Neruda ... poet nonpareil
By Shashi Tharoor
"The Hindu", Online edition of India's National Newspaper
July 18, 2004

What more can one say about Pablo Neruda that will not already have been said before one says it? ... .

A copy of the magazine Siembrawith Neruda's poem "La Pequena Alegria (The Little happiness") written when he was 16 years old.

THE curse of the weekend writer! I write this column the weekend before Pablo Neruda's birthday, but it will appear only after the centenary of the great Chilean poet's birth, on July 12, 1904, has passed. Much will probably have appeared in the press about him already before these words see the light of print — and it is fair to ask the question, what more can one say about Pablo Neruda that will not already have been said before one says it?

And yet, how can any writer allow this centenary to pass unremarked? It is not merely the Nobel Prize for Literature that he won in 1971 that marks Neruda as one of the greatest literary figures of the last century. It is surely the extent to which his life and his poetry lives on in the souls of readers everywhere — most particularly in the Spanish-speaking world, but also, thanks to some excellent translations, across the globe as well. Neruda's poetry illuminates the Spanish language, its lines cited, its sentiments absorbed to a greater extent than, say, Eliot's in English. His passion, his rage, his tenderness, his wit are as familiar and beloved to literate Hispanics as Tagore's to Bengalis. And unlike most poets, Neruda was a man of action, serving his country as a diplomat and politician, always willing to put his life and limb at the service of his convictions.

He was only 16 — an age when many of us are barely growing out of short pants — when he decided that the name he was born with a century ago (Ricardo Eliecer Neftali Reyes Basoalto) would not do for him. He chose, instead, to rename himself Pablo (a simple Spanish name already being made famous by the great painter Picasso) Neruda (after the Czech writer Jan Neruda, whom he greatly admired). Within four years he had already published a book of poetry that stunned the world: "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair". Eight decades of lovers since then have romanced each other with lines written by 20-year-old. More was to follow, though Pablo Neruda entered his country's diplomatic service (poetry has never been a generous paymaster). From love to an evocative humanism in "Residence on Earth" (1933), through the powerful and deceptively simple "Elementary Odes" (1958), Neruda sparkled with a brilliance that was both fierce and memorable.

He was, it must be said, a writer "engage". His politics was not merely leftist; he was a committed Communist and — though it seems awkward to admit it today, after all we know of the Soviet strongman's cruelties — avowedly Stalinist. His political convictions were really forged (like those of so many others at that time) in the crucible of the Spanish Civil War. Neruda had, after minor consular posts in East Asia and Argentina, been assigned to Spain in 1934, just as tensions between the Republicans and the Fascists were beginning to reach boiling point. When his friend, the great poet Federico Garcia Lorca, was murdered by the Fascists in August 1936, Neruda crossed the Rubicon. Not only did he write his classic poem about the war, "Spain in my Heart", but he intervened to save the lives of some 2,000 leftist refugees by transporting them across the seas to Chile. Neruda's official role in the evacuation as a diplomat was matched by his passionate self-justification in his poetry. In a powerful poem, "Let me Explain a Few Things", Neruda traced his own change from the romantic who had authored love poems to the committed righter of the world's wrongs: "You will ask why his poetry/does not speak of dreams and leaves?" he wrote. And then he provided the ringing answer: "Come and see the blood in the streets/ Come and see the blood in the streets!"

AP

... a familiar passion, rage, tenderness and wit.

Diplomacy was clearly not going to be enough for someone with such a seething passion for justice, and Neruda entered politics, being elected as a Senator in 1945, the year he also formally joined the Communist Party. Even those of us who see little to commend in communism as an ideology or the Communist Party as an institution cannot fail to be moved by the direct simplicity of his poem "To my Party". Far from the jargon-laden propaganda of the usual Marxist tracts, Neruda's poem soars in its vision: "You have given me brotherhood towards the man I do not know./You have given me the added strength of all those living ..../You showed me how one person's pain could die in the victory of all .../You have made me indestructible, for I no longer end in myself." Through Neruda's magnificent words, it is easier to understand how so many young idealists at the time found inspiration in communist solidarity.

A clash with Chile's tyrannical rulers was inevitable. After a passionate denunciation of the Government in a Venezuelan newspaper (no Chilean paper was prepared to publish it) was followed by a courageous speech in the Senate accusing the authorities of running a concentration camp, Neruda was forced to go into hiding in 1948. He lived underground, protected by friends, for a year before fleeing Chile in disguise in a bold horseback ride across the mountains to Argentina, during which he nearly perished. He made it after a couple of harrowing episodes, carrying with him a precious manuscript of poems, "Canto General". There followed three years of exile in Europe (part of which was recently immortalised in the marvellous Italian film "The Postman", though it omitted his once having to escape arrest by fleeing on a gondola in Venice).

On his return to Chile, Neruda remained active politically and was even nominatd for the Presidency of his country. He stepped aside for his friend Salvador Allende, who was finally elected in 1970 and named Neruda his Ambassador to France. Ill health prompted the poet-diplomat to return home in late 1972. It was there that Neruda followed in anguish the coup that toppled Allende's Government. As a prominent Communist, Neruda was raided by the military on his deathbed, but was spirited enough to say to the soldier who marched in to his bedroom: "There is only one thing of danger for you here — my poetry!"

Twelve days after the fall of the Allende Government, Pablo Neruda died. His body lay for two days in his house, which had been ransacked by the military, and his funeral became the occasion for a spontaneous popular demonstration against the military dictatorship. Neruda's biographer Adam Feinstein recounts how one morning soon after his death there was an uproar in a house where Neruda had used to live — a huge eagle had got into the living-room, though all the doors and windows of the house had been locked for months. Pablo Neruda had always said that in his next life he wanted to be an eagle. No doubt his wish was fulfilled, and he soars above us today, like his poetry.