listen unceasingly to the call to fill this mighty void with beings of flesh and blood. We are conscious of our duty as fulfillers - at the same time we are faced with the unavoidable task of critical communication within a world which is empty and is not less full of injustices, punishments and sufferings because it is empty - and we feel also the responsibility for reawakening the old dreams which sleep in statues of stone in the ruined ancient monuments, in the wide-stretching silence in planetary plains, in dense primeval forests, in rivers which roar like thunder. We must fill with words the most distant places in a dumb continent and we are intoxicated by this task of making fables and giving names. This is perhaps what is decisive in my own humble case, and if so my exaggerations or my abundance or my rhetoric would not be anything other than the simplest of events within the daily work of an American. Each and every one of my verses has chosen to take its place as a tangible object, each and every one of my poems has claimed to be a useful working instrument, each and every one of my songs has endeavoured to serve as a sign in space for a meeting between paths which cross one another, or as a piece of stone or wood on which someone, some others, those who follow after, will be able to carve the new signs.

By extending to these extreme consequences the poet's duty, in truth or in error, I determined that my posture within the community and before life should be that of in a humble way taking sides. I decided this when I saw so many honourable misfortunes, lone victories, splendid defeats. In the midst of the arena of America's struggles I saw that my human task was none other than to join the extensive forces of the organized masses of the people, to join with life and soul with suffering and hope, because it is only from this great popular stream that the necessary changes can arise for the authors and for the nations. And even if my attitude gave and still gives rise to bitter or friendly objections, the truth is that I can find no other way for an author in our far-flung and cruel countries, if we want the darkness to blossom, if we are concerned that the millions of people who have learnt neither to read us nor to read at all, who still cannot write or write to us, are to feel at home in the area of dignity without which it is impossible for them to be complete human beings.

We have inherited this damaged life of peoples dragging behind them the burden of the condemnation of centuries, the most paradisaical of peoples, the purest, those who with stones and metals made marvellous towers, jewels of dazzling brilliance - peoples who were suddenly despoiled and silenced in the fearful epochs of colonialism which still linger on.

Our original guiding stars are struggle and hope. But there is no such thing as a lone struggle, no such thing as a lone hope. In every human being are combined the most distant epochs, passivity, mistakes, sufferings, the pressing urgencies of our own time, the pace of history. But what would have become of me if, for example, I had contributed in some way to the maintenance of the feudal past of the great American continent? How should I then have been able to raise my brow, illuminated by the honour which Sweden has conferred on me, if I had not been able to feel some pride in having taken part, even to a small extent, in the change which has now come over my country? It is necessary to look at the map of America, to place oneself before its splendid multiplicity, before the cosmic generosity of the wide places which surround us, in order to understand why many writers refuse to share the dishonour and plundering of the past, of all that which dark gods have taken away from the American peoples.

I chose the difficult way of divided responsibility and, rather than to repeat the worship of the individual as the sun and centre of the system, I have preferred to offer my services in all modesty to an honourable army which may from time to time commit mistakes but which moves forward unceasingly and struggles every day against the anachronism of the refractory and the impatience of the opinionated. For I believe that my duties as a poet involve friendship not only with the rose and with symmetry, with exalted love and endless longing, but also with unrelenting human occupations which I have incorporated into my poetry.

It is today exactly one hundred years since an unhappy and brilliant poet, the most awesome of all despairing souls, wrote down this prophecy: "A l'aurore, armés d'une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides Villes." "In the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid Cities."

I believe in this prophecy of Rimbaud, the Visionary. I come from a dark region, from a land separated from all others by the steep contours of its geography. I was the most forlorn of poets and my poetry was provincial, oppressed and rainy. But always I had put my trust in man. I never lost hope. It is perhaps because of this that I have reached as far as I now have with my poetry and also with my banner.

Lastly, I wish to say to the people of good will, to the workers, to the poets, that the whole future has been expressed in this line by Rimbaud: only with a burning patience can we conquer the splendid City which will give light, justice and dignity to all mankind.

In this way the song will not have been sung in vain.

Two happy lovers
------------------------

Two happy lovers make one bread,
a single moon drop in the grass.
Walking, they cast two shadows that flow together;
waking, they leave one sun empty in their bed.

Of all the possible truths, they chose the day;
they held it, not with ropes but with an aroma.
They did not shred the peace; they did not shatter words;
their happiness is a transparent tower.

The air and wine accompany the lovers.
The night delights them with its joyous petals.
They have a right to all the carnations.

Two happy lovers, without an ending, with no death,
they are born, they die, many times while they live:
they have the eternal life of the Natural

[i]There is a famous movie based on Pablo's life."IL postino".


Here is the synopsis;


Il Postino
(The Postman)

1995 Academy Awards Nominations
----------------------------------------------
Best Picture of the Year
Best leading role actor - Massimo Troisi
Best Director - Michael Radford
Best Original Score - Luis Bacalov
Best screenplay based on previously published media - Anna Pavignano, Michael Radford, Furio Scarpelli, Giacomo Scarpelli, Massimo Troisi


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------








Synopsis



The year is 1952 and the location is a small island in the Mediterranean Sea. Exiled from his homeland, the poet Pablo Neruda finds hospitality from his travels and settles down on this little island, where he meets Mario Ruoppolo.

Mario is the son of a fisherman who has no intention whatsoever of following in his father's footsteps. His only alternative would be to immigrate, but that is more of a dream than reality. His meeting with the poet will drastically alter his life. He is hired as Neruda's personal mailman and from that moment on he begins to weave a web around the poet, a web of devotion, of attentions and of curiosity. Neruda's initial reaction to all this is inexistent.

