| 巴 | |||
| niè lǔ dá | |||
| chūshēngdì： | pà lā 'ěr chéng | ||
yuèdòubā bó lǔ · niè lǔ dá Pablo Nerudazài诗海dezuòpǐn!!! | |||
巴勃鲁·聂鲁达聂鲁达13岁开始发表诗作，1923年发表第一部诗集《黄昏》，1924年发表成名作《二十首情诗和一支绝望的歌》，自此登上智利诗坛。他的诗歌既继承西班牙民族诗歌的传统，又接受了波德莱尔等法国现代派诗歌的影响；既吸收了智利民族诗歌特点，又从惠特曼的创作中找到了自己最倾心的形式。从1925年到西班牙内战爆发．是聂鲁达创作的第二个阶段．基本上运用超现实主义和象征主义手法，追求神秘的内心体验，主要诗作是《地球上的居所》（1933一1935）。1937年，进入创作的第三阶段，亦是全盛时期，主要作品有著名长诗《西班牙在我心中》（1937）和代表作《诗歌总集》（195o），后者包括此时期发表的最著名的两首长诗：《马楚·比楚高峰》和《伐木者，醒来吧》（1948）。此后陆续发表诗集《元素之歌》（1954）、《葡萄和风》（1954）、《新元素之歌》（1956）、《一百首爱情十四行诗》（1957）、《英雄事业的赞歌》（196O）等。
聂鲁达于1945年加入智利共产党，1949年流亡国外，思想越发激进。他参加国际和平组织，受到苏联的热情帮助，感情上必然偏向克里姆林宫。1950年因为《让那劈木做栅栏的醒来》（诗中不仅歌颂林肯，而且还歌颂斯大林和苏联），荣获国际和平奖金。后来成为苏联的盟友，写了大量歌颂苏联的政治抒情诗，如《葡萄园与风》。1953年，还得过斯大林和平奖金。苏共二十大，赫鲁晓夫发表秘密报告，批判斯大林，聂鲁达不能接受。他对斯大林的错误，至死都未能认清。他在晚年回忆录《我曾历尽沧桑》中，这样写道：“我的立场是，在我所不了解的斯大林时代的阴云之上，我的眼前出现了头等人物斯大林，他有原则而善良，像隐士一样简朴，是苏联革命的伟大捍卫者。另外，这位大胡子的人在战争中变得巨大了，他的名字被人们挂在嘴边。”“我又将一首诗献给了这位强有力的人物。那是在他去世的时候。这首诗在我的任何一版全集里都可以找到。克里姆林宫的巨人有一种强烈的影响，振奋着人类，我的诗就是吸收了这种巨大影响。”
聂鲁达在拉美文学史上是继现代主义之后崛起的伟大诗人。他的诗歌以浓烈的感情、丰富的想象，表现了拉美人民争取独立、民主、自由的历程，具有高度的思想性和艺术力量。由于“他的诗作具有自然力般的作用，复苏了一个大陆的命运与梦想”，聂鲁达于1971年荣获诺贝尔文学奖。
《漫歌集》
聂鲁达1943年年10月，途经秘鲁参观马丘•比丘高处。这里是古代印第安民族所建立的印加帝国的遗址，他受到极大的震撼和启示。在这之前，聂鲁达一直想以史书的形式，写一本智利的诗歌总集。现在站在废墟上，他明白：古代的印第安人，是拉美各国的共同祖先。于是，他产生了新的构思，想写一本美洲的诗歌总集。“它应该是一种像我们各国地理一样片片断断的组合，大地应该经常不变地在诗中出现。”1945年9月，他先写出《马丘•比丘高处》（旧译《马楚•比楚高峰》）这首大诗。1948年2月5日，智利政府下令逮捕聂鲁达。诗人被迫转入地下，同时开始《漫歌集》的秘密写作，于1949年2月完成，历时一年。
《漫歌集》是一部史诗性的诗集，分15章，由250首诗组合而成。
第一章，《大地上的灯》（1400），诗人饱含深情，以史诗的语调，写出了欧洲殖民者未到新大陆之前，美洲大地的和平与宁静：
在礼服和假发来到这里以前，
只有大河，滔滔滚滚的大河，
只有山岭，其突兀的起伏之中，
飞鹰或积雪仿佛一动不动，
只有湿气和密林，尚未有名字的
雷鸣，以及星空下的邦巴斯草原。
第二章，是《马丘•比丘高处》。在西方诗界，《漫歌集》被认为是聂鲁达的代表作，其中最重要的就是500行的长诗《马丘•比丘高处》。此诗采用超现实主义的手法，表现古代印加帝国历史的辉煌和神秘的消亡，具有深厚的印第安民族文化底蕴，体现了民族性与世界性的融合。写这首大诗时，聂鲁达才41岁。
第三章，《征服者》叙述了300年来，欧洲殖民者对美洲印第安民族的屠杀和掠夺的苦难史。这些充满血泪的种族灭绝，长期被西方文明所遮蔽所回避。聂鲁达把它们一一呈现出来，这些早已被人遗忘的世界性的大事件，一路读下来，令人惊心动魂。
第四章《解放者》、第五章《背叛的沙子》，第六章《亚美利加，我不是徒然地呼唤你的名字》，继续写美洲的历史和地理。第七章《智利的诗歌总集》，是诗人对祖国智利的礼赞。
第八章《名叫胡安的土地》，歌颂他所认识的几个智利和拉美的劳动者。
第九章，《让那劈木做栅栏的醒来》（旧译《伐木者，醒来吧》，是纪念美国林肯总统），是著名的政治抒情长诗。
第十章《逃亡者》和第十一章《布尼塔基的花朵》，是写诗人逃亡中所见所闻。
第十二章《歌的河流》，是诗人写给各国友人的书信（诗篇）。
第十三章《新年大合唱》，是诗人于1979年献给正处在黑暗中的祖国。
第十四章《大洋》，在诗集的结构上，是一个意味深长的转折。长长的智利一边是浩瀚的太平洋，聂鲁达的家所在的黑岛，就面对着碧波万顷的太平洋。这一章所写的是太平洋的风光，有复活节岛和南极，展示了辽阔的时空感，给人以永恒的思绪，真是大手笔。
最后一章《我是》，以聂鲁达的前半生为题材，是诗人在危险的境遇中，对自己人生的一次总结。
