“Compañero Pablo Neruda!”
“¡Presente!”
“Compañero Salvador Allende!”
“¡Presente!”
“Compañero Victor Jara!”
“¡Presente!”
“Compañero Pablo Neruda!”
“¡Presente!”
Other shouts rang out from the crowd, drowning out the other chants: “He hasn’t died! He hasn’t died! He has only fallen asleep. Like the flowers that sleep when the sun has set.”
Epilogue
Eight small books of poetry sat on Neruda’s desk when he died, eight books he was waiting to publish the following year on his seventieth birthday. They are a collection of books written by a man who knew his life was at its end and had accepted it. The poetry is simple, as had been his style. Love and politics are present, as always—his observations of the impending downfall of the Allende government are notable—but these are not the dominant subjects or themes. Instead, in these books the reader most often finds Neruda by himself, contemplating. The poetry is deeply personal, penetrating, and meditative, set in and borne by nature.
The books are also at times playful, especially in Libro de las preguntas (The Book of Questions), a collection of whimsical rhetorical questions, which, in the words of William O’Daly, who translated these final books into English, “coalesce in the realm of paradox.” In the work, Neruda did not let his rational mind restrain his whim.
If all rivers are sweet
where does the sea get its salt?
Which yellow bird
fills its nest with lemons?
The book also contains many questions addressing political and social concerns. He could not avoid them. Neruda questions Hitler’s and Nixon’s fates and shows his increasing fear for his own country’s destiny, as the drama among factions between 1971 and 1973 became starker:
Is it true that a black condor
flies by night over my country?
These books contain the poetry of a man who knows he is dying. They are his homecoming, as seen in a poem from El mar y las campanas (The Sea and the Bells):
One returns to the self as if to an old house
with nails and slots, so that
a person tired of himself
as of a suit full of holes,
tries to walk naked in the rain,
wants to drench himself in pure water,
in elemental wind, and he cannot
but return to the well of himself,
to the least worry
over whether he existed, where he knew how to speak his mind
or to pay or to owe or to discover,
as if I were so important
that it must accept or not accept me,
the earth with its leafy name,
in its theater of black walls.
—“Returning”
Before the final silence of death, there is spiritual renewal, in which nature becomes the vehicle for reflection and connection to the larger world. This occurs in “Winter Garden”:
Winter arrives. Shining dictation
the wet leaves give me,
dressed in silence and yellow.
I am a book of snow,
a spacious hand, an open meadow,
a circle that waits,
I belong to the earth and its winter.
Earth’s rumor grew in the leaves,
soon the wheat flared up
punctuated by red flowers like burns,
then autumn arrived to set down
the wine’s scripture:
everything passed, the goblet of summer
was a fleeting sky,
the navigating cloud burned out.
I stood on the balcony dark with mourning,
like yesterday with the ivies of my childhood,
hoping the earth would spread its wings
in my uninhabited love.
I knew the rose would fall
and the pit of the passing peach
would sleep and germinate once more,
and I got drunk on the air
until the whole sea became the night
and the red sky turned to ash.
Now the earth lives
numbing its oldest questions,
the skin of its silence stretched out.
Once more I am the silent one
who came out of the distance
wrapped in cold rain and bells:
I owe to earth’s pure death
the will to sprout.
* * *
Alastair Reid translated Isla Negra, Extravagaria, and Fully Empowered, along with many other individual poems. They first met at Isla Negra in 1964 as Neruda was turning sixty; Alastair was thirty-eight. Over the next decade, the two listened to each other and heard each other, sharing a friendship that was profound for them both. Shortly following Neruda’s death, Alastair wrote this:
Translator to Poet
There are only the words left now. They lie like tombstones
or the stone Andes where the green scrub ends.
I do not have the heart to chip away
at your long lists of joy, which alternate
their iron and velvet, all the vegetation
and whalebone of your chosen stormy coast.
So much was written hope, with every line
extending life by saying, every meeting
ending in expectation of the next.
It was your slow intoning voice which counted,
bringing a living Chile into being
where poetry was bread, where books were banquets.
Now they are silent, stony on the shelf.
I cannot read them for the thunderous silence,
the grief of Chile’s dying and your own,
death being the one definitive translation.
* * *
The dictatorship tried to proscribe Neruda from the country in which he was so ingrained. It vaulted the virtuous Gabriela Mistral into his place as the country’s main cultural figure, enshrining her as “the mother of the nation.” Still, like those cries of “¡Neruda!” “¡Presente!” at his funeral, Neruda remained present throughout those fifteen dark years, as the dark condor he had written about gripped his country. In 2004, Ariel Dorfman, Duke University’s distinguished professor of literature and Latin American studies, reminisced:
When I went back to Chile after ten years of exile, I went to see Neruda’s house in Isla Negra. I knew it was boarded up, and what I found there on that extraordinary fence—I found it full of graffiti. And I had not till then understood to what point Neruda was a saint for the people of Chile. Of course there were a lot of anti-dictatorial messages, but most of the messages were “Pablo, I brought my son here, you’re alive.” “Pablo, thanks for having helped me in such a way.” . . . It was full of little messages to him, directly . . . And what’s wonderful about that is that the fence had become symbolic of the way we had gotten rid of the dictatorship . . . in the sense of taking over the public space. Okay, they’ve shut down Neruda’s house, we can’t go to this