As time goes by he begins to soften-up and to speak with the young man and actually takes a liking to him. Neruda introduces Mario to his world of poetry. He teaches him how to feel it and how to love it, and Mario, who is a brilliant student, goes even further: first he learns how to use poetry and then he attempts to write his own poems. Both the use and writing of poetry turn out to be pathetic failures mostly because Mario's sole purpose for writing those poems was to soften the heart of Beatrice, a beautiful young woman whom Mario is in love with.

Neruda and his poetry, reluctantly, play a very important role in bringing Mario and Beatrice together. The two do get married, and Neruda, the artificer of their love is their best man at their wedding. Not only do the two, Neruda and Mario, talk about poetry. They also converse, even though most of it is done by Neruda, about communism and Neruda's faith in his mission on earth. When the poet leaves, Mario decides that he too is a communist; however one without a real political awareness but with an unadulte rated faith in both the persona and the teachings of Neruda. He totally assimilates Neruda's way of thinking but not because of idealogical reasons but more simply out of love for the poet.

Mario's wedding is the last act of this beautiful comedy of life played out in the presence of Neruda. The poet leaves to go back to his homeland and Mario and Beatrice go back to the tragedies of daily living. There are caring and sweet farewells, full of hope and desires to meet again but unfortunately Neruda gets swept away by the course of events at home.


Time goes by and yet no word from the poet. Mario awaits for news from the poet but his life is slipping back into the endless pit of boredom it once was. Not even a job as a restaurateur can give meaning to his life. His intense love for Beatrice is faultering and he finds himself in an intense state of melancholy.


In the few and far between moments of relaxation that Mario allows himself, he wanders to Neruda's old home that once was the center of his universe and now is empty, void of everything except a few of the poets possessions. There is his armchair, a tape recorder and a few books, all items that Mario is supposed to mail to Neruda, but where? How can he? Neruda has never written, not even a word,why such silence?


Finally a much awaited letter arrives from Chile. To have and to hold it is one and all with happiness but it is short lived for when Mario opens the letter he discovers that it is not written by the poet but by his secretary who, in a very formal manner, asks that the items belonging to the poet be mailed to him at a given address. It is a very difficult moment for Mario. It is the realization and the intangible proof that he has been forgotten. Mario searches for reasons why this has happened. People around him accuse the poet of being a traitor or an opportunist but Mario can't accept that.


He does some soul searching and comes to the conclusion that the only reason why the poet didn't stay in touch with him is because he, Mario, is worthless and insignificant as a person. He has never achieved any"ng in life that could give him notoriety or Recognition. The knowledge of this creates the desire to do something new, maybe useless, but nevertheless straight from the heart, a poetic gesture done with enthusiasm. He records all the sounds of life on the island. His intention is to remind Neruda of their existence, to let him know that they are still there, alive and well.


He discovers a new sense of meaning and of care for his homeland which gives him the desire to write, to create. We will never know if his poem is "poetic" but it comes from the heart, written with feeling and emotions, so much so, that someone who liked the poem invites Mario to read his "Canto a Pablo Neruda" (Song for Pablo Neruda), in front of an audience in Naples. After so many hardships, happy now to be alive, Mario begins his assent to the stage. He wants to dedicate the applauses to the poet, recording them on Neruda's recorder and then mailing all to the address received from Neruda's secretary and hopefully this time the poet will remember him.


Unfortunately, as fate would have it, a fight breaks out in front of the stage. Police charge the crowd, a shot rings out in the air maybe more than one but Mario won't know, he won't even reach the last step to the stage and will never read his final gesture of love and devotion to Neruda, his own poem. Neruda will never receive his tape-recorder nor the recording done by Mario. Years go by and Neruda decides to travel back to Italy, back to the little island that gave him hospitality and to visit the "mailman" but he won't find Mario but a little boy, Pablito, born shortly after Mario's death. Only now, with tears in her eyes, does Beatrice give the taperecorder and tapes with the sounds of the island, the waves washing ashore, the screaming of the seagulls, the church bells and at the end of the tape, the horrifying sound of nightsticks crashing against the onslought of the crowds, instead of applauses... a screaming crowd and the terrible sound of gunshots.

N.Y. TIMES REVIEW | 'IL POSTINO'

FILM REVIEW: THE POSTMAN (IL POSTINO); A Lonely Soul And a Beloved Poet

By JANET MASLIN
Published: June 14, 1995, Wednesday




Mario Ruoppolo (Massimo Troisi) is the gentlest of men, a lonely soul resigned to the monotony of life on a quiet Italian island. All that changes with the arrival of Pablo Neruda (Philippe Noiret), who suddenly becomes the island's resident celebrity. Exiled from his native Chile for political reasons, Neruda has a transforming effect on the ruggedly beautiful setting where "The Postman" ("Il Postino") takes place. He becomes an unlikely friend to Mario, who blossoms so beautifully under Neruda's influence that he discovers the idea of poetry as if it were new.

As a rueful, warmly affecting film featuring a wonderful performance by Mr. Troisi, "The Postman" would be attention-getting even without the sadness that overshadows it. This Neapolitan actor, also a writer and director and much better known to Italian audiences than to viewers here, postponed a heart operation while he finished work on this pet project. He died (at the age of 41) the day after principal photography was completed.

Succinctly dedicated "To Our Friend Massimo," "The Postman," which was directed by Michael Radford, is an eloquent but also wrenching tribute to Mr. Troisi's talents. The comic unease that he brought to this performance clearly has a component of real pain. But that hint of unease suits Mario's wide-eyed, wistful look and his slow, often dryly funny demeanor. When Mario is first hired to deliver Neruda's mail, he has so little else to do that he spends time breaking in his postman's hat so that it won't give him a headache.

