*See Appendix II for more on this history.
*Since Neruda never gave a definitive answer, scholars like Hernán Loyola have speculated the choice could also relate to Dante’s Divina commedia and Paolo with his star-crossed lover, Francesca. Around the time Neruda came up with his new name, he wrote “Ivresse” (the title being the French word for “exalted intoxication”): “Let the passion of Paolo dance in my body today / and my heart will shake, drunk with a merry dream.” At the end of his teenage years, he would write “Paolo” next to “Teresa,” his lover’s name, in the sand of Puerto Saavedra.
*Lorrain’s first name is actually “Jean,” not “Juan,” as Neruda puts it. He was a prolific French poet, journalist, and novelist, a member of the decadent movement closely in line with Verlaine. He was famously flamboyant, a dandy during the Belle Époque. He died in 1906 at the age of fifty.
†Lost here in translation from the original Spanish, the first and third lines rhyme just like the second and fourth.
*The radical environment of the time is even captured, in a sense, on the book’s cover, stamped in time by the illustrations that Juan Gandulfo, the anarchist leader whose name was synonymous with revolution, volunteered to make from his wood engravings. (His images were used only on the first edition.)
†T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922) and D. H. Lawrence’s novel Kangaroo (1923) are two major products of this trend. Chileans were also participating in this literary experimentation, most notably the avant-garde leader Vicente Huidobro. José Domingo Gómez Rojas’s bohemian poetry—though cut short by his death after the attacks on the student movement—fits in as well. Many other Latin Americans were also writing in a similar vein at the time, most notably the Peruvian César Vallejo.
*Mistral included “Railroad Roundhouses at Night” in what became an enormously successful anthology of Latin American and European writers, Lecturas para mujeres (Readings for Women), intended to be a primer for girls’ schools. The same progressive secretary of education who had brought her to Mexico commissioned and printed twenty thousand copies. It was also published in Madrid, one year later.
*A piece Neruda wrote in his sixties, destined for his memoirs, provides light on Neruda’s attitude toward religion in his twenties, one that aligns with the “protest against Christian morality” within a very Catholic country. In the text, Neruda explains that for centuries, priests of all rites and languages have sold pieces of heaven, along with all its commodities: water, electricity, great television, the comforts of a clear conscience. The curious thing about this property, however, “inhabited by a terrible being named God,” is that it has never been visited by anyone. Yet they keep selling it, as the price per square meter “of the celestial air or divine earth” just keeps climbing. “Since I was very young,” he contends, “I have rebelled against this always invisible kingdom and the strange ways of the ruling gods.”
*The poem’s rhyme scheme gets lost in translation:
Te recuerdo como eras en el último otoño.
Eras la boina gris y el corazón en calma.
En tus ojos peleaban las llamas del crepúsculo.
Y las hojas caían en el agua de tu alma.
*Complete poem in Appendix I.
†The theme of the “absent one” was also present in one of his nicknames for Albertina, “Netochka.” In Dostoyevsky’s first (unfinished) novel, Netochka Nezvanova, Netochka is a young orphaned girl with a sorrowful life. As Neruda would have known, “Netochka Nezvanova” means “nameless nobody” in Russian; Neruda would have seen Albertina as if she was someone who “weren’t here now,” absent—nobody but possessing all his thoughts, nameless on paper but so present. In a 1983 interview, Albertina said Netochka was her favorite nickname.
*Desolación. The Instituto de las Españas in New York had published a smaller version of the book in 1922.
*Years later, Alone admitted that his negative review derived from the fact that he was “seduced and a bit tyrannized by the French spirit.” He had thought that without “clarity, simplicity, and order, there was no salvation.”
*There were more stylistic elements and influences in venture than those just behind the scattered expression initiative. The poets Neruda’s eccentric French teacher Ernesto Torrealba had pushed him to read in the liceo, especially Mallarmé and Apollinaire, informed the book’s style, substance, and vision. And venture’s nocturnal journey has similarities to the voyage in Rimbaud’s “Le bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”). Neruda was also influenced by the experimental verse of Vicente Huidobro, a Chilean writing in Paris at the time, eleven years and one literary generation his elder. Venture was actually a type of “poetic workshop,” as Neruda once put it, in which he explored and experimented with the different styles and voices of all these different poets.
†When Nascimento eventually sent him venture’s proofs, Neruda returned them immediately, having made no changes. “No mistakes?” the publisher asked. Neruda’s response: “There are and I’m leaving them.” Just as Neruda intentionally omitted capital letters and punctuation marks (though he did use accent marks), by leaving in these natural slips he felt he was better emulating the sounds of the subconscious voice.
*The book was appreciated by some of the leading Latin American avant-garde poets at the time. Huidobro included it in the landmark anthology Índice de la nueva poesía americana, which appeared the same year venture came out. (It also featured a poem by Rubén Azócar.) Huidobro also published one of the cantos in an issue of the French journal Favorables Paris poema, which he was editing with César Vallejo.
*The interaction with
