The New York Times reviewed opening night, calling it “two hours of drama filled with furious hatred for the United States.” The fact that the Times would review a play that opened in Santiago shows Neruda’s high standing in the cultural world and his continuing political influence. The anti-American feeling in the play is partly anti-imperialist, partly a statement of identity politics. Murieta, whether a Chilean or Mexican, is an American, and the gold is a piece of America to which any American, whether from Valparaíso or Virginia, is entitled. The United States had stolen California from Mexico through an unjust war. The play focused more on racism, rather than just imperialism. As Neruda wrote to the editor of the New York Times:
One generalization that I feel I must correct has to do with the supposed anti-Americanism of my work. This is mostly manifest in the spirit of violence, domination and racism in one historical period. By the way, I don’t think that your great country has put these characteristics behind it. But by stigmatizing segregationists and violent people during the California gold rush, my work does not cover the immense majority of the American people . . .
Elsewhere, Neruda wrote that the idea of the Ku Klux Klan was undoubtedly born with the white vigilante groups that formed in California against the Latinos and blacks, “because the same wild racism that you see even today existed in those first Yankee crusaders who wanted to clean California of Latin Americans and also, logically, have a hand in their discoveries. Joaquín Murieta’s wife was killed in one of these incursions.”
The play was a success in Santiago, but it has seldom been performed since the opening. It was the only play Neruda wrote.
He did, however, translate Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into Spanish, on the occasion of the four hundredth anniversary of the English bard’s birth. (Alastair Reid, Neruda’s friend and translator, liked to say that Neruda is the most widely read poet since Shakespeare.) In a letter to his publisher Gonzalo Losada on May 12, 1964, Neruda wrote, “I’ve achieved a lucid translation, freeing the verse of mannerisms and pretense. It came out like crystal-clear water.”
While that may be true of the literal translation of the lines, Neruda also edited his version, creating an adaptation of the original to make the play more populist, to appeal to a wider audience in Latin America. In a less direct-action, grassroots manner, Neruda’s intent seems to have been to perpetuate Lorca’s aim to bring Spanish theater “within reach of the people,” an action that excited Neruda’s idealism back in the days of the Second Republic in Madrid. Instead of playing up elements of a pertinent yet rhetorical theme like class struggle, Neruda accentuated the dramatic tension of the impossibility of Romeo and Julieta’s love (and echoed the tragedies of his youth, the impossibility of love with Teresa, Maria Parodi, Albertina, and Laura due to their parents’ tragic objections).
Toward this end, as Chilean poet, translator, and scholar Rodrigo Rojas points out, Neruda tried to make Romeo simpler and more romantic, so he dropped some of his dialogue, some of his words where Neruda felt he was being hesitant, doubtful, and rather lyrical, in order to make him appear more direct, less impatient, more decisive, more sure of his love for Julieta (in contrast, one could argue, to Neruda’s own love life). Most of the changes were at the beginning, and they were actually rather subtle compared with many of the adaptations of the classic that are constantly staged around the world. And Neruda’s changes should not be pinned to Neruda’s process of translation; he could have created them had he simply been commissioned to stage a new production in English.
From 1960 to his death in 1973, Neruda never let his pen of green ink rest. He was enormously productive, despite his deteriorating health, churning out a total of twenty-six books of poetry (seven of them would be published posthumously). They were of varied quality, but many were true gems. One of the most evocative was La barcarola, released shortly after the premiere of Joaquín Murieta. It is a lengthy love song to Matilde, written in the traditional 6/8 time to reflect the rhythm of the gondolier’s stroke. It is somewhat of a surrealistic departure from the straightforward personal poetry he had been writing. Aboard his imaginary boat, he tells Matilde the story of their love, their history, his love of Chile. Toward the end, the war in Vietnam fills an episode, as it often did in the books he wrote during that war. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1971, the Swedish Academy presenter called La barcarola his recent “masterpiece.”
A year after La barcarola came Las manos del día (The Hands of the Day). In the opening poem, the speaker admits he is the “guilty one” for never having done anything physical with his hands, that he never once made a broom so he could never “gather and unite / the elements.” He verges on overly apologetic, expressing an exaggerated guilt when, twenty-one poems into the book, he claims that his hands are “negative” and “useless.”
Thus forgive me for the sadness,
of my happy mistakes,
of my shadowed dreams,
forgive me, everyone, for the unnecessary:
I didn’t manage to use my hands
in a carpenter’s shop or in the forest.
Once again, in The Hands of the Day Neruda couldn’t turn his gaze away from Vietnam, where, in his universalist view that all men