"That's a little trick of ours," he says knowingly to his father, a fisherman, who is one of the main reasons there has not been much poetry in Mario's life. They live together in bleak, drafty quarters, where Mario probably dreams of better things while his father slurps soup out of the pot.

So the younger man is delighted to find a low-paying, not-too-promising job delivering mail to Neruda, who is the only local resident literate enough to be getting letters. Mario must bicycle to see Neruda at the remote hilltop outpost the writer shares with a woman, whom he treats grandly and addresses as "Amor."

"He's a poet," Mario confides to his sole post office colleague once he overhears that. "That's how you can tell."

At first, Mario's expeditions to see Neruda are cautious and polite, with Mr. Troisi engaged in amusing rehearsals for each brush with greatness. (Behind this handsome actor's hangdog expression and leisurely manner, there is slyly superb comic timing.) Then the postman begins to grow bold. He'd like a better autograph than the "Regards, Pablo Neruda" that his first request elicits. He'd like to know what makes Neruda tick. He might even like to be a poet himself.

Naturally, this story is too good to be true. "The Postman" is based on a novel, "Burning Patience," by Antonio Skarmeta, in which the postman was a teen-age boy. Anyway, the postman is a fiction, and Neruda's real home during the early 1950's (when the story takes place) was on Capri, a less undiscovered place than this film's delightfully sleepy setting. But what's most clearly a fiction here is the effect that Mario's lovely naivete has on Neruda himself. Touched by the younger man's guilelessness, the writer is moved to show Mario that life on the island doesn't need the services of a visiting poet. It already has a poetry of its own.

"The Postman" would be awfully cloying if it hammered home that notion too insistently. In fact the thought is expressed with gentle grace, and it is tempered by other, wittier effects of Neruda's presence. There's a sweetly romantic subplot about Mario's insistence that poetry have some practical application. He wants it to win him the beautiful Beatrice (Maria Grazia Cucinotta), who's not much of a reader but likes being compared to a butterfly.

There's the hilarious way Beatrice's aunt is scandalized by such tactics, which she doesn't quite understand but does know are dangerous. And there's the sobering moment when Mario grasps what he must look like to a man of Neruda's celebrity. "I lived in complete solitude with the most simple people in the world," Neruda eventually tells a newspaper interviewer. Those simple people aren't entirely flattered by that description. Mario's reaction is more complicated, with a disillusionment that is also the measure of how profoundly Neruda has changed him.

Mr. Noiret, the superb French actor who is such a sturdy presence, has so much of the right lumbering gravity for Neruda that his performance is hardly hurt by being dubbed into Italian. He accomplishes the major feat of making Neruda's side of this tale plausible, and gives his love of poetry real immediacy on screen.

And Mr. Noiret is magnetic enough to account for the villagers' debate about the essence of Neruda's appeal. Mario and his postal superior spend a lot of time noticing how many female correspondents this outspoken Communist poet and politician seems to have. Mario thinks this must make Neruda "the poet loved by women," but his boss finds that embarrassing and staunchly corrects it. Neruda, he proclaims, is "the poet loved by the people."

Still, neither he nor Mario nor anything else about "The Postman" can resist the romance of Neruda. And those letters from the ladies just won't quit. The boss is finally forced to modify his position. "Even the women are interested in politics in Chile," he concedes.

THE POSTMAN (IL POSTINO) Directed by Michael Radford; written (in Italian, with English subtitles) by Anna Pavignano, Mr. Radford, Furio Scarpelli, Giacomo Scarpelli and Massimo Troisi, based on the novel "Burning Patience" by Antonio Skarmeta; director of photography, Franco Di Giacomo; edited by Roberto Perpignani; music by Luis Enrique Bacalov; production designer, Lorenzo Baraldi; produced by Mario and Vittorio Cecchi Gori and Gaetano Daniele; released by Miramax. Running time: 113 minutes. This film is not rated. WITH: Massimo Troisi (Mario), Philippe Noiret (Pablo Neruda), Maria Grazia Cucinotta (Beatrice), Linda Moretti (Rosa) and Renato Scarpa (Telegraph Operator).

Biography

Pablo Neruda was born Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto in Parral, Chile on July 12, 1904. His mother died just weeks later, and his father discouraged his affinity for poetry, which he had displayed since the age of ten. His family’s disapproval drove the young Basoalto to write under the pseudonym of Pablo Neruda, which he officially adopted in 1946. Neruda was married three times, although Chile did not officially recognize his second marriage. Although his published poetry was widely respected by the time he reached age twenty, Neruda found it necessary to follow his budding political career to Asia in order to make a living. In Europe in the 1930’s he became involved in Communism , which would influence his later political actions as well as much of his poetry. In 1946 he successfully campaigned in Chile for the regime of Gabriel Gonzalez Videla, but he soon publicly expressed displeasure with Videla’s presidency and was forced to flee his homeland for several years. Neruda was able to return to Chile in 1952, finally both wealthy and widely respected. In 1971 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature . He died of cancer at age 69 on September 23, 1973. By that time he was recognized as a national hero and the greatest Latin American poet of the twentieth century.



Literary Influences

As a boy Neruda attended Temuco Boys’ School; the principal of the Girls’ School was Gabriela Mistral. Mistral was a well-respected poet, and later became a Nobel Laureate herself, and she encouraged a young Neruda to pursue his fascination with poetry. In 1933, Neruda met Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Garcia Lorca not only befriended Neruda and introduced him to influential Communists, he also publicly supported Neruda’s poetry. Neruda was interested in both national and international aspects of literature. He translated foreign works by many older authors including William Blake and William Shakespeare, but he also closely read Spanish language poets like Garcia Lorca, Jorge Luis Borges, and Miguel de Cervantes. Throughout his career, though, Neruda credited Walt Whitman with his deepest inspiration; he once declared that “I, a poet who writes in Spanish, learned more from Walt Whitman than from Cervantes.” A carpenter once helped hang a picture of Walt Whitman in Neruda’s home; when he asked if this was a picture of the poet’s grandfather, Neruda replied that it was indeed (Nolan, 4).