在20世纪的世界诗歌史上，很少看到《漫歌集》这样宏大开阔和浑厚有力的杰作。诗人个人的命运和情感，与整个美洲大陆辉煌的历史和悲惨的命运紧紧地连在一起。这就是瑞典文学院在“授奖词”中的高度概括：“由于他那具有自然力般的诗，复苏了一个大陆的梦幻与命运。”
1971年，瑞典文学院能把诺贝尔文学奖给聂鲁达，可以说是超越了政治偏见，因为当时30年代那种红色国际革命已经退潮了。二战的胜利，开启了一个以政治意识对峙的冷战时代。聂鲁达的诗歌，因为应合了当时红色国际的背景，被推向世界的舞台。同时也表明，他前期诗歌因为吸收了西方现代派艺术，并在《漫歌集》中表现出来的对欧洲殖民者入侵新大陆的强烈抗争，也打动了西方有良知的知识界对祖先暴行的反省。这在瑞典文学院的颁奖词中可以得到验证。可以说，聂鲁达的诗歌是个复杂的存在。他前后期诗歌的变化，也是20世纪世界复杂性的体现。50多年过去了，《漫歌集》在世界诗坛的独特地位，已经是不可代替的。
更耐人寻味的是，瑞典文学院的颁奖词还说：聂鲁达“他的作品，不是以作品的本身，而是以其所具有的意义，对人类的幸福做出了重大贡献。”这也是瑞典文学院认为聂鲁达之所以能获奖的理由。在20世纪的诗坛上，有多少诗作，能称得上对“人类的幸福作出贡献”？
但是，这部世界性的诗歌经典，在中国的传播却充满着误读和错位。在20世纪50年代的中国诗坛，是把聂鲁达作为一个继马雅可夫斯基之后的国际红色大诗人来接受。聂鲁达不仅享有盛誉，而且产生了广泛的影响。追随者着迷于他那新颖有力的革命长诗，如《伐木者醒来吧》（旧译），《献给列宁格勒的情歌》等。中国诗人们从聂鲁达的诗作中，学习如何将政治内容和自由体长诗相结合的创作方法。而《漫歌集》中的最重要的诗作，却没有人翻译，一般人也无从了解。
只有蔡其矫于1964年翻译了《漫歌集》中最重要的《马丘•比丘高处》。文革期间，蔡其矫曾把《马丘•比丘高处》的译诗手稿，拿给北岛、杨炼和江河传抄。对后来江河的《太阳和它的反光》、杨炼的文化组诗，产生了积极的影响。《漫歌集》中那种把整个美洲作为表现对象的系统化的构思，对蔡其矫的创作产生很大的影响。在他晚年走遍中国的旅游题材中表现出来。还有《马丘•比丘高处》那种将惠特曼的浪漫主义抒情与超现实主义手法相融合的现代诗艺，是促进晚年蔡其矫和牛汉再创艺术高峰的重要艺术动力。
由于聂鲁达在20世纪50年代中国诗界的影响，主要是政治抒情诗。而《漫歌集》中译本——王央乐译为《诗歌总集》，直到1984年才出版。虽然蔡其矫1964年就译出《马丘•比丘高处》，但一直到1983年，才收入《聂鲁达诗选》。而80年代的中国诗界，特别是青年诗人，着迷于西方现代派诗歌，视聂鲁达《漫歌集》过时，不感兴趣了。近年来，只有少数诗人和读者，还在阅读聂鲁达的爱情诗。
理想的《漫歌集》中译本，还没有出现。《漫歌集》巨大的经典价值，还有待于我们重新认识，因为很少有人认真研读，更遑论从中受益。
《黄昏》、《二十首情诗和一支绝望的歌》、《地球上的居所》、《西班牙在我心中》、《诗歌总集》、《马楚·比楚高峰》、《伐木者，醒来吧》（、《元素之歌》、《葡萄和风》、《新元素之歌》、《一百首爱情十四行诗》、《英雄事业的赞歌》等
With his works translated into manifold languages, Pablo Neruda is considered one of the greatest and most influential poets of the 20th century. Neruda was accomplished in a variety of styles ranging from erotically charged love poems like his collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, surrealist poems, historical epics, and overtly political manifestos. In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature, a controversial award because of his political activism. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language".
On July 15, 1945 at Pacaembu Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil, he read to 100,000 people at a reading in honor of Communist revolutionary Luís Carlos Prestes. Upon returning to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Salvador Allende invited Neruda to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people .
