“Sometimes I’m a poet of nature, sometimes a poet of things, sometimes I’m a public poet, an angry poet, a poet of joy—but now I’m learning,” Neruda noted to Alastair Reid in 1964.
In one line, Neruda rehumanizes himself as “a man rainy and happy, lively and autumn-minded.” Grounded, at peace with his poetry and international success, he was perhaps at his personal apex, at the height of both his poetic and personal powers, able to use them like at no other time before or after. In the middle of this period, in September 1962, he published Plenos poderes (Fully Empowered), a small but uniquely satisfying book. A deeply personal tone sustains throughout, and it contains two of his most important political poems. In Spanish, the term plenos poderes most often refers to the powers given to an ambassador to take independent action on behalf of his country, but it can more generally mean powers at their peak. English has no equivalent phrase.
“Fully empowered” is translator Alastair Reid’s perfect linguistic solution. It captures Neruda’s personal peace, the respect he had in his country and around the world at the time, and his poetic mastery: proud to fly his own flag from the garden at Isla Negra; able to bask in the company of the love of his life; free to simply be himself, unencumbered by technicalities and bureaucrats and constant conferences as he had endured in Europe; having already put out into the world “a shelf of remarkable books, as vast and varied as the sea itself,” as Reid put it. Neruda’s autumn yielded fine works scribed mostly from that low bluff overlooking the Pacific, books in which he poetized his own persona, allowing himself to be more adventurous and have some fun at his own expense. Furthermore, it was during this period that he finally saw the errors of Stalinism and was emboldened enough to reject them and admit his mistakes publicly, in some cases even to take a stand. This might have been the truest sign that he was, in fact, fully empowered.
Isla Negra, the small house that Neruda and Delia had bought in 1931 in a fishing village along the rugged coast, became Neruda’s sanctuary. The rocks on the beach became the cornerstones to which he would always return. It was his center, and he would transform it continuously, according to his aesthetic vision and touch. He used to say that he had a second profession, that of a rather surreal architect, a transformer of homes, and it proved true. It was from this house that he composed himself and his poetry, while sitting on a stone bench outside or in his little writing room with the infinite sea out his window. The house became his vessel with the water below him. Isla Negra was an externalization of himself.
Built on top of a small, sharp hill above a rocky beach, the house at Isla Negra spreads in various extensions to form the shape of a boat. He wanted it to have as many curves as possible, frustrated by how so many houses are just pure rectangles. He wanted his home to be impure, like the poetry he had preached. The house was furnished with his eclectic collections: ship figureheads, ships in bottles, seashells from the beaches of the world, sextants, astrolabes, ethereal rare butterflies and insects linking back to his childhood train excursions, miniature Mexican guitars, glass jugs in a spectrum of hues, beautifully carved wooden stirrups covering a wall just like in his childhood home, seventeenth-century maps of the Americas and the oceans, pictures of some of his favorite writers (Poe, Baudelaire, and Whitman) who had their place of honor wherever he lived, and first editions of their books, a giant shoe that once hung outside a cobbler’s shop in Temuco. He even made a special room for the wooden horse he had fallen in love with in the saddlery shop in Temuco.
There was a chimney that looked like a cascade of lapis lazuli flowing down the tall curved wall. Among the many unique rooms was a bar with glasses of every shape and color, and inscribed on the ceiling beams were the names of his friends who had passed away. Winding paths outside, rustic gardens, and a little writer’s hut on the hill completed the Isla Negra refuge. An old locomotive engine stood parked outside.
Neruda never loved being at sea. He loved the ocean, but he took ocean liners by necessity for travel and never went out in a boat. He liked to say that he was a “sailor of the land.” From the shore, though, the sea was essential to him. As he once said, “To me, the sea is an element, like the air.” The impact of discovering the sea in his youth, in Puerto Saavedra, never left him. The sensation that the sea was the heartbeat of the universe, as he had described it, brought him to Isla Negra and to the creation of his singular refuge there.
One single being, but there’s no blood.
One single caress, death or rose.
The sea comes and reunites our lives
and attacks and divides and sings alone
in night and day and man and creature.
The essence: fire and cold: movement.
—“The Sea”
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Matilde and Neruda made frequent trips up the coast to Valparaíso, his old bohemian