Themes

During his lifetime, Neruda seemed to experience the spectrum of emotional highs and lows very vividly, and his poetry clearly reflected this experience. In times of inspiration he was capable of unparalleled romanticism. His passionate love affairs often provided him with a living muse; his third wife brought him such inspiration from their marriage until his death. Despite his illness, Neruda was extremely happy during his final years in Chile, and his love for his country served as an equally powerful contributor to his poetry. Neruda’s capacity for joy and reverence toward life is especially evident in works such as Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924) and 100 Love Sonnets (1960).

Even in times of great happiness, however, Neruda tended to slip dark imagery into his poetry. Indeed, read in a different light, even his love poems can be seen as a subtle but powerful cry against life’s tragedies. Neruda’s periods of happiness were interspersed with times of extreme depression, which often resurfaced during his travels in Europe and Asia. Neruda was often forced by politics or financial troubles to abandon his friends, his country, and even his wives; in such times the passion he had reserved for these loves often turned inward and resulted in a gnawing loneliness. The dark undertones in Neruda’s daily life also surfaced in his work. Just as he often published collections of love poems in times of joy, he sometimes composed “material” poems to exercise his affinity for the macabre. Residence on Earth (1935) is one example of a collection detailing the sinister energy Neruda was able to derive from everyday objects.

The ups and downs in Neruda’s personal life led him to seek out and attempt to describe the essence of life. It was in this quest for understanding and oneness that he most closely resembled, and sometimes mimicked, Whitman. Like much of Whitman’s own work, many of Neruda’s poems, such as those found in his General Study (1950), were an attempt to discover and explain truths across separate themes. Such works tended to combine nature with nation, with history, and with freedom. Paradoxically, Neruda was also able to capture the intrinsic value inherent in plants, animals, and simple objects without unduly coloring the odes with emotion. His Elementary Odes (1954) also followed Whitman’s lead, and were heralded for their insightful brand of simplicity. Neruda’s greatest literary success was his ability to approach the grandiose and the minute, the tragic and the joyous, with equal patience and reverence.

Sonnet XVII (100 Love Sonnets, 1960)

I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

THE OLD WOMEN OF THE OCEAN



To the solemn sea the old women come
With their shawls knotted around their necks
With their fragile feet cracking.

They sit down alone on the shore
Without moving their eyes or their hands
Without changing the clouds or the silence.

The obscene sea breaks and claws
Rushes downhill trumpeting
Shakes its bull's beard.

The gentle old ladies seated
As if in a transparent boat
They look at the terrorist waves.

Where will they go and where have they been?
They come from every corner
They come from our own lives.

Now they have the ocean
The cold and burning emptiness
The solitude full of flames.

They come from all the pasts
From houses which were fragrant
From burnt-up evenings.

They look, or don't look, at the sea
With their walking sticks they draw signs in the sand
And the sea erases their calligraphy.

The old women get up and go away
With their fragile bird feet
While the waves flood in
Traveling naked in the wind.

an alternate view of pablo neruda;


Bad Poet, Bad Man From the July 26, 2004 issue: A hundred years of Pablo Neruda
by Stephen Schwartz
07/26/2004, Volume 009, Issue 43



THE CHILEAN WRITER Pablo Neruda is "the greatest poet of the twentieth century--in any language." Or so said Gabriel García Márquez, in a line recently repeated by the Washington Post and several other American publications. Readers in the United States seem destined to have Neruda thrust upon them every few years, much as the cicadas return to whine and roar up and down the East Coast. The excuse this time is the centennial of Neruda's birth on July 12, 1904.

There is probably no more chance of halting this current binge of Neruda worship than there is of banishing the cicadas, but, still, the truth does need to be said: Pablo Neruda was a bad writer and a bad man. His main public is located not in the Spanish-speaking nations but in the Anglo-European countries, and his reputation derives almost entirely from the iconic place he once occupied in politics--which is to say, he's "the greatest poet of the twentieth century" because he was a Stalinist at exactly the right moment, and not because of his poetry, which is doggerel.

Yes, his work is still plagiarized by teenage boys in Latin America, who see his Twenty Love Poems and a Desperate Song and figure there is nothing wrong with borrowing from it--just as one poem in the book is itself stolen from Rabindranath Tagore--and presenting its overwrought lines to their girlfriends. But if those boys grow up to be serious writers, they leave Neruda behind.

Nonetheless, the American progressive literary caste adores, adulates, and idolizes Neruda. He found the exact measure of his mediocrity in Robert Bly, beater of drums and perpetrator of vexingly atrocious verse, as translator. I admit to feeling a little sympathy for the dead Neruda once: When I discovered that his political poem Que despierte el leñador, in which Lincoln represents the Marxist element in the history of the United States, had been done into English by Bly. Awarded a Soviet "International Peace Prize" for 1950--and there's a phrase that should provoke considerable thought--the text was published in America by the Communist party with its title stirringly rendered as Let the Railsplitter Awake! Actually, Bly's title, I Wish the Woodcutter Would Wake Up, may be even more revealing.

