*Monos azules were inexpensive, common, useful, and symbolic of the working class. Lorca wore them when working with his theater troupe, La Barraca.
*The U.S. Congress had just passed the Neutrality Act of 1935, which prevented the export of “arms, ammunition, and implements of war” from the United States to foreign nations at war. Although the act didn’t apply to civil wars, the State Department dissuaded companies from selling planes to the Republic, saying to do so would be against the spirit of U.S. policy. The act didn’t prohibit oil and similar resources to be sold on credit to European belligerents, as they weren’t classified as “implements of war.” Texaco and Standard Oil delivered about $20 million of oil to Franco, indispensable to his continued operations throughout the course of the war.
*The Spanish Civil War as a “poets’ war” was unprecedented in history. Great battles had been recorded in poetry since ancient times, but those poems were read only after the moment of action. The romantics were idealistic in their desire to bring about societal change, but there were wide gaps between what they aspired to in their verses and what they achieved. An example is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s response to the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, where police on horseback charged more than sixty thousand protesters: Shelley hoped his poetry would stimulate workers to rise up in further revolt. Yet nobody would publish it for over a decade, long after the moment for such a revolt had passed.
The improvement in mass communications by the 1930s made it easier and faster to receive news, allowing poets to write with more immediacy. In the wars of previous centuries, one usually had to wait for news to be delivered by horseback from a distant battle.
*In 1944, the U.S. intelligence services intercepted and decrypted a cable from Moscow to Mexico City stating, “Pablo NERUDA is being developed [RAZRABOTKA].” “Development,” according to the United States, consisted of being studied and/or cultivated. “Razrabotka” referred to one of the stages in recruitment, including the “assessment of the candidate and the developing of his trust in the case officer.” There is absolutely no evidence that Neruda was ever “developed” to serve as an agent for the Soviets, for whatever reason.
This information was declassified in 1995, when the CIA began to release some three thousand messages it had intercepted from Soviet intelligence as part of the Cold War–era Venona project, which included espionage around the United States’ development of the atomic bomb, providing evidence against Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss, among others. In September 1995, a report from the NSA’s policy office stated, “We have made progress on the next batch of messages to be released.” It then listed seventeen names “previously indicated for redaction” that “after discussions . . . may be released.” Among them: “Neruda.”
*The poem would later be included in the final section of The Third Residence.
*For example:
Yo escribí sobre el tiempo y sobre el agua,
describí el luto y su metal morado,
yo escribí sobre el cielo y la manzana,
ahora escribo sobre Stalingrado.
†The review appeared in 1947, the first in the Times on an English-language version of the book, a seminal edition by New Directions, translated by Angel Flores. Residence on Earth: Selected Poems was “wisely published in Spanish and English on alternate pages.” It was a glowing review by Milton Bracker, one of the Times’ top correspondents and a contributor to the New Yorker. “The flavor of Neruda is clearly political in the noblest sense. He is primarily a poet who combines words with a stinging originality,” Bracker wrote.
*Rafael Sánchez Ventura, an “angelic poet of rebellion” and “tireless champion of absolute injustices,” as Lorca put it, had been a member of the Republicans’ Junta for the Preservation and Protection of Spain’s Artistic Treasures. In 1940, he sent a number of Altolaguirre’s works to the Library of Congress to have them preserved for posterity.
*Complete poem in Appendix I.
*As Alastair Reid writes, “The word pueblo invokes in Spanish much more than either a place or the people who inhabit it: it humanizes a place as a state of being, as a set of values and allegiances. English has nothing quite as embracing.”
*The poem’s ability to serve as effective political rhetoric revolves around the metaphor that Neruda uses throughout. He begins by presenting the image of the motherland as a svelte woman bathed in sweat, her body made of the people. From there the verse takes us to the Communist Party’s founder, Recabarren, and then to Neruda’s running mate, Lafertte, whose salty sweat and tears, Neruda says, remind us of saltpeter, a mineral that takes us back to the desert, the motherland itself. He not only exalts the leaders, but effectively says that they embody the country itself. Besides the metaphor, the lyrical sound (lost in translation) was key to the poem’s ability to serve as a campaign speech. To raise funds, the campaign sold pamphlets with the poem printed inside and a picture of Neruda on the front.
*Lost in translation is the rhyme between “obrero del riel” (railroad worker) and “Gabriel.”
*The Ibáñez dictatorship had first established Pisagua at the end of the 1920s to intern homosexuals.
*Five years older than Neruda, he was the son of Charles Mason’s daughter Telésfora and Orlando Mason’s father, Rudecindo Ortega. He had represented Temuco as a deputy in Congress and later resigned from the Senate in protest against the Law
