topics: |  autobiography | chile | poetry | spanish | translation

Excerpts

I have always maintained that the writer's task has nothing to do with mystery or magic, and that the poet's, at least, must be a personal effort for the benefit of all. The closest thing to poetry is a loaf of bread or a ceramic dish or a piece of wood lovingly carved, even if by clumsy hands. 49

On Veinte poemas

Those Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada make a painful book of pastoral poems filled with my most tormented adolescent passions, mingled with the devastating nature of the southern part of my country. It is a book I love because, in spite of its acute melancholy, the joyfulness of being alive is present in it. A river and its mouth helped me to write it: the Imperial River. Veinte poemas is my love affair with Santiago, with its student-crowded streets, the university, and the honeysuckle fragrance of requited love.

The Santiago sections were written between Echaurren Street and España Avenue, and inside the old building of the Teachers Institute, but the landscape is always the waters and the trees of the south.

The docks in the "Cancion desesperada" ("Song of Despair") are the old docks of Carahue and Bajo Imperial: the broken planks and the beams like stumps battered by the wide river: the wingbeat of the gulls was heard and can still be heard at that river's mouth.

In the long, slender-bodied, abandoned lifeboat left over from some shipwreck, I read the whole of Jean Christophe, and I wrote the "Cancion desesperada." The sky overhead was the most violent blue I have ever seen. I used to write inside the boat, hidden in the earth. I don't think I have ever again been so exalted or so profound as during those days. Overhead, the impenetrable blue sky. In my hands, Jean Christophe or the nascent lines of my poem. Beside me, everything that existed and continued always to exist in m y poetry: the distant sound of the sea, the cries of the wild birds, and love burning, without consuming itself, like an immortal bush.

I am always being asked who the woman in Veinte poemas is, a difficult question to answer. The two women who weave in and out of these melancholy and passionate poems correspond, let’s say, to Marisol and Marisombra: Sea and Sun [mar y sol], Sea and Shadow [mar y sombra]. Marisol is love in the enchanted countryside, with stars in bold relief at night, and dark eyes like the wet sky of Temuco. She appears with all her joyfulness and her lively beauty on almost every page, surrounded by the waters of the port and by a half-moon over the mountains. Marisombra is the student in the city. Gray beret, very gentle eyes, the ever-present honeysuckle fragrance of my foot-loose and fancy-free student days, the physical peace of the passionate meetings in the city’s hideaways. p.51-52]

[Marisol is thought to be Terusa, a lover from Temuco who hailed from a
prosperous family; she was also a beauty, she had been festival queen there.
Marisombra was Albertina, a co-student at Santiago, and they were often
together at communist barricades ("You were the grey beret and the still
heart.")]

Killing of fish

In the morning, the miracle of this newly washed nature was overwhelming. I
joined the fisherman very early. Equipped with long floats, the boats looked
like sea spiders. The men pulled out fish of vivid colors, fish like birds
from the teeming forset, some with the deep blue phosphorescence of intense
living velvet, others shaped like prickly balloons that shriveled up into
sorry little sacs of thorns.
    With horror I watched the massacre of those jewels of the sea. The fish
were sold in segments to the poor. The machetes hacked to piece the God-sent
sustenance from the deep, turning it into blood-drenched merchandise." 89

[compare Romesh Gunesekera's anguish in a Sri Lankan fish market ;
    I saw the fat, grey body of a reef shark [thrashing on the ground] as a
    fishmonger hacked at it with a cleaver.  Blood spurted. - p.247, Reef.  ]

On Poetry

The poet who is not a realist is dead. And the poet who is only
a realist is also dead. 265

soon we'll all look like poets, and readers will disappear. 265

Poetry is a deep inner calling in man; from it came liturgy, the psalms, and
also the content of religions. The poet confronted nature's phenomena and in
the early ages called himself a priest, to safeguard his vocation
    In the same way, to defend his poetry, the poet of the modern age accepts
the investiture earned in the street, among the masses.  Today's social poet
is still a member of the earliest order of priests. In the old days he made
his pact with the darkness, and now he must interpret the light. 266

