The Many Voices of Pablo Neruda

...He tried to reclaim Conte de Lautréamont for the South American literary canon, too...

...Eliot's style of modernism, latched onto the Chilean because he offered a way of identifying with the masses and engaging the problems of society...

...Sometimes he composed three or four a day, discussing his affairs, ideas, impressions, the poets and politicians he admired or detested, his fascination with nature, and his sense of the history of the Americas...

...You wrote on horseback, galloping between the rough turf and the aromatic dust, alone with the night and horseshoes...

...Some works were left out because the editor judged them impossible to render successfully in English...

...Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden) With such breadth and charm, it is not surprising that by the time he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, he had become an international figure...

...If we are repelled by the 20th-century poet's defense of Stalinism, we remember that Whitman was a sucker for the silliest forms of Victorian pseudoscience...

...Subsequently the expansiveness of Walt Whitman, "my comrade from Manhattan," struck a chord: Your voice, that's still singing in the suburban stations, on the unloading docks at night...

...Neruda's Stalinist tract, The Grapes and the Wind (1954), is omitted entirely...

...Even this gargantuan tome is incomplete...

...He appropriated many voices and styles, but even in his weakest efforts, something quintessential of himself shines through, while the tone of his strongest verse cannot be mistaken for any other poet...

...His early peregrinations put him in touch with many important modernist practitioners in Spain, France and Italy...

...But until now English translations of his work have been limited to small selections...

...This is particularly noticeable in his more perfumed verses, like "Sexual Water," which builds to a climax of erotic ecstasy: Rolling in big solitary raindrops, in drops like teeth, in big thick drops of marmalade and blood, rolling in big raindrops, the waterfalls, like a sword in drops, like a tearing river of glass, it falls biting, striking the axis of symmetry, sticking to the seams of the soul, breaking abandoned things, drenching the dark...

...It is unlikely that anyone but a critic would feel impelled to read straight through the volume's over 1,000 pages...

...By the age of 13, though, Neruda had begun to acquire a reputation as a poet...

...The epic Canto General (1950) hymns the geography and history of Latin America, arguing for the greatness of its culture and peoples...

...He believed anything could be rendered in poetry, so he wrote about such unlikely subjects as an artichoke (who "got dressed as a warrior"), his socks and laziness...

...A generation of romantically inclined writers, tired of the ironic objectivity that characterized TS...

...Taught to admire poets who polished and refined until the tiniest verselet glittered with a luster disproportionate to its size and content, they felt liberated by Neruda's example—his three and four poems a day...

...Consider the verse and tracts of Robert Bly—his soapbox populism, windy generalizations about "peoples," and disjointed imagery passed off as deep and coherent, as if profundity stretched the boundaries of normal discourse...

...Odes—a form especially associated with Neruda—appear in generous proportions...

...Translated by Donald D. Walsh) The visionary poems of Arthur Rimbaud taught the Chilean how to sound a prophetic note...

...This problem is almost universal in rendering lyrics from one language into another...

...Fortunately, both were so prolific that there is something for almost everyone in their works...

...The word "great" indicates his authority...

...Neruda's Hispanic rhythms suggested new cadences for the lyric phrases of W.S...

...These characteristics draw a mere caricature of Neruda...

...For those unable to read his work in Spanish, Stavans' voluminous collection provides a starting point to measure Pablo Neruda's influence on the poetry written in our own comer of the Americas...

...On the other hand, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair comes from W.S...

...Knowledge of other languages and cultures, coupled with voracious reading across traditions, expanded Neruda's horizons and enabled his talents to burst through his youthful insularity...

...On the political side, the reader finds "Spain in Our Heart," "General Franco in Hell" and "Song to Stalingrad" (all from Residence on Earth, 1945), not to mention A Call for the Destruction of Nixon and Praise for the Chilean Revolution (1973...