In 1938, two singular men sat down to compose a statement about the situation of the global intellect as they then saw it. They wrote, among other things, "The totalitarian regime of the U.S.S.R., working through the so-called 'cultural' organizations it controls in other countries, has spread over the entire world a deep twilight hostile to every sort of spiritual value. A twilight of filth and blood in which, disguised as intellectuals and artists, those men steep themselves who have made servility a career, of lying for pay a custom, and of excuses for crime a source of pleasure." Nobody more embodied the phenomenon described in these lines than Pablo Neruda. The description was written by the surrealist André Breton and the exiled Leon Trotsky.

Whatever may be said of the Trotskyists, neither their leader nor they themselves ever promoted bad art. And the essayists, authors, and critics who cleaved to Trotsky, including James T. Farrell, Sidney Hook, Mary McCarthy, Saul Bellow, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and a considerable number of others, were inspired by the words of Breton and Trotsky when, in 1939, some among them helped found the Committee for Cultural Freedom. Trotsky and his followers rejected the childish argument that leftist politics makes good writers and that authors of the right are necessarily heartless and mercenary.


THE RISE of Pablo Neruda may be the definitive example of the Soviet influence on art around the world. Late nineteenth-century poetry in Spanish was dominated by the inflated rhetoric of Rubén Darío, on whom Whitman and the French Parnassiens exercised a baleful influence. Then came the "Generation of '98," the group of extraordinary writers in Spain who, in the aftermath of that country's defeat in the Spanish-American war, carried out something comparable to the Imagist revolution of Pound and his contemporaries--clearing the exaggerated, gassy vocabulary of Rubén out of the idiom, replacing it by a clean, spare style as well as a harsh recognition of the realities that had befallen Spanish society and culture. They included some of the great modern classics of the language: Unamuno, Azorín, Ortega y Gasset, Pío Baroja, and Valle-Inclán.

Above all, Antonio Machado exemplified this new poetic diction in Spanish. The Generation of '98 had major echoes in Latin America, but also paved the way for the "Generation of 1927," which comprised a yet more brilliant constellation of poets, known for an even less cluttered modernist style: Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén, Gerardo Diego, Dámaso Alonso, Vicente Aleixandre, Federico García Lorca, Luis Cernuda, Rafael Alberti, Manuel Altolaguirre.

To move from the lucid achievement of these extraordinary men to the pseudo-Whitmanese of Neruda represented an immense step backward for Spanish poetry; it meant a return to the lazy, overwrought excesses employed by imitators of Rubén Darío, without the solid Catholic values and connection to the Nicaraguan landscape found in Rubén and his better disciples (most of them known only among his fellow Nicaraguans). Everybody who knows Spanish literature recognizes this fact--everybody except a few academic demagogues and a large number of American newspaper reviewers, who are still responding to the reputation built for Neruda by the Soviet machine. The admirers of Neruda are tourists in their approach to Hispanic literature, like people who attend a flamenco dance performance and think they have seen Spain--but with a politically correct edge.

Neruda was a figure promoted to global literary stardom by the creators and bestowers of the Stalin Peace Prize, which he received in 1953. He was joined in this role with a group of writers, some of them once very gifted, whose talents faded when they sold themselves to Moscow. The best among them as writers, and therefore the worst morally, were the French ex-surrealist Louis Aragon, who before his communization was unquestionably the finest young prose stylist in his language, but who turned into a leaden pedant, authoring poems in praise of the Soviet secret police, along with his compatriot Paul luard, who followed the same path, endorsing the last Stalinist purges.

The Czech novelist Milan Kundera wrote, "I was shocked when, in 1950, the great French Communist poet Paul luard publicly approved the hanging of his friend, the Prague writer Zavis Kalandra. . . . When a great poet praises an execution, it is a blow that shatters our whole image of the world." Neruda, however, was not a great poet, even though he praised many executions and even participated in an assassination plot, while also helping consign anti-Communist leftists to the tender mercies of Adolf Hitler.


NATURALLY, these details are not to be found in the hagiographic articles that have poured forth in recent weeks on the occasion of the Neruda centenary. A few weeks ago, the London Guardian dramatically evoked Neruda's labors to relocate refugees from the defeated Spanish Republic. Officiating as a Chilean diplomat in Paris, Neruda assisted in hiring a ship, the Winnipeg, to convey 2,000 Spanish leftist exiles to Chile.

Adam Feinstein writes, "The Winnipeg left Pauillac, the port of Bordeaux, on August 4, 1939. Neruda stood on the dock, in his white hat, alongside his second-wife-to-be Delia del Carril, to wave the boat off. In the key poem, 'Explico algunas cosas' ('Let Me Explain a Few Things'), Neruda reveals that he has disowned his previous, inward-looking self, together with any romantic, unworldly lyricism, and is now fully committed to his new role of truth-teller and exposer of the world's injustices."

A charming legend, but one hiding historical truths known in rather different terms to scholars. Neruda played the role of a reverse Schindler. Using his status as a diplomat, Neruda made sure that passports to board the Winnipeg went to refugees who shared his politics and beliefs, which were those of Joseph Stalin. Rejected refugees were then condemned to internment or death in France, which fell within a year into the hands of Hitler's rapidly advancing armies.


IN HIS DISTINGUISHED WORK Beyond Death and Exile, Louis Stein notes that the anarchists and anti-Communists "were given a disproportionately small share of the available places." A leading Spanish anti-Communist leftist, Federico Solano Palacio, went further, declaring that some 86 percent of the applications for transportation by anarchists were thrown out. Solano Palacio specifically cited the example of the Winnipeg. The Catalan labor historian Josep Peirats wrote in 1993: "Before World War II stopped all departures, [three ships] sailed to Veracruz, Mexico. Later on, the Winnipeg sailed to Chile. . . . These trips were administered by the Communists. . . . They granted or denied passports [and] strictly screened passengers at points of embarkation. The same procedure applied to transport to Chile, where Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet . . . did the screening."

