I was born sixteen years ago in a dusty
town, distant and white which I still don’t know,
and as this is a bit vulgar and naive,
wandering brother, let’s go to my youth.
You are very few things in life. Life
hasn’t given me all I’ve delivered to her,
equative and proud I laugh at the wound:
sorrow is to my soul like two is to three!
Nothing more. Ah! I remember when I was ten
I drew my path against all the harms
that could defeat me down that long trail:
to have loved a woman and written
a book. I haven’t succeeded, because the book
is handwritten and I loved not one, but five or six . . .
Neftalí displays a surprising level of confidence here and also a playfulness in his sorrowful circumstance—even self-deprecation in the recognition of his own innocence. The poem marks a light departure from the largely dark imagery of those years. It also lacks the desperation of “El liceo,” the second poem he wrote when he turned sixteen.
“El liceo” is one of the sharpest of his teenage years. It showcases how Neftalí was approaching his creative craft more consciously. Less submerged in his inner world, he is aware of the realities of the outside world, of where and how he fits in it, and thus the travails it will present to him. Here we see him firmly plant his position that poetry can be a profession, not just a diversion. In his critique of the doldrums of Temuco, he clearly starts to set his sights on leaving the provinces.
¡El liceo! ¡El liceo! All my poor life
in a sad cage . . . My lost childhood!
But it doesn’t matter, let’s go!, for tomorrow or the next day
I’ll be bourgeois, the same lawyer,
like any little doctor with glasses, keeping
the paths closed toward the new moon . . .
What hell, and in life, like in a magazine,
a poet has to graduate from dentistry!
About three months later, in October 1920, Ricardo Neftalí Reyes Basoalto began to sign his poems as Pablo Neruda. This was partly to hide the poems from his father as his poetry became more public. It was also partly for the sheer romance of having a pen name. Above all, it was a proclamation that he was no longer just Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, schoolboy, but rather Pablo Neruda, poet.
The origins of the name are debatable. Through most of his life Neruda wouldn’t reveal the precise details or would claim that he couldn’t remember them exactly. The working theory is that he read a short story by the Czech writer Jan Neruda in a magazine and felt it would throw his father “completely off the scent.” In 1969, four years before his death, when Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector asked him in an interview if it did indeed come from the Czech, Neruda responded: “No one until now has been able to figure it out.” Some believe it actually came from the dazzling Moravian violinist Wilhelmine Neruda, whose picture appeared in a Chilean magazine in 1920. Pablo, most likely, was for the poet Paul Verlaine.* In a poem written a few months before he changed his name, entitled “La chair est triste, hélas!” (“The Flesh Is Sad, Alas!”), he wrote:
My poor, poor, poisoned, dreadful life!
When I was thirteen I read Juan Lorrain*
and then I squeezed the emotion of my wings
spreading my pain with the verses of Verlaine.†
The poet Pablo Neruda forged onward. In 1920, Neruda and his friends organized an ateneo literario in Temuco. In Chile, literary athenaeums were popular societies that held conferences and long debates over the art of words. They had formal rules and regular meetings, but were open to everybody, unlike the exclusive aristocratic literary societies prevalent throughout Chile at the time. Neruda was the obvious choice for president, as he had already become the town’s most successful writer of his generation. His classmate and friend Alejandro Serani was the secretary. At first, the meetings in Temuco were tiny, held in members’ houses or occasionally at a restaurant. The members weren’t wealthy, especially the students. Neruda himself never hosted a meeting: Orlando Mason’s newspaper office was too small, and José del Carmen would never have let his son host at his own house.
Neruda began to lead discourses on the importance of the Russian writers, the avant-garde, and what was being written in Santiago. This was a significant breakthrough considering his usual shyness. He was beginning to gather the first glimmers of a unique self-assurance that would emerge more and more (though sometimes retreat) in the coming years.
The ateneo was increasingly excited by the literary voices of the revolutionary student movement in the capital. Members read about it in the nascent newspaper Claridad (Clarity), published by the Federación de Estudiantes de la Universidad de Chile (University of Chile Student Federation, or FECh), which, in October 1920, circulated in Temuco and elsewhere.
The FECh—Latin America’s very first student organization—had been founded in 1906. It emerged out of students’ desire to better defend their rights and perspectives. Claridad took its name from the Clarté movement, started by French intellectuals in 1919, born of a hatred of war and its horrors, which they had just experienced, World War I having ended the year before. Their biweekly journal, Clarté, promoted internationalism, pacifism, and political action.
Over time, the “Student” part of the FECh’s name lost some of its relevance as artists and writers participated and the group’s alliance with labor strengthened. Within the organization, there was a wide variety of ideologies. According to one of the student leaders, FECh was a mix of “radicals, masons, anarchists, vegetarians, liberals, socialists, collectivists, Nietzscheans, and Catholics, among the more well-known strands.”
As an alliance representing several movements, FECh was increasingly seen as a threat to the Chilean aristocracy, which still maintained a powerful grip on the country. By 1920, the Chilean oligarchy and the rest of the ruling class
