*In her study Opium and the Romantic Imagination, Alethea Hayter argues that “the action of opium may unbare some of the semi-conscious processes by which literature begins to be written.” Those equipped with a creative imagination and a tendency to rêverie—the ability to lose oneself in dreamy, pleasant thoughts like in a daydream—can indeed encounter “unique material” through the use of the drug. Opening the doors of perception, opium may open those individuals to “unique material for [their] poetry,” “presenting everyday images in a different light.”
“The writer,” Hayter states, “can actually witness the process by which words and visual images arise simultaneously and in parallel in his own mind. He can watch, control, and subsequently use the product of the creative imagination at an earlier stage of its production than is normally accessible to the conscious mind.” This echoes some of Neruda’s discourses on how he wanted the “scattered expressions” and other processes of his creative mind to work.
*“Orient and Orient,” a La Nación article from 1930, further displays the extent of his reading of Eastern texts and how he would articulate their thoughts. He even quotes the Upanishads, the ancient Indian text of Hindu teachings: “Never lost, yet at the same time losing itself, the being returns to the origin of its creation ‘as the drop of seawater returns to the sea.’”
*The English East India Company and Dutch merchants, along with their respective governments and armed forces, clashed for nearly a decade, jockeying with Java’s Prince Jayawikarta to control the trade in the area. In 1619, after having lost ground, the Dutch army took advantage of an opportunity created by the prince’s rivals and attacked, burning the city of Jayakarta, as Jakarta was then known. The prince fled as the Dutch assumed power and took over the port and the area. They renamed it Batavia, and it soon became another part of the Dutch East Indies, which covered most of present-day Indonesia.
*For example, in Santiago’s main newspapers, El Mercurio and La Nación, there was a review by his friend Luis Enrique Délano in the former and a rather artificial piece by Norberto Pinilla in the latter, which more than anything defends Neruda’s sad character. The rare time Pinilla has anything negative to say about a poem, he goes no further than to call it opaque and without beauty.
*Neruda was so fond of Carbalho that fifteen years later he wrote a poem dedicated to him in Canto General, testifying to the fraternity the two had developed in Argentina. The poem revolves around the theme of hearing the universal voice of the poet in the silence of the night. In the final stanza, Neruda tells his friend: “Brother, you’re the longest river on earth / . . . faithful to the transparency of a sublime tear / faithful to mankind’s besieged eternity.”
†Between August 1933 and October 1934, Borges codirected and was a major contributor to Revista multicolor de los sábados (Multicolor Saturday Magazine), the literary supplement to Critica, a newspaper with a vast circulation and notable prestige. Yet there seemed to be absolutely no contact with Neruda while he was there, with many different speculations as to why. At this time, Borges was in love with Norah Lange, who was becoming extremely close to Neruda. This could have generated jealousy and even enmity.
*Complete poem in Appendix I.
*Storni’s poetry, erotic and almost always informed by her feminism, would have international impact. She wrote what has been called poetry of “fatal beauty that leads to an unavoidable death.” A year after Neruda arrived in Argentina, she was besieged by breast cancer. Four years later, her body crushed with pain and her mind depressed and exhausted, she walked off a pier and into the ocean at Mar del Plata, where she drowned.
*Stalin became Neruda’s hero when he was the only world leader to support the Spanish Republicans after the Fascist Francisco Franco launched his military coup and initiated the civil war.
*“Ode with a Lament,” part of Residence, seems uncannily as if it were written about Neruda’s daughter, Malva Marina. However, it was written in Buenos Aires, before her birth.
*In 1938, friends of Neruda’s printed the poem on sixteen unbound pages, accompanied by illustrations by Ramón Gaya.
*As a coincidental historical note, it was Jiménez’s wife, Zenobia Camprubí de Jiménez, who had translated Tagore’s The Gardener from Hindi to Spanish, which Teitelboim read and then reprinted in Pro and Vital. Neruda would have certainly been aware of this, as she was credited below her translation in those issues.
*Borges is the only other Latin American included among Bloom’s twenty-six authors, representing Europe and all of the Americas, starting with Dante.
†The original rhyme scheme is lost in translation:
Es por acción de amor a mi país
que te reclamo, hermano necesario,
viejo Walt Whitman de la mano gris.
para que con tu apoyo extraordinario
verso a verso matemos de raíz
a Nixon, presidente sanguinario.
*The poems in the 1933 Chilean edition were written between 1925 and 1931. As Neruda had hoped from the start, the book published in Spain was seen as the real first edition, the one hundred books each signed by him in Santiago just a special limited edition.
*As Lorca explained at a “Talk on Poetry” that year, “The theater is a school of laughter and lamentation, an open tribunal where the people can introduce old and mistaken mores as evidence, and can use living examples to explain eternal norms of the heart.” Lorca’s devotion to this art as a social tool would inspire Neruda’s new social poetry.
*The Falange (the Spanish word for “phalanx,” the Greek mass military formation) was