Neruda's services to Stalin did not end with this sorry episode. In May 1940, the Mexican Communist muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, in a preview of a successful assassination three months later, led an armed attack on the Mexican residence of Trotsky, in which an American guard was kidnapped and murdered. Siqueiros, facing nine separate criminal charges, was released on bail. But soon after, Neruda helped arrange for him to get a Chilean passport. Siqueiros immediately fled Mexico, thus squelching a major part of the Mexican government's investigation of the anti-Trotsky conspiracy. For the rest of his life, Neruda expressed his undiluted pride in this action, which had led to his suspension from the Chilean diplomatic service.

Neruda never bothered to hide his great enthusiasm for Stalin. Upon the dictator's death in 1953, he wrote a threnody declaring:


To be men! That is the Stalinist law! . . .
We must learn from Stalin
his sincere intensity
his concrete clarity. . . .
Stalin is the noon,
the maturity of man and the peoples.
Stalinists, Let us bear this title with pride. . . .
Stalinist workers, clerks, women take care of this day!
The light has not vanished.
The fire has not disappeared,
There is only the growth of
Light, bread, fire and hope
In Stalin's invincible time! . . .
In recent years the dove,
Peace, the wandering persecuted rose,
Found herself on his shoulders
And Stalin, the giant,
Carried her at the heights of his forehead. . . .
A wave beats against the stones of the shore. But Malenkov will continue his work.

This poem remains in print in Neruda's Spanish-language collected writings. It does not often appear in anthologies of his work in English.

In 1971, Neruda got the Nobel Prize, which he had sought for years and the denial of which he complains about in Il Postino, the 1994 Italian film based on his later life. The award of his Nobel came much to the disgust of certain members of the selection committee, who could not forget his actions in behalf of the Soviet dictatorship. But his Swedish translator, Artur Lundkvist, from the moment he was elected to the Nobel Academy in 1968, made it his business to get the Chilean the prize.

When Il Postino came out, it was said that Bill Clinton and Al Gore were among its most enthusiastic fans, and that Clinton even went so far as to buy, as a birthday present for Hillary, a copy of Love: Ten Poems by Pablo Neruda. But what serious reason can justify allowing the continued transformation of this loathsome figure, vain and selfish, ambitious and unctuous in his service to a totalitarian regime, into a champion of Spanish literature?

And yet, here is Carolyn Curiel in the New York Times this July 6: "That Pablo Neruda was the greatest poet of the last century is beyond argument in much of South America." In fact, the more honest of his fellow Chileans express great resentment that Neruda's Nobel overshadows that awarded in 1945 to another Chilean poet, Gabriela Mistral, unknown north of the Rio Grande today, and many of them argue that yet another Chilean modernist, Vicente Huidobro, was a thousand times better and more important to world literature than Neruda. Huidobro compared Neruda, unfavorably, to a tango dancer.


THIS SUMMER the Chronicle of Higher Education gave space to Ilan Stavans, a Mexican-born professor at Amherst, to make a new anointing of Neruda as the savior of Hispanic literature. Along the way, Stavans had the nerve to proclaim that Neruda's adherence to the Communist party made him "the spokesman for the enslaved." Is this not, perhaps, a misprint, overlooked by the proofreaders at the Chronicle of Higher Education? The Communists were enslavers, as the whole world, except perhaps Professor Stavans, now admits. We must ask, can one really consider Neruda a finer poet than Paul Celan, who survived a fascist concentration camp, or Osip Mandelstam, who died in the Gulag?

Such comparisons are worse than distasteful; they border on the obscene. Federico García Lorca said of Neruda, "he is closer to blood than to ink;" it was an insight of great depth, far beyond its author's knowing--and today, unbelievably enough, the reputation of García Lorca has been annexed to, and overshadowed by, that of Neruda. It is time to treat Pablo Neruda as the French surrealists once recommended dealing with another Nobel laureate, Anatole France: Let us box up his memory with his books and throw the whole thing away. As Breton wrote, "There is no reason that, once dead, this man should create any more dust."


Stephen Schwartz, a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard, also writes for leading periodicals in Spain and Latin America.



© Copyright 2005, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

abbydoss1969,

i was very pleased to find the name of Pablo Neruda here, one of the greatest... i love everything about this man, his passion for life, his courage, his ability to love, ability to inspire..
You have presented an excellent translation of his poems.
I`d like you to read one of my favourite poems by Neruda, hope you`ll like it.

If You Forget Me

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

Alana,

These are not my translations! I'm trying to learn about Pablo Neruda and whatever I come across on the net I'm posting here.

The poetry you posted was also nice;especially the idea that "If you forget me, I 'll also forget you' bit. Kind of macho.


Since you like him so much , what's your opinion of the article I have posted above by Stephen Swarchz under the title "Alternative view of Pablo"

He dismisses all his love poetry as "Juvenile"
But talks a lot about his politics.

abbydoss1969,
yes, of course i know, what i meant is that you presented the most successful translations. English is beautiful, but the power of Spanish is so strong that.. nothing can compare with it. It`s like Lorka, he is so different in English...

i will find time to analyse the article, i didn`t have time to read all of it, but one thing i can say now: one can not divide Neruda`s poetry into to parts (Neruda citizen & Neruda romantic). His poetry is like peace & war, water & wine, grass & flowers, sand & stone. It is the salt- ".. the salt of the sea"... you remember:
“I am surrounded by the sea, invaded by the sea; we are salty, oh, table of mine, pants of mine, soul of mine, we are turning into salt.”His lyric is enormous, just like the Pacific Ocean that he loved so much..

