poetry of pablo neruda

[abbydoss1969]

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.

[Alana]

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..

[Alana]

"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.

[abbydoss1969]

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"

[abbydoss1969]

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.

[abbydoss1969]

‘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.

[Alana]

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

[abbydoss1969]

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.

[Latha]

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.

[abbydoss1969]

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