by Pablo Neruda
So a poet born in Italy has a difficult road cut out for him, a starlit road that demands living up to a brilliant heritage.
I have known Salvatore Quasimodo for years and I can say that his poetry has a conscience that seems phantasmagorical to us because of its profound and fiery burden. Quasimodo is a European who makes the most of his learning, his sense of balance, and all the weapons of his intelligence. Yet his position at the center of Italian poetry, as the outstanding contemporary poet of an intermittent but inexhaustible classicism, has not turned him into a warrior locked up in his tower. Quasimodo is a perfect example of the universal man, who does not get up in arms to split the world into West and East; instead, he considers it his obligation, as a man of his time, to knock down cultural barriers and show that poetry, truth, freedom, peace, and happiness are gifts that belong to all alike.
The colors and sounds of a world that is sad but orderly are combined in Quasimodo. His sadness is not Leopardi’s hopeless uncertainty but represents the earth settling down to let things grow in the evening; the feeling of reverence given off by that time of day when scents, voices, colors, and bells watch over the work of the seeds that are deep in the ground. I love the poet’s tight language, his classicism and his romanticism, and most of all I admire the way he has steeped himself in the tradition of beauty, as well as his power to transform everything into a language that is true and moving.
I lift a fragrant crown of Araucanian leaves over the sea and the distance and release it into the air so that life and the wind will carry it off and lay it on Salvatore Quasimodo’s brow. It is not the Apollonian laurel crown we have so often seen in the portraits of Francesco Petrarca. It is a crown from our unexplored forests, made of leaves that have no name yet, leaves soaked in the dew of southern dawns.
VALLEJO LIVES ON
Vallejo was a different kind of man. I shall never forget his great yellow head, like those one still sees in old windows in Peru.
Vallejo was serious and pure in heart. He died in Paris; he was killed by the polluted Paris air, by the polluted river from which so many dead people have been fished. Vallejo died of hunger and asphyxia. If we had brought him back to his Peru, if we had let him breathe Peruvian air, maybe he would still be alive and writing poetry. I have written two poems, on different occasions, about my dear friend, my good comrade. I believe they tell the story of our friendship, which was never interrupted by time or distance. The first, “Oda a César Vallejo” (“Ode to César Vallejo”), is in the first volume of Odas elementales.
In the last few years, during the small literary war kept alive by little soldiers with ferocious teeth, Vallejo, César Vallejo’s ghost, César Vallejo’s absence, César Vallejo’s poetry have been thrown into the fight against me and my poetry. This can happen anywhere. The idea is to wound those who have worked hard, to say, “This one is no good; but Vallejo was good.” If Neruda were dead, they would throw him in against Vallejo alive.
The second poem, whose title is a single letter, the letter V., is in Estravagario.
In seeking the ineffable, the tendril or thread that ties a man to his work, I speak of those who had something, or a great deal, to do with me. We shared some part of our lives and now I have survived them. I have no other way of fathoming what some people have taken to calling the mystery of poetry; I would call it the clarity of poetry. There must be some connection between a man’s hands and his work, between the eyes, the viscera, the blood of man and his work. But I have no theory. I don’t go around with some dogma under my arm ready to drop it on somebody’s head. I am like almost everyone else: everything looks bright to me on Monday, everything looks dark on Tuesday, and I believe this is going to be a bright-and-dark year. The coming years will be a lovely blue.
LEÓN FELIPE
“Are you happy?” León Felipe would ask any and everybody, at the same time scratching his messianic little beard.
For me, it is not the inhumane but the super-humane who are supermen: it is in them that degrees of grandeur reside. And León Felipe was superhuman, extra-human, made of the mortar of the whole of humanity. It was a pleasure to hear him, to feel him, to see him.
Moreover, I read him, León Felipe himself, rather than read his poems I often read that vast, amiable man himself.
He was made of many pages. He was a young and yellow folio in which every versicle, all he’d learned, his references, his wisdom, and his tenderness were perceptibly inscribed in his gestures.
Noble poet! Beloved good man!
Ay, how much we have lost in him! How much we will go on losing!
I acquiesce, because he was for me a great example of meditative valor. Many times, he taught us how to lose. And now, when his absence begins to grow transparent, I acquiesce to his benign and hopeless teachings.
Few men like him. Few poets like that wandering Spaniard León Felipe Camino.
GABRIELA MISTRAL
I have already mentioned that I met Gabriela Mistral in my home town of Temuco. But later she broke with that town forever. Gabriela was midway through her difficult, hard-working life, and she looked monastic, like the Mother Superior of a straitlaced school.
It was around this time that she wrote her poems of the mother and child, poems worked in flawless prose, polished and graceful; for her prose was often her most penetrating poetry. She describes pregnancy, birth, and growth in these poems, and some confused gossip went around in Temuco, some vague word, unintentionally ugly, coarse talk that hurt her feelings as a maiden lady, some rumor spread by those railroad and lumber people whom I know so well, rough-mannered and impetuous people who call a spade a spade.
Gabriela felt offended, and was offended until the day of her death.
Years later, in the first edition of her great book, she inserted a long, useless note protesting the things that had been whispered about her in those mountains at the end of the world.