...Atthe time of his death from cancer in September 1973, less than two weeks after the assassination of Chile's president, Salvador Allende, he had published 28 collections of verse...

...The political turmoil stirring in their native countries, however, sparked chaos as well as creativity...

...The deeply humanist Philip Levine learned from him that it is still possible to write poetry about auto mechanics and wise old African-American men cultivating their gardens in the burnt-out wastelands of inner-city Detroit without sounding like Soviet poster propaganda...

...The amorous masterpieces include The Captain's Verses (1952), originally published anonymously because the poet wrote it for a lover while he was married to someone else, and Isla Negra (1962), celebrating his last and favorite home as well as his love for Matilde Urrutia, the woman for whom he ultimately left his wife...

...Merwin and Galway Bunnell...

...But, perhaps inevitably, the myriad translators are a source of confusion...

...And your people, black, white, poor & simple, like all people still not forgetting the tolling of your bell...

...His whole oeuvre in Spanish comprises three thick volumes printed on onionskin paper...

...In 1969 he ran for president of Chile on the Communist ticket, but withdrew in favor of Allende...

...After fleeing the Spanish Revolution, he founded a literary review in Paris with Nancy Cunard...

...fecund as the Amazon valley...

...Lazy poets will always find some distant model to justify the direction they are headed in...

...teeming with exotic animals, jungle flora and brightly colored butterflies...

...winding like a river through history and past innumerable vistas, then suddenly revealing a grassy pampas stretching to a distant horizon before contracting to focus on a single, tiny object singing endlessly like the sea...

...To remedy that, Han Stavans has put together a monumental edition, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1040 pp., $40.00), containing the efforts of 37 translators...

...Neruda was similarly drawn to the prophetic books of William Blake, and translated some of them into Spanish...

...Thirty years after his death, it is too soon to predict what Neruda's ultimate impact will be...

...If you can read the poems in the original or listen to recordings of Neruda reciting his work in Spanish, you will hear mellifluous sonorities that don't survive translation into English...

...When he began his literary career, South American writers were shaking off the mannerisms of an inherited European tradition and restoring to their language the qualities of living, localized speech...

...As a young man he lived in Burma, Ceylon, Java, and Singapore as a consul for the Chilean government...

...Juan Ramon Jimenez, his archenemy, called him "a great bad poet...

...His translations of Neruda (omitted by Stavans) have been considered controversial, yet the sweep of Belitt's own language— his modulation of vowels and consonants—replicate, as well as English can, the music of the author of Residence on Earth...

...Still, an overwhelming body of Neruda's output is here...

...The ecstatic, mystical odes of Ben Belitt come closest, for my money, to Neruda's sound painting...

...Raised on a frontier populated by miners, cowboys, railroad men (his father was an engineer), farmers, and native tribes, he developed a lifelong passion for exotic places...

...Neruda spent the final years of his life as Chile's ambassador to France...

...For good or ill, the better-known poets are most apt to sound like themselves...

...His moods range from quite serious to whimsical, as in the comic "Ode to My Suit": Every morning, suit you are waiting on a chair to be filled by my vanity, my love, my hope, my body...

...As consul general to Mexico in the 1940s, he campaigned tirelessly for South American literature, and soon became one of its most visible authors...

...Each was inspired by vastness and felt poetry to be a Messianic mission...

...In his memoirs he termed originality "just one more fetish made up in our time," and pointed out that classical authors deliberately imitated the models they admired...

...He bonded closely with Federico Garcia Lorca before the Spanish poet's assassination in 1936...

...Toward the end of that decade, following a term as a Communist member of the Chilean Senate, Neruda was forced into exile because the Communist Party was outlawed...

...Lautréamont died in his early 20s but left behind Les chants de Maldoror, which became a cult book...

...It includes a scant three verses from Book of Twilight (1923), and only 14 of the Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924...

...Those experiences and many more are recorded in his poems...

...Merwin's justly admired version, and he provides a coherent and tuneful interpretation of this early book...

