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A passion to connect poetry to everything Matthew Sweeney’s slightly qualified but intense admiration for Pablo Neruda on the centenary of the Nobel Laureate’s birth |
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PABLO NERUDA
my poems don’t eat poems, This poem is one of the ‘Elemental Odes’ he wrote between 1952 and 1957, straggly skinny poems that he originally intended to publish in newspapers, and which often took as their subject-matter what Neruda described as ‘things… scorned by the arbiters of good taste’. So, we find here, as well as an ‘Ode to the Dictionary’, an ‘Ode to Bicycles’ and an ‘Ode to a Pair of Socks’. There is something comforting in finding stuff as homely and unliterary as this making its way into poetry. More than comforting, it is a way of connecting poetry to everything. It was very good, for example, for me to go to the market on an extremely hot day recently and buy a watermelon, then come back and read, in ‘Ode to the Watermelon’, that ‘It’s a fruit from the thirst-tree. / It’s the green whale of the summer.’ Of course, not everyone will welcome such allinclusiveness for poetry.
There are those still who want to keep poetry esoteric and elitist and
away from the quotidian. Like it or not, though, the opposite to this
was Neruda’s selfappointed project, and it has a lot to do with
the fact that his Neruda first came to critical and commercial success with the collection entitled Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair published in 1924, in his twentieth year. It remains a perennial favourite around the world (in 1961 reaching the staggering total of a million sales), and I imagine I am not alone in confessing it was my first encounter with the work of Neruda. I can still see that slim black Penguin volume, with elegant translations by WS Merwin, many of which are reproduced here. What is so striking about these love poems, apart from their gentle eroticism and sustained note of adolescent longing, is the metaphorical concreteness with which the conceits of the poems unfold. Here are two examples: So that you will hear me (from ‘V’, ‘So That You Will Hear Me’) I like for you to be still: it is as though you were
absent, (from ‘XV’, ‘I Like for You to be Still’) The ideas both poems are built around, as I hope these extracts show, are simple, yet unexpected, and the language likewise has a directness and clarity that anyone writing a love poem should aspire to — an unpretentious speaking voice in which everything said seems on first glance peculiarly slanted, and then on a second glance wins a recognition that it’s true. It is no wonder that Neruda is commonly regarded as one of the finest love poets of the 20th century, and it was lucky for the postman in the film Il Postino, that some of those love poems were there for him to borrow and use in his successful wooing of the beautiful village girl he wanted. It comes as no surprise, then, to discover that these early poems are not the only love poems collected here. Two subsequent collections are represented — The Captain’s Verses, originally published anonymously and privately in 1952, and One Hundred Love Sonnets which appeared in 1959 — and there is no falling off, as might be expected, due to volume. The same strengths that are on display in the early love poems are there to see. Here, for example, is the beginning and end of one of the sonnets: Should I die, survive me with a force so pure Passionate events devoured, indeed, but there is much more to Neruda than a love poet. Just flicking through the pages of this huge book (almost a thousand pages, 600 poems approximately, and this only a generous sampling of his vast oeuvre) is to be reminded of some of the major happenings of the 20th century. The Spanish Civil War is here (Neruda was living in Madrid as it broke out); as is the unlamented USSR (of which Neruda was a supporter and wrote several poems in homage to; also a travel book The Grapes and the Wind, not extracted here, which won the Stalin Prize for Peace in 1954); Castro’s Cuba (which he eventually fell foul of in 1972 after delivering a speech in New York to the American PEN where he talked of ‘renegotiating’ his relationship to Walt Whitman and the English language); the war in Vietnam; and the rise to power of the Socialist President Salvador Allende in his native Chile. It is fair to say that not all the poems dealing with these You will ask: But where are the lilacs? Let me tell you what’s happening with me. I lived in a barrio From there you could see Bandidos with planes and Moors, Come and see the blood in the streets, This is public poetry really working, and brings us right back to the Lorca quote with which this article began. When one compares this with the rather easy political poetry one frequently comes across, and indeed with the less successful — sometimes spectacularly so — political poems included in this volume, it is almost amazing that it works as well as it does. After Yeat’s ‘Easter 1916’, it’s hard to think of a highly rated political poem. Auden came to disown his two poems that fell most clearly into this category — ‘Spain’ and ‘September 1st 1939’. More recent poets of weight have tended to deal with such subject matter in a more oblique manner, but oblique was never Neruda’s style. One has to link it to his passionate idea of what poetry — or his poetry — involved. If he got it right he got it right. If he didn’t, he would another time. What was important was that