At the time of her memorable triumph, of her Nobel Prize, she had to pass through Temuco on her way to receive the honor. The schoolchildren waited for her at the railroad station every day. The schoolgirls came, spattered by the rain and quivering with copihues. The copihue is the southern flower, the lovely, wild corolla of Araucanía. A useless wait. Gabriela Mistral managed to pass through at night, she took a night train so as not to accept Temuco’s copihues.
Well, does this speak ill of Gabriela? It simply says that the wounds were still raw, deep within her soul, and would not heal easily. It merely shows that love and rancor struggled in the soul of this writer of such magnificent poetry, as they do in any human being’s soul.
For me she always had the open smile of a good friend, a smile like flour sprinkled on the dark bread of her face.
But what were the prime elements that went into the oven of her work? What was the secret ingredient of her poetry, which was always filled with pain?
I’m not going to investigate this, and I’m sure I would not find it out, and if I do find out, I am not going to tell.
* * *
The wild mustard blooms this month of September; the countryside is a rippling yellow carpet. Here on the coast the south wind has been thrashing about with magnificent fury for the past four days. The night is filled with its resonant stir. The ocean is at once an open green crystal and a vast whiteness.
You come here, Gabriela, beloved daughter of these wild mustard blossoms, these rocks, this giant wind. We all welcome you joyously. No one will forget your songs to the hawthorns, to the snows of Chile. You are Chilean. You belong to the people. No one will forget your lines to the naked feet of our children. No one has forgotten your “cursed word.” You are a moving friend of peace. For those and other reasons, we love you.
You come, Gabriela, to the wild mustard plants and the hawthorns of Chile. It is only right that I give you the true welcome of the blossoms and the thorns, in keeping with your greatness and our unbreakable friendship. September’s doors, made of rock and of springtime, swing open for you.
Nothing makes my heart happier than to see your wide smile enter this sacred land made to blossom and sing by the people of Chile.
It’s my good luck to share with you the essence and the truth which, because of our voices and our words, will be honored. May your magnificent heart rest, live, fight, sing, and have offspring, in the Andean and ocean solitudes of our country. I kiss your noble forehead and render homage to your universal poetry.
VICENTE HUIDOBRO
The great poet Vicente Huidobro, who looked at everything through mischievous eyes, harassed me with numberless pranks, sending me childish anonymous letters attacking me, and constantly accusing me of plagiarism. Huidobro is typical of a long line of incurable egocentrics. This way of defending one’s ground in the dog-eat-dog life of the times, which conceded no importance to the writer, was characteristic of the years immediately before the First World War. In America, this aggressive narcissism re-echoed D’Annunzio’s arrogant effrontery in Europe. This Italian writer, who threw out or violated the canons of the petite bourgeoisie, left a volcanic wake of messianism in America. His most scandalous and revolutionary disciple was Vargas Vila.
It’s difficult for me to speak ill of Huidobro, who honored me, throughout his life, with a spectacular ink-slinging war. He crowned himself the “God of Poetry” and did not think it was right that I, so much younger than he, should be part of his Olympus. I never quite understood what that Olympus was all about. Huidobro’s group creationized, surrealized, and devoured the latest fashions from Paris. I was infinitely inferior, a hopeless country boy from the backwoods, a hayseed.
Huidobro was not content to be the extraordinarily gifted poet he really was. He also wanted to be Superman. There was something childishly attractive about his pranks. If he were alive today, he would have offered his services as the only qualified volunteer for the first voyage to the moon. I envision him proving to the scientists that his cranium is the only one on earth genuinely endowed with the form and flexibility to adapt itself to space travel.
Anecdotes give a good picture of him. For instance, when he returned to Chile after the last war, old by then and nearing his end, he used to show everyone a rusty telephone and say, “I myself took it from Hitler. It was the Führer’s favorite telephone.”
One time he was shown a bad academic sculpture, and he said, “How awful! It’s even worse than Michelangelo.”
A wonderful story in which he played the leading role in 1919, in Paris, is also worth telling. Huidobro published a pamphlet called Finis Britanniae, in which he predicted the immediate collapse of the British Empire. When no one paid attention to his prophecy, the poet decided to disappear. The press took up the case: “Chilean diplomat mysteriously kidnapped.”
A few days later he was found lying outside the door of his home. “Some English Boy Scouts kidnapped me,” he declared to the police. “They had me tied to a column in a basement and forced me to shout a thousand times: ‘Long live the British Empire!’” Then he passed out again. The police, however, examined a package he had under his arm. It was a new pair of pajamas bought by Huidobro himself three days before in one of the better Paris shops.
The whole story came out. And the poet lost a friend, the painter Juan Gris. He had steadfastly believed in the kidnapping and had suffered greatly because of the imperialist outrage against the Chilean poet. And he never forgave him that lie.
* * *
Huidobro is a crystalline poet. Every facet of his work glitters and gives off a contagious joy. Throughout his poetry there is a European brilliance, which he crystallizes and radiates in a play of light filled with grace and intelligence.