...His work is so vast and varied—like the landscape from which he came—that one can easily envision fresh interpretations of his poetry springing up throughout the 21 st century, and generations of writers mining his lode for inspiration...

...He returned home in 1953, as popular as ever...

...This legacy has not always been positive...

...A Communist, he lauded Josef Stalin and Fidel Castro but distrusted Mao Zedong...

...Seven more appeared posthumously, along with two memoirs...

...Several 19th-century poets spoke powerfully to the Chilean's romantic temperament...

...On Poetry The Many Voices of Pablo Neruda By Phoebe Pettingell The Chilean writer known as Pablo Neruda— who was born in 1904 and christened Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto—grew up with the 20th century, witnessing many of its historic events firsthand...

...It is easy to think ofNeruda as apublic poet, but it should not be forgotten that he was even more famous for his erotic lyrics...

...But not all of Neruda's influences came from his surroundings...

...Later he served in Madrid during the Spanish Revolution...

...For Neruda and his contemporaries this coincided with the birth of modernism, so their own effort to "make it new" came at an opportune moment and won international attention...

...Neruda held that his strange, disjointed images spoke to the South American frontier: Child of the Uruguayan moon...

...Each of your songs was a lasso, and Maldoror, seated on the skulls of cows writes with his lasso— ("Lautréamont Reconquered," translated by Maria Jackett) In contrast to many of his artistic contemporaries, Neruda did not worry about sounding too much like someone else...

...Robert Bly masquerading as Pablo Neruda maintains the bombast that characterizes his own rhetoric...

...Throughout his life Neruda traveled widely, familiarizing himself with the cultures of France, Italy, India, the Soviet Union, and parts of China...

...It was the beginning of a renaissance analogous to the one forged by United States authors in the mid-19th century...

...He is always a presence in his writing, whatever the subject...

...Stavans concludes the volume with "Homage: Fourteen Other Ways of Looking at Pablo Neruda," a set of more freely interpretive translations by prominent poets that show how different he sounds depending on who is putting him into English...

...In the midst of this ferment Neruda was especially lucky...

...He set out to imitate Whitman's epic accounts of a fledgling nation not overwhelmed by history or tradition...

...His travels culminated in a brief stay on Capri—a period portrayed in the sentimental 1994 film IlPostino...

...Ode to Walt Whitman," translated by Greg Simon) In Whitman Neruda found a soul mate who shared his populism and his optimistic view of the world...

...Stavans' compilation conveys Neruda's scope admirably...

...Still only half awake I leave the shower to shrug into your sleeves, my legs seek the hollow of your legs, and thus embraced by your unfailing loyalty I take my morning walk, work my wav into my poetry...

...FORTUNATELY, Neruda has many admirable disciples...

...By the time I finished, Neruda's output seemed in my dazed brain to have swelled to the vastness of the South American continent: bristling with volcanoes...

...Seasoned interpreters like Alastair Reid and Donald D. Walsh manage to subsume their own voices in their subject's, insofar as one language can substitute for another...

...Neruda's effect on English poetry in the United States (he makes one sensitive about using the word "American" to describe only citizens of our country) can be perceived in his translators...

...These Spanish-speaking writers drew inspiration from developments in other cultures while describing a vibrant new society in a state of transition...

...An individual translator can often compensate by offering a certain consistent interpretation of a particular poet...

...The Nobel Committee also lauded him as "the poet of violated human dignity" for championing his homeland's oppressed...

...In his Introduction Stavans says he tried to "offer the reader an image of Neruda's entire poetic arc," and the collection certainly presents a remarkable array of subjects and styles...

...Your word, that's still splashing like dark water...

...Charles Baudelaire's incantatory verse, with its complex, intoxicating imagery, molded Neruda's mature style...

...Writing under this French nom de plume, the Uruguayan Isadora Ducasse, who lived in Paris, was a mid19th-century precursor of the surrealists...