During his lifetime, Neruda occupied many diplomatic posts and served a stint as senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When Conservative Chilean President González Videla outlawed communism in Chile, a warrant was issued for Neruda's arrest. Friends hid him for months in a basement of a home in the Chilean port of Valparaíso. Neruda then escaped into exile through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. Years later, Neruda was a close collaborator to socialist President Salvador Allende.
Hospitalized with cancer at the time of the Chilean coup d'état led by Augusto Pinochet, Neruda died of heart failure twelve days later. Already a legend in life, Neruda's death became charged with an intense symbolism that reverberated around the world. Pinochet had denied permission to transform Neruda's funeral into a public event, but thousands of grieving Chileans disobeyed the curfew, flooding the streets in tribute . Neruda's funeral became the first public protest against the Chilean military dictatorship.
Neruda's pen name was derived from Czech writer and poet Jan Neruda; it later became his legal name.
Ricardo Eliezer Neftalí Reyes y Basoalto was born in Parral, a city in Linares Province in the Maule Region, some 400 km south of Santiago. His father, José del Carmen Reyes Morales, was a railway employee; his mother, Rosa Basoalto, was a school teacher who died two months after he was born. Neruda and his father soon moved to Temuco, where his father married Trinidad Candia Marverde, a woman with whom he had had a child nine years earlier, a boy named Rodolfo. Neruda also grew up with his half-sister Laura, one of his father's children by another woman.
The young Neruda was christened "Neftalí", his late mother's middle name. His father was opposed to Neruda's interest in writing and literature, but Neruda received encouragement from others, including future Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral, who headed the local girls' school. His first published work was an essay he wrote for the local daily newspaper, La Mañana, at the age of thirteen: Entusiasmo y perseverancia ("Enthusiasm and Perseverance"). By 1920, when he adopted the pseudonym of Pablo Neruda, he was a published author of poetry, prose, and journalism.