What surprises me most about his work when I reread it is its diaphanous quality. This literary poet, who followed all the trends of a complicated era and decided to ignore nature’s solemnity, lets a steady flow of singing water run through his poems, a rustle of air and leaves, and a grave humanness that completely takes over his later and his last poems.
From the delightful workmanship of his Frenchified poetry to the powerful forces in his most important writing, there is in Huidobro a struggle between playfulness and fire, escapism and immolation. This struggle makes for quite a show, taking place in plain view, with a dazzling clarity, and almost always deliberately.
There is no doubt that a prejudice in favor of seriousness has kept us away from his work. We agree that Vicente Huidobro’s worst enemy was Vicente Huidobro. Death snuffed out his contradictory and impossibly playful life. Death brought a curtain down over his perishable life but raised another to leave the dazzling aspect of him in full view forever. I have proposed a monument for him next to Rubén Darío. But our governments are penny pinchers when it comes to putting up statues for artists, just as they are free spenders with senseless monuments.
We couldn’t possibly think of Huidobro as a political figure, in spite of his swift incursions into revolutionary territory. He was as irresponsible toward ideas as a spoiled brat. But that’s water under the bridge, and we ourselves would be irresponsible if we set to jabbing pins into him at the risk of damaging his wings. Let’s say, instead, that the poems to the October Revolution and in memory of Lenin’s death are Huidobro’s fundamental contribution to the awakening of mankind.
Huidobro died in 1948, in Cartagena, near Isla Negra, not before writing some of the most heartbreaking and profound poems I have read in all my life. Shortly before his death, Huidobro visited my home in Isla Negra with my good friend and publisher, Gonzalo Losada. Huidobro and I talked together as poets, as Chileans, as friends.
LITERARY ENEMIES
I suppose major and minor conflicts have always existed, and will go on existing, between writers in all parts of the world.
The number of great suicides in the literature of our American continent is considerable. In revolutionary Russia, envious persons drove Mayakovsky into a corner and he finally pulled the trigger.
Petty grudges are exacerbated in Latin America. Envy sometimes even becomes a profession. It is said that we inherited this trait from a colonial Spain that had hit rock bottom. It’s true that in Quevedo, Lope de Vega, and Góngora we often come across the wounds they inflicted on one another. For all its fabulous intellectual brilliance, the Spanish Golden Age was an unhappy age, with hunger prowling outside the palaces.
In the past few years the novel has taken on a new dimension in our countries. The names of García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, Vargas Llosa, Sábato, Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and the Chilean Donoso are heard and their writings read everywhere. Some of them were christened together as the “boom”; it’s also common talk that they are a group who blow one another’s horns.
I have met most of them and find them remarkably wholesome and generous. I understand, more clearly every day, why some of them have had to leave their countries to look for a more tranquil atmosphere to work in, far from the reach of political animosity and ever-increasing envy. Their reasons for voluntary exile are irrefutable: their books have become more and more essential to the truth and the dream of our Americas.
I’ve had qualms about mentioning my personal experiences with envy in its extremes. I wouldn’t want to seem egocentric, excessively taken with myself, but it has been my luck to draw the envy of such dogged and colorful persons that the story is worth telling.
These nagging shadows may have made me angry at times. And yet they were in fact performing a strange duty, against their will—building my reputation—as if they were part of a campaign whose sole objective was to sound my name abroad.
THE LITERARY ANTAGONIST
The tragic death of one of these shady adversaries has left a kind of empty place in my life. He kept up his private war against everything I did for so many years that I miss it now.
Forty years of literary persecution is something exceptional. I get a certain pleasure from looking back at this lonely battle of a man against his own shadow, for I myself was never an active participant.
Twenty-five journals
were published by that one editor (it was always he) just to destroy me as a writer, to accuse me of all kinds of crimes, treacheries, poetic exhaustion, public and secret vices, plagiarism, sensational sexual aberrations. Pamphlets also appeared and were diligently distributed; newspaper articles that were sometimes humorous; and finally a whole book called Neruda y yo (Neruda and I), a fat volume packed with attacks and insults.
Though this “I” of “Neruda and I” is, and perhaps remains, unknown, for many who will read this book, it will prove worthwhile if I pause to recollect certain details that will show the nature of this character who hounded me for decades. His tragic end—he committed suicide in his old age—made me hesitate a long time before writing down these recollections. I am finally doing it, because I feel that this is the right time and place. An immense cordillera of hate runs through the Spanish-speaking countries; it eats away at the work of writers, with anxious envy. Few escape its ferocity.
The only way to end this kind of destructive viciousness is to publicly show it up when it is there.
* * *
My adversary, a Chilean poet older than I, fanatical and domineering, was more bluff and bluster than the real thing. This type of fiercely egocentric writer is common in the Americas. Their sourness and self-sufficiency may take different forms, but their D’Annunzian ancestry is tragically patent. But here, in our impoverished latitudes, we poets, for the most part in rags and starving, believed at least in the operatic velvet of the narcissus D’Annunzio. His South American imitators shared a certain pathetic kinship with the sordidness of an epoch in which the false aristocrats, descendants of the Europeans, lived entrenched in their haciendas. We poets wandered on inclement mornings, stepping around the vomit of drunks.