Ode to a Continent
MACHU PICCU, PERU — 1943 — The poet has been to Paris, to Rome, to the farthest stretches of the “Far East.” He has seen war and fled fascism. But he has never seen anything like. . . this.
Something in the stones, something in the mist sets the poet to thinking — both beyond himself and into himself. And within months, he is expanding a poem about his native Chile into a “Canto General,” a song of everything.
Beyond the literary salons of Latin America, Pablo Neruda is best known for twenty love poems he published when he was just twenty. Veinte Poemas de Amor is still the best-selling poetry book in Spanish. Others recall Neruda as the gentle poet in the charming Italian movie “Il Postino.” But Neruda was more than just another poet entranced by love and life.
“The greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.” — Gabriel Garcia-Marquez.
“A poet closer closer to pain than to insight, closer to blood than to ink.” — Federico Garcia-Lorca.
Though he wrote surrealist poems, political poems, love poems, and whole books of odes, Neruda’s masterwork is Canto General. Into this long epic work, he poured the life of an entire continent. But Canto General, “written on the run” as Neruda fled Chile, was almost buried by tyranny. The story begins in adolescence when. . .
Something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and wrote the first line. . .
Discouraged by his father, encouraged by teacher Gabriela Mistral, who later, like Neruda, won the Nobel in Literature, Neruda began writing as a teenager. When pubished, he changed his name from a cumbersome patronymic to the short and simple Pablo Neruda. He claimed he found the name in a book. And in 1924, when Veinte Poemas de Amore y una Canción Desesperada came out of Chile, the name Pablo Neruda became synonymous with sensuality.
“Traditionally, love poetry has equated woman with nature,” an editor wrote. ”Neruda took this established mode of comparison and raised it to a cosmic level, making woman into a veritable force of the universe.”
Famous but broke, Neruda took a day job — as a diplomat. For the next two decades, he served as Chilean consul in Burma and Singapore, France and Spain. During his post in Madrid, the Spanish Civil War turned the romantic into a political poet. Neruda’s book-length Spain in Our Hearts got him kicked out of Franco’s republic. On the road again.
Then in 1943, returning to Chile from a diplomatic post in Mexico, Neruda visited Machu Piccu. Something in the stones. . .
From air to air, like an
empty net
I went between the streets and atmosphere. . .
For the next few years, Canto General, “born of fury like a live coal,” simmered in Neruda’s soul. He gave public readings in football stadiums to 50,000 or more, but politics took precedence. He served in the Chilean senate until 1948 when a right-wing president banned his beloved Communist party. He denounced the president on the Senate floor then, threatened with arrest, went into hiding. Suddenly he had time to write.
After a year moving through safehouses, Neruda and his wife fled on horseback into the Andes. In his pack, he carried his unfinished masterpiece. A generation later, speaking from the heights of the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm, he recalled the journey.
“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.”
Down from the mountains, across the pampas of Argentina, Neruda carried “my Canto General.” An enraged Chilean government, refusing to admit the famous poet had escaped, announced his death. But Neruda turned up in Paris, his entry there arranged by Picasso. And in 1950, the full work — 15 cantos, 231 poems, 15,000+ lines — came to light.
Before the wig and the dress coat
there were rivers, arterial rivers:
there were cordilleras, jagged waves where
the condor and the snow seemed immutable. . .
Man was dust, earthen vase, an eyelid
of tremendous loam, the shape of clay. . .
From this primordial beginning, rising to “The Heights of Macchu Piccu,” moving on through “The Conquistadors” and “The Liberators,” sprawling into “The Rivers of Song” and “The Great Ocean,” concluding with the Whitmanesque canto “I Am,” Canto General is a love song to Chile, to South America, to the workers and dreamers of the world. Difficult at times, embarassingly pro-communist on occasion, Canto General still sings to those in need of hope, reconciliation, and faith in the human spirit.
Still in exile, Neruda moved on. From Paris to Italy (“Il Postino”), from India to China to the USSR. His faith in communism battered by revelations of Stalin’s gulag, he remained intensely political. In 1970, when his friend Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile, Neruda became a close advisor. Then, just twelve days after Allende was deposed by a military coup, Neruda died. Some say of cancer, but others insist he was poisoned.
Neruda’s legacy has only grown since his death. Canto General was finally published in English in 1993. One reviewer called it “one of the highest poetic achievements of the century.” But along with praising a continent and a people, Pablo Neruda taught a truth that much of the world still needs to learn — that poetry matters.
In Chile they still talk of the time, days before Neruda’s death — or murder — when Pinochet’s police descended on his home on the coast near Santiago. Neruda invited them in. “Look around,” he said. “There’s only one thing of danger for you here — poetry.”