Veinte poemas
In the following year (1921), he moved to Santiago to study French at the Universidad de Chile with the intention of becoming a teacher, but soon Neruda was devoting himself full time to poetry. In 1923 his first volume of verse, Crepusculario ("Book of Twilights"), was published, followed the next year by Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada ("Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair"), a collection of love poems that was controversial for its eroticism, especially considering its author's young age. Both works were critically acclaimed and were translated into many languages. Over the decades, Veinte poemas would sell millions of copies and become Neruda's best-known work.
Neruda's reputation was growing both inside and outside of Chile, but he was plagued by poverty. In 1927, out of desperation, he took an honorary consulship in Rangoon, then a part of colonial Burma and a place of which he had never heard before. Later, he worked stints in Colombo (Ceylon), Batavia (Java), and Singapore. In Java he met and married his first wife, a tall Dutch bank employee named Maryka Antonieta Hagenaar Vogelzang. While on diplomatic service, Neruda read large amounts of poetry and experimented with many different poetic forms. He wrote the first two volumes of Residencia en la tierra, which included many surrealistic poems, later to become famous.
Headstone of Neruda's daughter.
Spanish Civil War
After returning to Chile, Neruda was given diplomatic posts in Buenos Aires and then Barcelona, Spain. He later replaced Gabriela Mistral as consul in Madrid, where he became the center of a lively literary circle, befriending such writers as Rafael Alberti, Federico García Lorca, and the Peruvian poet César Vallejo. A daughter, Malva Marina Trinidad, was born in Madrid in 1934; she was to be plagued with health problems, especially Hydrocephalus, for the whole of her short life. During this period, Neruda became slowly estranged from his wife and took up with Delia del Carril, an Argentine woman who was twenty years his senior and who would eventually become his second wife. He divorced from his Dutch wife in 1936, who moved to the Netherlands with his only child; this child died in 1943.
As Spain became engulfed in civil war, Neruda became intensely politicized for the first time. His experiences of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath moved him away from distinctive, privately focused labor in the direction of collective obligation and better cohesion. Neruda became an ardent communist, and remained so for the rest of his life. The radical leftist politics of his literary friends, as well as that of del Carril, were contributing factors, but the most important catalyst was the execution of García Lorca by forces loyal to Francisco Franco. By means of his speeches and writings, Neruda threw his support behind the Republican side, publishing a collection of poetry called España en el corazón ("Spain in My Heart"). Neruda’s wife and child moved to Monte Carlo; he was never to see either of them again. After leaving his wife, he took up full time with del Carril in France.
Following the election in 1938 of President Pedro Aguirre Cerda, whom Neruda supported, he was appointed special consul for Spanish emigration in Paris. There Neruda was given responsibility for what he called "the noblest mission I have ever undertaken": shipping 2,000 Spanish refugees, who had been housed by the French in squalid camps, to Chile on an old boat called the Winnipeg. Neruda is sometimes charged with only selecting Communists for emigration while excluding others who had fought on the side of the Republic ; others deny these accusations, pointing out that Neruda chose only a few hundred of the refugees personally; the rest were selected by the Service for the Evacuation of Spanish Refugees, set up by Juan Negrín, president of the Spanish Republican government-in-exile.
Mexico
Neruda's next diplomatic post was as Consul General in Mexico City, where he spent the years 1940 to 1943. While in Mexico, he divorced Hagenaar, married del Carril, and learned that his daughter had died, age eight, in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands from her many health problems. He also became a friend of the Stalinist assassin Vittorio Vidali.
After the failed 1940 assassination attempt against Leon Trotsky, Neruda arranged a Chilean visa for the Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros who was accused of having been one of the conspirators. Neruda later said he did it at the request of Mexican President Manuel Ávila Camacho. This enabled Siqueiros, then jailed, to leave Mexico for Chile, where he stayed at Neruda's private residence. In exchange for Neruda's assistance, Siqueiros spent over a year painting a mural in a school in Chillán. Neruda's relationship with Siqueiros attracted criticism and Neruda dismissed the allegations that his intent had been to help an assassin as "sensationalist politico-literary harassment".
