The Paradox of Pablo Neruda

...Back m the '20s and '30s, when the award was bestowed upon such poets as Yeats and Eliot, a kind of reverse political measuring rod was used The Academy, casting about for a meritorious nonpolitical Latin American poet on whom to confer its blessings, bypassed...

...world but among poets everywhere who welcomed a colleague's commitment to themes of social justice and the regeneration of the lowly arid oppressed Those who gag over an expedient ode m praise of Stalk, or a simplistic attenuation of Latin America's poverty to the machinations of the United Fruit Company, or a grotesque description of Luis Mafiosi Marin as "the chauffeur of American whiskey," have to admit that political poems of this sort were few and far between, and that in his love lyrics of the '60s Neruda demonstrated that he had not lost his touch...

...As a Communist, should Neruda have accepted the prize7 Sartre, refusing it earlier, had already stated that Communists do not "need" such bourgeois recognition and money Perhaps their party "advised" Neruda to accept, to counter the bad publicity resulting from Solzhenitsyn's fear of going to Stockholm to receive the award, and to focus favorable afternoon on Arlene??s floundering "revolution' (which Neruda had supported after his party ordered him to withdraw as a candidate for the Presidency last year) Or, quite possibly, Neruda (like Picasso) is considered too eminent to be overtly manipulated as an artistnod accepted the award without advice but for the same political reasons...

...This is the paradox of Neruda, the key to his greatness as a poet He is at home in the hermetic armories of art, but never content to remain there What has he to do, he asks rhetorically, with critics the blind and the hundred-e\end, the elegant ones in red pumps and cat nations some coiled in the forehead of Mai x oil tluashinq about in his whisker sir the honored writers Relearns, intellect-mongers, obscurantist??s, false existential witch-doctors, surrealist butterflies, ablaze...

...It should be borne in mind, too, that cultural kudos like the Nobel Prize are valued in Latin America to an extent incomprehensible m the English-speaking world As a he-long Chilean patriot, Neruda might justly have felt that to spurn so renowned an "honor" would be to deprive his country of proper compensation for the laudable support it has always given his diplomatic as well as poetic career...

...If anyone in the world "deserves" the Nobel Prize lord the poetry he has written, it is Neruda On his writing desk at Isla Negara is a small photograph of one poet only—Walt Whitman And not since Whitman has a poet of genius embraced a whole continent, as Neruda has his, 01 spoken so directly to no poets among his readers More successfully than Whitman, in fact, Neruda has achieved this teat of taking poetry out of the library, for the heterosexuality of his love poems has insured him a far wider audience, and his deeply rooted feeling for Chile has not cut him off from other countries where Spanish is spoken hetman??s Americanism was limited by its identification with American expansionism As a leading Surrealist poet of the '30s, Neruda influenced the international avant-garde and was influenced by it As a leading "Marxist" poet of the '40s and '50s, Neruda extended his sway, not only to the noncapitalist...

...Neruda in favor of the more modestly talented Chilean, Gabriela Mistral But in 1970 the prize, long since become a political football, was given to Aleksandra Solzhenitsyn...

...on the carrion you up-to-the-minute continental cadavers, green grub in the cheeses of Capital??what did you do run the kingdom of agony, in the sight of nameless humanity9 Scraped clean of intellectualism and anti-intellectual-slam, of nationalism and internationalism, of surrealism and party politics, but milted on all of these, Neruda's greater poems are universal in their humanity Let those who will, he says, throw "hardware" at the moon in this time of the swollen grape, the wine begins to come to life between the sea and the mountain ranges In Chile now, cheer r les are dancing, the dark mister pious girl Is are e singing, and in guitars, water is shining The sun is touching every door and making wonder of the wheat My house has both the sea and the ear the, my woman has great eyes the color of wild hazelnut, when the night comes down, the sea puts on a dress of white and green, and later the moon in the spindrift foam dreams like d sea-given girl I have no wish to change my planet " From the poem "Lazhoius " translated by Alastair Reid The two other passages quoted aye from translations by Ben Belittle in Pablo Nemea 4 New Decade of Poems 1957-1968 Grove Press...

...Discussing Borges with me once, Neruda had countered my admiration for the great Argentinean poet by say that ' poetry must be like a beefsteak, I can't make poetry out of books or other poems " And he had added, more sweepingly, that he was "an anti-intellectual...

...Writers &Writing THE PARADOX OF PABLO NERUDA BY SELDEN RODMAN E Clearly this year I had occasion to call upon Pablo Neruda and, earlier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez Neruda, an old friend, was about to leave his home in Chile to become Salvador Arlene??s ambassador in Paris, Garcia Marquez, whom I'd never met, was paying a visit to his native Colombia I happened to mention the Nobel Prize to each of them I asked Neruda, jokingly, whether he was still campaigning" for the honor, to which he replied (also jokingly7) "If I do any campaigning it will be to have the prize awarded to Marianne Moore " I had asked Garcia Marquez, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude was then a best seller all over Latin America and had been compared by many to Don Quixote, whether he would accept the prize if it should be offered to him "I d like to receive it," he said, "after I've made enough money to refuse it without economic remorse The Nobel Prize has become a monumental lizard hunt ". I suppose the novelist was saying??and who could disagree with him...

...what the prize for literature is awarded by the Swedish Academy to authors (some 'deserving" and some not) on the basis of political considerations Neruda, more guardedly, was saying that it ought to be awarded to writers of outstanding talent who need the money and international reclaimed But now that Neruda, who has been internationally famous for half a century and does not lack money, has received the prize and accepted it, what is one to think7 Why was it given to him7 Should he have accepted it7 Did he deserve it7...

...poet" who admired most among the modem Americans such "troubadours" as Sandburg and Masters, Lindsay and Frost Marianne Moore he did not mention—mmuch less Stevens and Eliot, whose aristocratic elitism he must have found downright distasteful Yet Neruda is an intellectual, compared with the Sandburg??s and Lindsay??s, and the Spanish-language poets of this century whom he most admires—Jimines, Lorca, Vallejo, Alberta, Machado??here certainly intellectuals, appreciated mainly by other intellectuals...

...Ethics...

...Esthetics...

...the great Russian novelist, in recognition of his persecution by the first Communist state, whereupon it became expedient, clearly, to give the 1971 prize to the great Chilean poet, to emphasize that the "liberal" Academy had nothing against members-in-good-standing of the Communist party Obviously neither of these writers needed the money or the recognition...

...Politics...