he responded to the situation that he was caught in, or that he empathized with, or cared strongly about. It touches on the old requirement of the poet, now obsolete perhaps, to be the spokesman for a community, to be its articulate conscience, and this has nothing to do with literary perfection. This book, incomplete as it is (in the sense of not containing all the work he published), is nevertheless proof of how uneven he was as a poet, and almost makes sense of Juan Ramón Jiménez’s provocative description of him as ‘a great bad poet’. I can understand the editor, Ilan Stevens, wanting to show ‘the Neruda that is a sum of his parts’, but there is too much here to show Neruda always at his best. Perhaps there’s no way round this, though — and what Stevens is saying is that because Neruda was several different types of poet in one, we have to be given a chance to see them all in one volume. He even helps us in this by including sometimes alternative translations
of the same poem, and 37 translators in all (of varying standards, as
the introduction admits). And there are frequent examples of Neruda’s
original poems sprinkled throughout. I, for one, cannot argue with this One way to read Neruda, and the way he seems to want us to read him, is as someone who listens and responds on our behalf. There are many pointers to this in the poems. We’ve already had that quote from ‘Ode to the Book 1’. In another poem, called ‘Poetry’, we’re told that ‘from a street it called me’. In the first ‘Ode to Criticism’ (although he’s a bit kinder to the critics in the second one), it’s only when the critics leave that: once again It’s not just people he wants to speak to, either. In ‘Bestiary’ he wittily goes one step further, he wants to communicate with animals, but not the elegant animals: If I could speak with birds, I want to speak with flies, I wish to speak with the rabbit, I want to converse with a spider: and lest we miss the point he’s making, the poem ends like this: Therefore, gentlemen, I am going What was the name of that cat? Once again it has to do with the old idea of the poet, a different aspect of it, this time — the poet here being the one who celebrates, who sees beauty where others don’t, who lights up the dark corners. If ever there has been a poet of celebration, it is Neruda. In the first of the ‘Elemental Odes’, ‘The Invisible Man’, he writes: life is a box And in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he said: ‘we must travel across lonely and rugged terrain, through isolation and silence, to reach the magic zone where we can dance an awkward dance or sing a melancholy song but in the dance and the song are consummated the most ancient rituals of awareness — the awareness of being men, and of believing in a common destiny.’ On the grand side, certainly, but impassioned — or one could say full-blooded. There is no doubt that Neruda always believed strongly in his calling as a poet. Sometimes this leads to less than persuasive writing — as in the long, tediously spelt out poem ‘Autumn Testament’, which comes with italicised comments in the left hand margin such as ‘The poet talks of his state and his predilections’ or ‘He parcels out his sufferings’, and makes it hard for the contemporary reader to take it seriously. Or at the very least it reminds us of how important ‘things’ were to the grounding of Neruda’s poetry, and to its successes — and how inspired it was for him to take the decision to write the ‘Elemental Odes’ (one of which is even called ‘Ode to Things’ and begins ‘I love things with a wild passion’). A quote from the introduction to this volume, originally stated by Neruda in 1935 in a manifesto called ‘Towards an Impure Poetry’, is further illustration of how much he himself appreciated this, even if he didn’t always pay heed to it in his writing: ‘It is useful at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest: wheels that have crossed long, dusty spaces with their huge vegetal and mineral burdens, bags of coal from the coal bins, barrels, baskets, handles, and hafts in a carpenter’s tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like an object lesson for all troubled lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that hands have given to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things — all lend a curious attractiveness to reality that we should not underestimate.’ Neruda’s best poems, the ones that will triumphantly survive, are full of these things, and of that reality of the world. By way of illustration, I want to finish by quoting from a poem I didn’t know before receiving this book, a beautiful, quiet poem of celebration. It’s called ‘Horses’: From the window I saw the horses. I was in Berlin, in winter. The light The air white like a moistened loaf. From my window, I could see a deserted arena, All at once, led out by a single man, I have obliterated that gloomy Berlin winter. I shall not forget the light from these horses.
PABLO NERUDA The Captain’s Verses Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda Canto General Books newly published or re-issued for the Neruda Centenary: Pablo Neruda — A Passion for Life The Essential Neruda — Selected Poems Residence on Earth Isla Negra Pablo Neruda —Memoirs Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
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Please send books for review in Poetry London to: Scott Verner You can contact Poetry London on editors@poetrylondon.co.uk
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