Return to Chile
In 1943, following his return to Chile, Neruda made a tour of Peru, where he visited Machu Picchu. The austere beauty of the Inca citadel later inspired Alturas de Macchu Picchu, a book-length poem in twelve parts which he completed in 1945 and which marked a growing awareness and interest in the ancient civilizations of the Americas: themes he was to explore further in Canto General. In this work, Neruda celebrated the achievement of Machu Picchu, but also condemned the slavery which had made it possible. In the Canto XII, he called upon the dead of many centuries to be born again and to speak through him. Martin Espada, poet and professor of creative writing at the University of Massachusetts, has hailed the work as a masterpiece, declaring that "there is no greater political poem".
Neruda and Stalinism
Bolstered by his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, Neruda, like many left-leaning intellectuals of his generation, came to admire the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin, partly for the role it played in defeating Nazi Germany (poems Canto a Stalingrado (1942) and Nuevo canto de amor a Stalingrado (1943)). In 1953 Neruda was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize. On Stalin's death that same year, Neruda wrote an ode to him, as he also (during World War II) wrote praise of Fulgencio Batista (Saludo a Batista, i.e Salute to Batista) and later of Fidel Castro.
His fervent Stalinism eventually drove a wedge between Neruda and longtime friend Octavio Paz who commented that "Neruda became more and more Stalinist, while I became less and less enchanted with Stalin". Their differences came to a head after the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact when they almost came to blows in an argument over Stalin. Although Paz still considered Neruda "the greatest poet of his generation", in an essay on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn he wrote that when he
thinks of … Neruda and other famous Stalinist writers I feel the gooseflesh that I get from reading certain passages of Dante’s Inferno. No doubt they began in good faith, but insensibly, commitment by commitment, they saw themselves becoming entangled in a mesh of lies, falsehoods, deceits and perjuries, until they lost their souls.
In the ode written on the occasion of Stalin's death, Neruda wrote: “To be men! That is the Stalinist law!.../We must learn from Stalin/ his sincere intensity/ his concrete clarity.... [...] 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.”(full English translation )
Neruda also called Lenin the "great genius of this century". Another speech (June 5, 1946) is a tribute to the late Soviet leader Mikhail Kalinin, who for Neruda was "man of noble life", "the great constructor of the future", "a comrade of arms of Lenin and Stalin".
Neruda later came to rue his support of the Soviet leader; after Nikita Khrushchev's famous Secret Speech 20th Party Congress in 1956, in which he denounced the "cult of personality" that surrounded Stalin and accused him of committing crimes during the Great Purges, Neruda wrote in his memoirs "I had contributed to my share to the personality cult," explaining that "in those days, Stalin seemed to us the conqueror who had crushed Hitler's armies". Of a subsequent visit to China in 1957, Neruda would later write: "What has estranged me from the Chinese revolutionary process has not been Mao Tse-tung but Mao Tse-tungism", which he dubbed Mao Tse-Stalinism: "the repetition of a cult of a Socialist deity". However, despite his disillusionment with Stalin, Neruda never lost his essential faith in communism and remained loyal to "the Party". Anxious not to give ammunition to his ideological enemies, he would later refuse publicly to condemn the Soviet repression of dissident writers like Boris Pasternak and Joseph Brodsky: an attitude with which even some of his staunchest admirers disagreed.
Senator
On March 4, 1945 Neruda was elected a Communist party senator for the northern provinces of Antofagasta and Tarapacá in the arid and inhospitable Atacama Desert. He officially joined the Communist Party of Chile four months later.
In 1946, Radical Party presidential candidate Gabriel González Videla asked Neruda to act as his campaign manager. González Videla was supported by a coalition of left-wing parties and Neruda fervently campaigned on his behalf. Once in office, however, González Videla turned against the Communist Party. The breaking point for Senator Neruda was the violent repression of a Communist-led miners' strike in Lota in October 1947, where striking workers were herded into island military prisons and a concentration camp in the town of Pisagua. Neruda's criticism of González Videla culminated in a dramatic speech in the Chilean senate on 6 January 1948 called Yo acuso ("I accuse"), in the course of which he read out the names of the miners and their families who were imprisoned at the concentration camp.