Contents

	1  The country boy			  5
	2  Lost in the city			 29
	3  The roads of the world		 55
	4  Luminous solitude			 77
	5  Spain in my heart			111
	6  I went out to look for the fallen	135
	7  Mexico, blossoming and thorny	150
	8  My country in darkness		165
	9  Beginning and end of exile		193
	10 Voyage and homecoming		221
	11 Poetry is an occupation		253
	12 Cruel, beloved homeland		329
	   Chronology 	  			353
	   Index 				365

Publisher's Blurb

Bio: (from back cover of Rupa edition)

Not only was Pablo Neruda one of the twentieth century's greatest poets but
he played an integral part in the history of the time. He was born the son of
a railway-worker and Memoirs opens with a lyrical evocation of his childhood
in Chile, in what was still a frontier wilderness.

Neruda describes his bohemian youth in Santiago and his career as Chilean
consul in Burma and Ceylon before the agony of the Spanish Civil War. After
the murder of his friend, Garcia Lorca, Neruda became a communist and a poet
'for the people'. On his return to Chile he became a Senator before being
forced into exile and he escaped from Chile, on horseback over the Andes, in
1949.

Neruda returned to Chile in 1952 and in 1970 was asked to stand as a
candidate in the presidential election but stood down in favour of Salvador
Allende. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Liberature in 1971 and died in
1973, days after finishing these memoirs.

other editions blurb

Perhaps no other poet received in his lifetime the international recognition
and honors that Pablo Neruda received, was so widely translated, or exerted
such far-reaching influence. His name has long been a byword in the
Spanish-speaking world (in his own country, he tells us, even the stones know
his voice), and over the past decade he has been increasingly read and
admired in the United States and England. Neruda’s long-awaited memoirs begin
with a lyrical evocation of his childhood in the south of Chile - then a
frontier wilderness - where he was born, the son of a railway-man, in
1904. He retraces, with numerous anecdotes and loving recollections of people
and places, his Bohemian student years in Santiago; his sojourns as Chilean
consul in Burma, Ceylon, and Java, in Spain during the civil war, and finally
in Mexico; and his service as a senator of the people of Chile.

Neruda, a Communist, was driven from his senate seat in 1948, and a warrant
was issued for his arrest. After a year in hiding, he escaped on horseback
over the Andes and then to Europe; his travels took him to Russia, Eastern
Europe, and China before he was finally able to return home in 1952. The
following year he was awarded the Stalin (now Lenin) Prize, the highest
literary honor of the U.S.S.R. In 1969, Chile’s Communist Party chose Neruda
as its candidate in the presidential election, but he soon withdrew in favor
of Salvador Allende. In 1971, while ambassador to France, he was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature. Failing health led to his return to Chile in
November 1972, where he died less than a year later, twelve days after the
coup that overthrew Allende. The final section of these memoirs was written
after the coup, and Spanish editions were published in Argentina and Spain
several months after Neruda’s death.

In these pages we meet many of the century’s most important literary and
artistic figures, who were Neruda’s friends - Garcia Lorca, Vallejo, Alberti,
Eluard, Aragon, Ehrenburg, Picasso, Siqueiros, and Rivera, among them - and
also such political leaders as Gandhi, Nehru, Mao Tse-tung, Castro, Che
Guevara, and of course Neruda’s good friend Allende. Neruda not only explains
his views on poetry and describes the circumstances that inspired many of his
poems, but he speaks out in defense of the causes he considered just and
vigorously supported. This intimate and revealing record of the poet’s life,
written in his unmistakable style, is a significant part of the history of
our time. The final editing of Pablo Neruda’s memoirs was interrupted by his
death, Matilde Neruda and Miguel Otero Silva prepared the manuscript for
publication. 
    -zenobooks.com