The Chilean government, led then by President Ricardo Lagos of the Socialist Party, had formed an official commission for the centennial two years in advance. According to Lagos, Neruda’s work is part of Chile’s foundation, its essence, “a component of our nationality, an obligatory and joyful point of reference every time we want to know who we are, where we come from, or which direction we should take in order to continue the construction of this proud residence on earth that’s called Chile.”
In one of the many quotes supplied for the government’s official book for the centennial, the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa hit on a vital point, stressing how Neruda’s poetry “has touched so many different worlds and nourished so many varied and contradictory callings and talents.” (This broad spectrum may have been particularly salient to Vargas Llosa, who turned away from the leftism of his early years and eventually ran for president of Peru as a conservative.)
In the United States, an important event was held at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., featuring Neruda’s friends Volodia Teitelboim, Alastair Reid, and Antonio Skármeta, author of Il postino, among other writers, poets, actors, and singers. It took place in March, just three days after the terrorist attacks in Madrid that killed nearly two hundred and injured some eighteen hundred. Ariel Dorfman was a participant at the event. Even before the train bombings, he had planned to recite and talk about Neruda’s “I Explain Some Things,” about the bombing of civilians in Madrid a half century before. Dorfman just happened to be reading the poem over and over in preparation for the event when he heard about the attacks.
Dorfman saw it as a “sign in some sense.” In fact, he had originally chosen to recite that specific poem
because I felt it was a way of allowing Neruda to condemn the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the bombs falling upon the innocent, the blood of children that runs, today as yesterday, “simply like blood of children.” And I also wanted Neruda’s verses to howl against the destruction of so many other cities and lives . . .
The poem ended up being more relevant than I had planned. When I finally read it at the Kennedy Center, I understood, as did the audience, that Neruda had captured my mouth, stolen my throat, in order to whisper something far more urgent.
But while many still use Neruda’s voice and example to speak out against contemporary forms of injustice, some believe that his Stalinism disqualifies him, making him inappropriate, if not hypocritical, for such a role. An article in the National Review announced, “You would have no idea reading Dorfman’s piece [in the L.A. Times] that Neruda was such a hard-line true believer that he was awarded the International Stalin Prize and the Lenin Peace Prize.” Then the author quoted his poem on Stalin’s death: “We must learn from Stalin / His sincere intensity / His concrete clarity . . .” This was followed by a quote from a National Review contributor who had emigrated from Russia in 1991, at the age of nineteen: “Neruda was not even a sympathizer—he was an active agent. We have no idea how much blood is on his hands in Spain, and I don’t mean just fascist blood we don’t care for.”
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Neruda would have turned a hundred years old on July 12, 2004. As he was celebrated across the world, my day began being interviewed by Renee Montagne on NPR’s Morning Edition. It felt like the culmination of a long journey for me, from my early forays in Chile to now launching The Essential Neruda and sharing his work with some ten million people on the airwaves, striving to help spread Neruda’s poetry, its power to evoke emotion, to perhaps foster consciousness.
That night we threw our own birthday party for Pablo at the Project Artaud theater in San Francisco. It opened with a lively poetry reading, featuring Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Hass, Jack Hirschman, and Stephen Kessler. Then the musical group Quijeremá performed a riveting set of South American–infused jazz, led by Quique Cruz, who had grown up a few coastal towns away from Isla Negra and who had been tortured by the regime before being exiled. He recounted that Neruda had come to his school to read his poetry; Cruz was twelve then, and deeply moved. The composition his band played for us was the score for the documentary on Neruda we had rushed to finish that very morning.
The evening was sold out, the 350-person theater filled, and an energetic crowd filled the expansive lobby, hoping to get in too. The house crew set up extra loudspeakers so everyone could at least hear the performances. I thought of Neruda’s fabled appearance at the 92nd Street Y in New York, in 1966, the poet–rock star’s reading so packed organizers set up closed-circuit televisions for those who couldn’t get into the auditorium. Now, half a century later, a full century after his birth, in a theater in San Francisco, it was happening again, a testament to the enduring potency of Neruda’s poetry, of its continued resonance.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti took the stage. He spoke of Neruda’s legacy, of his “hundred years of beatitudes.” He read his own 1960 poem, written while on Machu Picchu, titled “Hidden Door,” which he had dedicated to Neruda. Watching the audience from behind the stage, I could sense Neruda’s presence filling that hall in all his enduring complexity: the love poet, the political poet, the experimental poet; Neruda the Communist, Neruda the womanizer, Neruda the sailor on earth. We were there that night to celebrate Neruda: not just the idealized poet, but the whole man, the multifaceted human being.
After the readings, we screened the documentary. It opened with Isabel Allende’s narration, recounting her tale of taking Neruda’s book of odes with her into exile, as Neruda appeared on-screen, wearing a