Exile
A few weeks later, Neruda went into hiding and he and his wife were smuggled from house to house, hidden by supporters and admirers for the next thirteen months. While in hiding, Senator Neruda was removed from office and in September 1948 the Communist Party was banned altogether under the Ley de Defensa Permanente de la Democracia (Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy), called by critics the Ley Maldita ("Accursed Law"), which eliminated over 26,000 people from the electoral registers, thus stripping them of their right to vote. Neruda's life underground ended in March 1949 when he fled over the Andes Mountains to Argentina on horseback. He would dramatically recount his escape from Chile in his Nobel Prize lecture.
Once out of Chile, he spent the next three years in exile. In Buenos Aires a friend of Neruda, the future Nobel winner and novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias, was cultural attaché to the Guatemalan embassy. There was some slight resemblance between the two men, so Neruda went to Europe using Asturias's passport. Pablo Picasso arranged his entrance into Paris and Neruda made a surprise appearance there to a stunned World Congress of Peace Forces, the Chilean government meanwhile denying that the poet could have escaped the country.
Neruda spent those three years traveling extensively throughout Europe as well as taking trips to India, China, and the Soviet Union. His trip to Mexico in late 1949 was lengthened due to a serious bout of phlebitis. A Chilean singer named Matilde Urrutia was hired to care for him and they began an affair that would, years later, culminate in marriage. During his exile,Urrutia would travel from country to country shadowing him and they would arrange meetings whenever they could. Matilde Urrutia was the muse for "Los versos del Capitán", which he later published anonymously in 1952.
While in Mexico Neruda also published his lengthy epic poem Canto General, a Whitmanesque catalog of the history, geography, and flora and fauna of South America, accompanied by Neruda's observations and experiences. Many of them dealt with his time underground in Chile, which is when he composed much of the poem. In fact, he had carried the manuscript with him on his escape on horseback. A month later, a different edition of five thousand copies was boldly published in Chile by the outlawed Communist Party based on a manuscript Neruda had left behind. In Mexico, he was granted honorary Mexican citizenship.
His 1952 stay in a villa owned by Italian historian Edwin Cerio on the island of Capri was fictionalized in the popular film Il Postino ("The Postman", 1994).
Return to Chile
By 1952, the González-Videla government was on its last legs, weakened by corruption scandals. The Chilean Socialist Party was in the process of nominating Salvador Allende as its candidate for the September 1952 presidential elections and was keen to have the presence of Neruda—by now Chile's most prominent left-wing literary figure—to support the campaign.
Neruda returned in August of that year and rejoined Delia del Carril, who had traveled ahead of him some months earlier, but the marriage was crumbling. Del Carril eventually learned of his torrid affair with Matilde Urrutia and left him in 1955, moving back to Europe. Now united with Urrutia, Neruda would spend the rest of his life in Chile, many foreign trips notwithstanding and a stint as Allende's ambassador to France from 1970 to 1973.
By this time, Neruda enjoyed worldwide fame as a poet, and his books were being translated into virtually all the major languages of the world. He was also vocal on political issues, vigorously denouncing the U.S. during the Cuban missile crisis (later in the decade he would likewise repeatedly condemn the U.S. for the Vietnam War). But being one of the most prestigious and outspoken leftwing intellectuals alive also attracted opposition from ideological opponents. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, an anti-communist organization covertly established and funded by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, adopted Neruda as one of its primary targets and launched a campaign to undermine his reputation, reviving the old claim he had been an accomplice in the attack on Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940 . The campaign became more intense when it became known that Neruda was a candidate for the 1964 Nobel prize, which was eventually awarded to Jean-Paul Sartre.
Neruda recording his poetry at the U.S. Library of Congress in 1966.In 1966, Neruda was invited to attend an International PEN conference in New York City. Officially, he was barred from entering the U.S. because he was a communist, but the conference organizer, playwright Arthur Miller, eventually prevailed upon the Johnson Administration to grant Neruda a visa. Neruda gave readings to packed halls, and even recorded some poems for the Library of Congress. Miller later opined that Neruda's adherence to his communist ideals of the 1930s was a result of his protracted exclusion from "bourgeois society". Due to the presence of many East Bloc writers, Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes later wrote that the PEN conference marked a "beginning of the end" of the Cold War.
