SANTIAGO, Chile, July 12 (UPI) -- It is impossible not to feel the vibrations of the celebration of the centennial of the birth of Pablo Neruda. Neruda was the son of a railway worker back in the days when the railroad was the backbone of Chile and when the people who operated it were important and integral in sustaining the communications of a nation.
Neruda -- who discovered the power of the written word in verse, understood the rhythm within a text, and could feel the consonance between syllables -- took all of these elements and turned them into little crystalline, transparent moments.
Newspapers and magazines from around the world have dedicated articles, editorials and even entire supplements to him. Most of these articles praise him, in a spirit of unanimous approval and gratitude that is very rarely reached by mortals, even in death.
The Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, in dedicating their principal editorial article, confirmed that Neruda is an integral part of the peoples' hearts. His success, if his universality can be labeled as such, lies in the fact that the writer was able to seduce literary critics "and etch his verses on the collective memory."
This seems to be the correct analysis. "I was born July 12, 1904, and one month later, in August, my mother was no longer alive, worn out by tuberculosis," said Neruda in his memoirs.
In his early years, he was, quite simply, a sad child, who devoured the books he could find in provincial libraries.
Born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, he disliked his name and changed it when he was only 14 to Pablo Neruda, the name that we have now heard sound across the four corners of the globe.
Renaming things was his custom. When he chose a rocky cliff surrounded by pine trees high above the sea in the center of the Chilean coast to construct his final home in 1939, he asked a passerby to tell him the name of the location. "Córdoba," he was told. He baptized it Isla Negra, and so it has been called ever since.
Of what has been written of the poet, little to nothing is usually mentioned of the low-ranking diplomatic posts he served, generally as consul in lost lands of the mystic Orient. And when his communist activity is mentioned, it is written off as if it were an eccentricity of his, like his addiction to wearing disguises or collecting shells -- even though he was a Communist Party senator and presidential candidate. The same is true of his relationship with the dictator Josef Stalin, who he idolized in his "Canto de Amor a Stalingrado" (Song of Love to Stalingrad). The poem, initially praised and later denounced, is given only sidelong glances, except when some compatriot or other dusts it off to expose it to daylight.
If there was something Neruda, this man of a million friends, ever complained about, it was precisely of the hatred he aroused, of the envious few who never forgave his unstoppable ascent to fame, which finally brought him to the Olympus of great writers.
El Tiempo writes: "It is said of Velázquez that he is the painter of the painters, and of Neruda that he is the poet who wanted to be all poets. At this celebration of the centennial of his birth, numerous acts -- including a CD of poems interpreted by famous singers, homage and publications -- remember this great Chilean of deliberate voice, voracious appetite, and communist affiliations, who was a nomad, diplomat, womanizer (nine muses are honored in his poems), friend of many friends and fervent collector of all types of things, who published his first book of verse at 19, writing at that age his 'Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada,' ('Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair') and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. Neruda belongs to a small group of contemporary, universal poets, and constructed in Spanish (language) poetry a solid building visible from any distance."
There is not much more that can be said except that he is reproached by some indulgent literary critics -- who occupy themselves with interpreting and evaluating his work -- for his modernist beginnings at a time when this movement had already subsided and advancing on to surrealism when the trend had long been dead. In his final phase, he posed as a vanguard and placed the seal on the style that was so definitely his, shamelessly mixing delicate love poems with odes to the most rudimentary things, transforming political verse into a bonfire, and immersing himself without second thought in historical chronicle, which he immediately beautified.
The El Tiempo editorial contains an extremely intriguing part: "Neruda was a great friend of Colombia, where he had numerous comrades, especially within the 'piedracielista' literary group (a group of Colombian poets formed by Jorge Rojas, Arturo Camacho Ramírez, Gerardo Valencia, Eduardo Carranza and Carlos Martín). He alludes to our country various times in his memoirs, written over a span of 40 years, and in his ambitious and formidable 'Canto general.' In 'Canto,' he names the Tequendama waterfall, Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, he calls us 'homeland of the emerald,' he praises our people, he lashes the government of Laureano Gómez, and finally, out of his profound hatred for the international policies of the United States, he shoots off a mysterious phrase:
'We leave from the furrow so that the seed
will hit like a Colombian fist.'
Written in 1950 -- when agriculture of plants used for narcotic purposes was not yet a problem and the drug trade and its deleterious effects on United States society had not yet been felt -- this verse can only be interpreted as a strange premonition from the poet."
The same can be said for Mexico and Peru. Neruda always had a verse for everyone, and his love for Latin America shines throughout all of his work. If the centennial of his birth has signified anything, it is certainly the realization that he has been transformed into myth and converted into a world literary icon.