"He was once referred 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 in each book." (Rene de Costa in The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, 1979)
________

I think Mr. Schwarts never understood Neruda & his work. Just look at the title of his article "Bad Poet, Bad Man" in which he does not analyse Neruda "The Communists", but criticises his every move...
It was a different time, for most of the world Josef Stalin was not a man who killed 20 mil. of his own during the time of repression (1937-39), but a hero , a winner of the Second World War, for Neruda he was a "com padre"... The shocking facts came out when Nikita Khrushchev took over after Stalin`s death.
"..During a visit by Neruda to the US in 1966, his friend and admirer, the US playwright Arthur Miller, commented that “he felt baffled more than ever how a man of such all-embracing spirit could continue to countenance Stalinism”, concluding that “the depth of alienation from bourgeois society had locked a man into a misconceived, nearly religious loyalty to the dream Russia of the believing thirties”. "When Neruda’s art and socialism were refracted through the prism of Stalinism, the result was poor poetry and poor politics."
He knew & understood that, he became more silent.. It is always easy to judge, to see mistakes.. what is right for us today can be very wrong tomorrow & Neruda was not an exception.

Poet of the poor

Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life
By Adam Feinstein
Bloomsbury, 2004
497 pages, $65 (hb)

REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON

Pablo Neruda was a poet who won the Nobel prize for literature. He was also a lifelong, if increasingly troubled, Stalinist. As Adam Feinstein’s biography of the Chilean poet shows, Neruda’s complex soul harboured incompatible spirits.

Born in 1904, the young Neftali Basoalto’s interest in books, poetry and nature displeased his hostile father and, in a search for independence, he took the name Pablo Neruda, poet and bohemian aesthete. His first published book contained 48 poems on love, eroticism and loneliness, and, during a time of political upheaval in Chile when reactionary governments were crushing student, union and communist movements, none were political. His poetry of this period, Neruda was later to reflect, had a content “soaked in atrocious pessimism and anguish — they do not help you to live, but to die”. The Spanish Civil War was to change all that.

Sent to Spain in 1934 in the latest in a series of government diplomatic postings, Neruda was late to commit to the left, a result of needing to tread softly as a representative of the pro-Franco Chilean government. It was the fascist execution of the great Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca that tipped the scales. “Spain in My Heart”, Neruda’s heart-wrenching hymn to the victims of the fascists in Spain, announced his arrival as a political poet in 1936. This period, however, also marked Neruda, as with many other left-wing and anti-fascist artists, as not knowing, or not wanting to know, about what Stalin was doing in the name of the socialism Neruda embraced.

Back in Chile, Neruda collected funds for the defence of the Spanish Republic and was due to address a porters’ union in Santiago’s central market one evening in 1937. Neruda froze with stage fright and desperately resorted to reading his poetry. Greeted by “stony, Chilean silence”, he waited tensely for their verdict and in what he described as “the most important event in my literary career”, one man, possibly the union leader, said “Comrade Pablo, we are totally forgotten people. And I can tell you that we have never been so totally moved ...”, before breaking down in tears.

From then on, says Feinstein, Neruda “abandoned any desire for obscurity and complexity” in his poetry. From that moment, he “wanted to reach out to ordinary people and touch them as profoundly as he had in that Santiago market. Anything he wrote after that, he wrote for them”, not for intellectuals and bohemians. The “anguished self-obsession” of his protracted adolescence was decisively over.

Posted to Paris during the second world war by a new left-wing Popular Front government in Chile, Neruda rescued 2000 Republican Spanish Civil War refugees, stranded in France, loading them on an old fishing boat to Chile, whilst also making the Paris embassy of Chile (Chile was officially neutral during the war), a haven for European anti-Nazi refugees.

Neruda’s political reputation became tarnished, however, when posted to Mexico, where he was unjustly accused of complicity in an attempt to assassinate Leon Trotsky. In 1940, David Siqueiros, a Mexican mural wall-painter and hard-line Stalinist, had led a gang on an assassination attempt against Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary leader and anti-Stalinist exile. Stalin had pressured the Mexican president to grant Siqueiros a visa to Chile rather than arrest him, and Neruda was ordered to comply or face expulsion. Neruda’s acquiescence in spiriting Siqueiros to safety may have been facilitated by Neruda’s rosy-eyed view of Stalin but the right-wing allegation that Neruda was personally involved in the assassination plot was slander.

After the war, Neruda was chosen by Chile’s Communist Party as a Popular Front candidate for the 1945 elections. Neruda’s campaigning among the copper and nitrate miners and the drought-tormented peasants in the arid north of Chile stiffened his political resolve. Neruda was elected to the Senate and he joined the Communist Party, of which he said (in his poem “To My Party”) — “you have given me brotherhood towards the man I do not know”.

When the narrowly elected Popular Front government fractured under the pressure of the Cold War, there was violent repression of the left. Neruda’s house was set on fire and his senator status (and immunity to arrest) was revoked, forcing him into hiding before a hair-raising escape by horseback across the Andes to Argentina.

An exile in Europe, Neruda’s loyalty to Stalin remained untouched by the persecution of writers in the Soviet Union. Neruda was blinded to the sinister by Russia’s very real heroic sacrifice in turning back Hitler and the very false image of Stalin as the conqueror of Nazism. Neruda’s Stalinism survived the double shock of 1956 — Kruschev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes followed by Kruschev’s invasion of Hungary, on both of which a privately troubled Neruda remained publicly silent.

