Siqueiros’s work is less mural-like, but it is powerful in its singularity: a naked, faceless, muscular man, with his long arms reaching out through what appears to be the disintegration of the world, to be sand like the Canto General poem “The Sand Betrayed.” His body emboldened, he seems triumphant, the archetypal “new man” who will grow out of the struggles and injustices of the past once a socialist or communist society has been created.
* * *
In Chile, Neruda was still inspiring sedition, and the government renewed its efforts to arrest him. At the same time as the Mexican edition of Canto General came out, a “clandestine edition” for Chile was produced under the stamp of a fictitious printing house (Imprenta Juárez, Reforma 75, Ciudad de México). The Communist Party was in charge of its publication. The printing was complicated and laborious, requiring endless precautions in order to avoid detection by the police. Neruda’s friend José Venturelli, one of the greatest Chilean artists of the twentieth century, illustrated the book with his bold drawings. Diego Muñoz helped correct the proofs, taking the papers to one printer after another to obscure the trail. They also used obsolete linotype components so intelligence units wouldn’t be able to trace the printed characters to any current printer’s type. The government was still oppressing workers and the Left, and the abuses described in the book were playing out in real time. The vision of a new utopia, and of men and women arising from the sands of the Atacama Desert and the length of the country—the hope of renewal—was vital.
Higher-quality editions featuring all of Venturelli’s art along with the poetry were sold to readers from “the highest class of this country” to fund the production of a more accessible edition of the book that those of lesser means could afford. For this one, they used ordinary paper, which was cheaper and did not require placing a special order to a paper company that might have aroused suspicion. All of this effort resulted in five thousand copies that included pictures and graphics, including a moving photo of Neruda and Delia, arms locked together, walking away from the camera through a rustic field in the south, just before his escape into exile.
The book was soon translated into French, Italian, German, Russian, and Chinese, among other languages. It eventually spread across the world. In 1950, the U.S. journal Masses & Mainstream came out with a ninety-five-page hardcover and paperback edition of poems from Canto general translated into English, titled Let the Rail Splitter Awake and Other Poems.* “Let the Rail-Splitter Awake” is an essential twenty-one-page poem written “from somewhere in the Americas” and addressed to the United States. It’s a call for the spirit of “Lincoln [to] awake so the U.S. can recover its disposition of peace and hope for all humanity,” as Neruda once put it.* He invokes Abraham Lincoln as a North American Karl Marx:
Let the Rail-splitter awake.
Let Abe come with his axe
and his wooden plate
to eat with the farmers.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Let him buy something in a drugstore
let him take a bus to Tampa
let him bite into a yellow apple
and enter a moviehouse to converse
with all the simple people.
Let the Rail-splitter awake.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Peace for the twilights to come,
peace for the bridge, peace for the wine,
peace for the stanzas which pursue me
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
peace for the grimy
iron of Brooklyn, peace for the letter-carrier
who from house to house goes like the day.
Earlier he says:
You are
what I am, what I was, what we must
protect, the fraternal sub-soil
of pure America, the simple
men of streets and roadways.
My brother Juan sells shoes
just like your brother John,
my sister Juanita peels potatoes
just like your cousin Jane,
and my blood is of miners and sailors
like your blood, Peter.
You and I will open doors
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
for beyond the land belongs to us
and no whistle of a machine-gun will be heard there,
but a song, another song, and another.
Jack Hirschman, San Francisco’s poet laureate emeritus, was a student at the City College of New York when he read “Let the Rail-Splitter Awake” for the first time. “It struck me like a bomb,” he recalled. It was a feeling shared by many on the Left, stemming from the pressures of the time, particularly the rabid anti-communism and the witch hunts perpetrated by Congress. “It was the first major political poem after World War II, and that it was an attack on McCarthyism, by an American poet who wrote in the Spanish language, amazed me even more. Pablo always had the guts of his poetry aimed at the contemporary moment.”*
* * *
Neruda’s most important work to date in terms of heft, scope, and the time he spent composing it was out, and it was a powerful success. It had been written on the run, except for “The Heights of Macchu Picchu” and “Canto general de Chile,” composed between February 1948 and January 1949. These sections were born out of anger, as Neruda admitted, spurred by the political situation created by González Videla. Yet as he says in the poem “I End Here” and elsewhere, although the book was born from fury, he nevertheless remains positive through the end.
Though he would have liked to have been able to return to his cherished Chile, he was doing quite well in Europe and Mexico. Through his political appearances, and with Canto General’s celebrated release to the public, he seemed to eclipse González