La Sebastiana, Neruda's house in Valparaíso.Upon Neruda's return to Chile, he stopped off in Peru, where he gave readings to enthusiastic crowds in Lima and Arequipa and was received by President Fernando Belaúnde Terry. However, the visit prompted an unpleasant backlash. The Peruvian government had come out against the government in Cuba of Fidel Castro, and in July 1966 retaliation against Neruda came in the form of a letter signed by more than one hundred Cuban intellectuals who charged Neruda with colluding with the enemy, and called him an example of the "tepid, pro-Yankee revisionism" then prevalent in Latin America. The affair was particularly painful for Neruda because of his previous outspoken support for the Cuban revolution, and he never visited the island again, even after an invitation in 1968.
After the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967, Neruda wrote several articles regretting the loss of a "great hero". At the same time, he told his friend Aida Figueroa not to cry for Che, but for Luis Emilio Recabbaren, the father of the Chielan communist movement, who preached a pacifist revolution over Che's violent ways.
La Chascona, Neruda's house in Santiago.
Final years
In 1970, Neruda was nominated as a candidate for the Chilean presidency, but ended up giving his support to Salvador Allende, who later won the election and was inaugurated in 1970 as the first democratically elected socialist head of state. Shortly thereafter, Allende appointed Neruda the Chilean ambassador to France (lasting from 1970-1972; his final diplomatic posting). Neruda returned to Chile two and half years later due to failing health.
In 1971, having sought the prize for years, Neruda was finally awarded the Nobel Prize. This decision did not come easily, as some of the committee members had not forgotten Neruda's past praise of Stalinist dictatorship. But his Swedish translator, Artur Lundkvist, did his best to ensure the Chilean the prize.
Inside "La Sebastiana", home of Pablo Neruda in ValparaísoAs the disturbances of 1973 unfolded, Neruda, then terminally ill with prostate cancer, was devastated by the mounting attacks on the Allende government. The military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet on 11 September saw Neruda's hopes for a marxist Chile destroyed. Shortly thereafter, during a search of the house and grounds at Isla Negra by Chilean armed forces at which he was present, Neruda famously remarked:
“ Look around—there's only one thing of danger for you here—poetry. ”
Neruda died of heart failure on the evening of September 23, 1973, at Santiago's Santa María Clinic. After his death, Neruda's homes in both Valparaiso and Santiago were looted and vandalized . The funeral took place amidst a massive police presence, and mourners took advantage of the occasion to protest against the new regime, established just a couple of weeks before.
Casa la Isla Negra, Neruda's third home in ChileMatilde Urrutia subsequently compiled and edited for publication the memoirs that Neruda had been working on just days prior to his death including, possibly his final poem 'Right Comrade, Its the Hour of the Garden'. These and other activities brought her into conflict with Pinochet's government, which continually sought to curtail Neruda's influence on the Chilean collective consciousness. Indeed, Neruda's poetry was outlawed in Chile by the junta until the restoration of democracy in 1990. Urrutia's own memoir, My Life with Pablo Neruda, was published posthumously in 1986.
Neruda owned three houses in Chile; today they are all open to the public as museums: La Chascona in Santiago, La Sebastiana in Valparaíso, and Casa de Isla Negra in Isla Negra, where he and Matilde Urrutia are buried.
Legacy
An edition of Neruda's On the Blue Shore of Silence was printed in honor of the poet's 100th birthday in 2004. The book featured translations of Neruda's original poems by Scottish poet Alastair Reid and original paintings from artist Mary Heebner's series Laguna Salada.
Neruda always wrote in green ink because it was the color of Esperanza (hope).
Neruda was good friends with Venezuelan intellectuals and diplomats, such as Arturo Uslar Pietri, Juan Oropeza and Miguel Otero Silva.
In the Italian film Il Postino, Pablo Neruda, portrayed by Philippe Noiret, befriends a postman and inspires in him a love of poetry.
A bust of Neruda stands on the south side of the Organization of American States building in Washington D.C.
The South African musician Johnny Clegg drew heavily on Neruda in his early work with the band Juluka.
Neruda is referred to frequently as "The Poet" in the novel The House of the Spirits. One character, Clara "the Clarivoyant" Trueba, is said to have helped him in his rise to fame and another member of the Trueba family later attends his funeral.
Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis set to music the famous "Canto General" (one of the most famous poems by Neruda) when he was exiled from his homeland by the dictatorship in Greece (1967-1974). It's a very well-known and popular musical work in both countries (Chile and Greece). The world premiere of this music work occurred in Athens, Greece in 1975. Over 125.000 attended this concert. Theodorakis has visited Chile many times and had the opportunity to present "Canto General" in concerts in Santiago.
"Neruda Songs," a classical and operatic cycle based on five of Neruda's love poems, received the $200,000 University of Louisville's Grawemeyer Award for Musical Composition. The composer, Peter Lieberson, dedicated the music to his deceased wife, mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who performed the music exemplifying what Neruda referred to as "the arc of love" at its world premiere shortly before her death.
Documentary film in production on Neruda's life, times, and poetry, ["Pablo Neruda: The Poet's Calling,] http://www.redpoppy.net/pablo_neruda.php" directed by Mexican director Carlos Bolado and Mark Eisner, narrated by singer/songwriter Suzanne Vega.
See also
Cien Sonetos de Amor
Further reading
English
Pablo Neruda / Durán, Manuel., 1981
Pablo Neruda: The Secrets of the Chilean Poet and Diplomat, 1981
Pablo Neruda: all poets the poet / Bizzarro, Salvatore., 1979
The poetry of Pablo Neruda / Costa, René de., 1979
Pablo Neruda: Memoirs (Confieso que he vivido: Memorias) / tr. St. Martin, Hardie., 1977
The Essential Neruda / ed. Mark Eisner, intro by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (City Lights), 2004
Spanish
Pablo Neruda en Cuba y Cuba en Pablo Neruda / Angel I Augier., 2005
Neruda por Skármeta / Antonio Skármeta., 2004
Neruda, memoria crepitante / Virginia Vidal., 2003
Voy a vivirme: variaciones y complementos nerudianos / Volodia Teitelboim., 1998
Neruda y Arauco / Maria Maluenda., 1998
Para leer a Neruda / Hugo Montes., 1997
Neruda y la mujer / Berna Pérez de Burrell., 1993
Para leer a Pablo Neruda / José Carlos Rovira., 1991
Neruda, voz y universo / Mario Ferrero., 1988
Neruda total / Eulogio Suárez., 1988
Nuevas aproximaciones a Pablo Neruda / Angel Flores., 1987
Neruda: un hombre de la Araucania / Rafael Aguayo., 1987
Asturias y Neruda: cuatro estudios para dos poetas / Giuseppe Tavani., 1985
Neruda, 10 años después / Floridor Pérez., 1983
El pensamiento poético de Pablo Neruda / Alain Sicard., 1981
Poesía y estilo de Pablo Neruda / Amado Alonso., 1979
Mi pequeña historia de Pablo Neruda / Arturo Aldunate Phillips., 1979
Conocer Neruda y su obra / Alberto Cousté., 1979
La poesía de Neruda / Luis Rosales., 1978
Pablo Neruda: naturaleza, historia y poética / Eduardo Camacho Guizado., 1978
Rilke, Pound, Neruda: tres claves de la poesía contemporánea / José Miguel Ibáñez Langlois., 1978
Poesía y estilo de Pablo Neruda: interpretación de una poesía hermética / Amado Alonso., 1977
Notes
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Pablo Neruda^ A Reading in Honor of Pablo Neruda's Centennial: NPR
^ Neruda | La vida del poeta | Cronología | 1944–1953, Fundación Neruda, University of Chile. Accessed online 29 December 2006.
^ "Pablo Neruda: The Poet's Calling (http://www.redpoppy.net/pablo_neruda.php)"
^ http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=4328 A critical review
^ "Pablo Neruda, Nobel Poet, Dies in a Chilean Hospital", The New York Times, September 24, 1973.
^ Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems, Robert Bly, ed.; Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, p. xii.
^ Earth-Shattering Poems, Liz Rosenberg, ed.; Henry Holt, New York, 1998, p. 105.
References
Adam Feinstein, Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life, Bloomsbury, 2004. (ISBN 1-58234-410-8)
Pablo Neruda, Memoirs (translation of Confieso que he vivido: Memorias), translated by Hardie St. Martin, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977. (1991 edition is ISBN 0-374-20660-0)