Neruda refused to openly concede any demerit points against Soviet-style Stalinism, partly justifying his silence as a case of not giving ammunition to the enemies of the left by joining in their anti-Soviet chorus. When Moscow banned Boris Pasternak from receiving the 1958 Nobel prize for literature in Stockholm, Neruda, initially delighted at the award (despite his view that Pasternak, whose poetic talent he greatly admired, had the “reactionary politics of an enlightened deacon”) swallowed the Moscow line in uncomfortable silence.

“I believe it is my duty not to contribute ... to fuelling the Cold War”, he wrote of his tactical, but deplorable, silence on the persecution of dissident Soviet writers. The irony was that the public silence on Stalinism by Neruda (a member of the central committee of the Chilean Communist Party) gave the anti-socialist right the very political ammunition he had sought to deny them.

During a visit by Neruda to the US in 1966, his friend and admirer, the US playwright Arthur Miller, commented that “he felt baffled more than ever how a man of such all-embracing spirit could continue to countenance Stalinism”, concluding that “the depth of alienation from bourgeois society had locked a man into a misconceived, nearly religious loyalty to the dream Russia of the believing thirties”. When Neruda’s art and socialism were refracted through the prism of Stalinism, the result was poor poetry and poor politics.

After the CIA-supported Congress for Cultural Freedom had scuttled Neruda’s favouritism for the Nobel prize in 1964, by pouncing on his see-no-Stalinist-evil stance and by recycling the old smear about Neruda’s involvement in the plot to kill Trotsky, poetic justice was at last done when Neruda won the award in 1971. This was to be, however, a false harbinger of Neruda’s artistic, political and personal spring.

When the Socialist Party’s Salvador Allende (who could recite Neruda’s poems by heart) was elected President of Chile in 1970, Neruda was appointed ambassador to France from where he defended Allende’s policies of nationalisation of key industries that produced a million dollars a day for their US capitalist owners. “Why be scared”, wrote Neruda, “if we try to clothe our people, build hospitals, schools, roads, with those million dollars a day.” Neruda’s fears for the fate of the Allende government, however, plus his fraying Stalinism, and encroaching age and the prostate cancer it brought with it, gave Neruda’s later poetry a “defeated air of sadness”, although still full of lyrical, if melancholy, beauty.

By 1973, Neruda was frail and dying, as was the Allende government. Twelve days after General Pinochet’s CIA-sponsored coup on September 11, Neruda died. True to his belief that “poetry is rebellion”, however, Neruda’s funeral cortege became a massive, illegal, demonstration of workers and students, the first since the coup. In the face of terrifying armed soldiers, the funeral marchers, singing the “Internationale”, lost their fear and started back on the road to resistance. As in life, so too in death, Neruda was the poet of the poor and abused.


From Green Left Weekly, June 29, 2005.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.

So, it is actually a war between right wingers and left wingers.

Some of the things Pablo has done , does seem little awkward in today's time.But, obviosly we have to remember the times he lived in, and mistakes he made.
May be , if he 'd lived in those times we could've made the same mistakes.
It is interesting you have taken the article from ''GREEN LEFT WEEKLY"

Love

Because of you, in gardens of blossoming flowers I ache from the
perfumes of spring.

I have forgotten your face, I no longer remember your hands;
how did your lips feel on mine?

Because of you, I love the white statues drowsing in the parks,
the white statues that have neither voice nor sight.

I have forgotten your voice, your happy voice; I have forgotten
your eyes.

Like a flower to its perfume, I am bound to my vague memory of
you. I live with pain that is like a wound; if you touch me, you will
do me irreparable harm.

Your caresses enfold me, like climbing vines on melancholy walls.
I have forgotten your love, yet I seem to glimpse you in every
window.

Because of you, the heady perfumes of summer pain me; because
of you, I again seek out the signs that precipitate desires: shooting
stars, falling objects.

‘Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon,’
XII From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’

Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon,
dark smell of seaweed, crush of mud and light,

what secret knowledge is clasped between your pillars?

What primal night does Man touch with his senses?



Ay, Love is a journey through waters and stars,

through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain:

Love is a war of lightning,

and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness.



Kiss by kiss I cover your tiny infinity,

your margins, your rivers, your diminutive villages,

and a genital fire, transformed by delight,



slips through the narrow channels of blood

to precipitate a nocturnal carnation,

to be, and be nothing but light in the dark.

ON THE BLUE SHORE OF SILENCE
by Pablo Neruda
http://www.popmatters.com/books/revi...-silence.shtml

Quote:

---

Here I came to the very edge
where nothing at all needs saying,
everything is absorbed through weather and the sea,
and the moon swam back,
its rays all silvered,
and time and again the darkness would be broken
by the crash of a wave,
and every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning.

This is the book, right here -- this ten-line sentence on a threshold, acknowledging the uselessness of human language through human language. The speaker simply meets the edge in the first line, and for the rest of the poem describes that edge, through pairing of sensual compliments (rather than easy opposites): the darkness is broken not by light, but the sea's sound. Also remarkable is how the poem simultaneously traces the observations of a speaker who has stayed up all night waiting for sunrise, and suggests a transitional state of being. It's a compelling merge of nature's on-go and the voice of the human mind, which knows that its language is unnecessary, just as it knows the restraint of that language, like the tide, is impossible.

---

That's a good one.

Hi,
I really enjoyed reading ur responses abt Pablo. Here is another one of him poems which has interested me for a long time. Can smone tell me what kind of love is it? To whom is he professing his love to in this poem.

I Don’t Love You As If You Were A Rose
(by Pablo Neruda)
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose
from the earth lives dimly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way
to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that you hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

Hi,
Read the first page where his biography and literary influences are quoted.

I think all his muse for his poetry was his third wife with whom he spent his final years very happily.

I think the same poetry is quoted previously, but with a different translation