The sea, wide and vast, was like all the multitudes he contained and poured forth. Wide and vast like the plenitude of his soul as well as the plenitude of his ego. And like that sea that seemed a part of him, Neruda was so complex and yet at times so simple. With all the different aspects of Neruda, and all their contradictions, at his core he is one great body, still, in all its fullness, stretching across the world, to all its famous and hidden corners.
There, on the screen, Neruda watches the same waves that crash on Isla Negra’s rocks today. The folk singer Hugo Arévalo, who now lives in Isla Negra himself, had told me that one of the things that had brought Neruda to live there was the ability to see the line between land and sea moving constantly, never fixed. “I think that movement had a meaning in his poetry,” he said. And as I myself saw it, that motion also had a role in the nuances of his life, in the balance between self-mystification and truth, in the need to adapt to shifting realities while always keeping his edge.
That shore reflects all the changes he went through, all the battles, all the triumphs, all the tragedies—of anyone’s life, but certainly heightened in his—before coming back to the core:
Let us look for secret things
somewhere in the world,
on the blue shore of silence
or where the storm has passed,
rampaging like a train.
—“Forget About Me”
Neruda, mysterious as the sea: as much as we think we know him, as much as we could describe him that night in the reading and the film and music, as much as I try to in this book, we’ll never know everything, because he wasn’t only a figurehead, nor merely an icon; he was also, simply, a human being.
As the audience watched those waves crashing over the black rocks of Isla Negra, they heard an actor read part of Neruda’s poem “Lazybones.” Working on the movie, I had heard the poem so many times that it had begun to lose its effect on me. But as I listened to it in that packed theater, the words struck me with renewed emotion. Neruda composed the poem overlooking the waves at Isla Negra, not long after the space race had begun. The “metal objects” he refers to are the new satellites circling above in the night sky. While the possibilities they represent may catch his attention, the poet is still consumed by the beauty right here on earth:
Metal objects will still
journey among the stars,
weary men will still go up
to assault the gentle moon
and install their pharmacies.
In this season of swollen grapes
wine begins its life
between the sea and the mountains.
In Chile the cherries dance,
dusky girls sing
and the water gleams from guitars.
The sun knocks on every door
and works miracles with wheat.
The first wine is pink,
sweet as a tender child,
the second wine is robust
like the voice of a sailor
and the third wine is a topaz,
a poppy and a fiery blaze.
My house has the sea and the earth,
my woman has majestic eyes
the color of wild hazelnuts,
when night falls the sea
adorns itself in white and green
and then the moon in seafoam
dreams like a maritime bride.
I do not want any other planet.
The poem’s melody of innocent thoughts and imagery conveys that Neruda’s work doesn’t always have to be raw with politics or love; that, at the heart of it all, his poetry is about the wonder of being human. This is what keeps people coming back to Neruda, the essential poetic expression of what we are at our core, the elementary within the complex, the ordinary and the infinite, the true and the unknowable.
Author’s Note
In the first chapters a difficulty presents itself whether to use Pablo Neruda, the pen name he assumed at age sixteen, or Neftalí, from his given name, Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto. When events jump ahead of those first sixteen years, I refer to him as Pablo Neruda. When writing about him during the time before he changed his name, I use Neftalí or some combination of his original first, middle, and last names.
All translations of the poems in this book are mine unless otherwise indicated, most often in the endnotes. I also translated most of the source material. I take responsibility for any inadequacies or errors in these translations. It should be noted that strict literal fidelity to the original, especially with the poetry, wasn’t always maintained. Modest, appropriate liberties were sometimes taken in order to best convey the true intents and richness of the original.
Megan Coxe and Jessica Powell provided invaluable help. Those passages and poems fully translated by them are cited with their names; these were graciously crafted for this book and thus are previously unpublished.
Acknowledgments
It is as if there were a Canto General that orchestrated this book’s creation and delivery into the world. I am so grateful to all those who, in one way or another, contributed their voice, from those who have been with me throughout the entire history of this project to those who spontaneously crossed my path in a market, a construction site, or a Valparaíso bar, appearing right on cue, as if Pablo had sprinkled his poetic pixie dust on this venture; an impossibility that seemed impossibly to happen over and over, and at just the right moment. Buoyed by this presence, I borrow his line and say thank you, to everyone, to you . . .
At the genesis were my parents, Gilbert and Rona Eisner, and their love, their example, their belief and support. From there, I have had the greatest fortune to have encountered what Pablo would call
