For almost his entire life, Neruda was a tremendously prolific writer, of both poetry and prose. It wasn’t a question of him consciously sacrificing quality for quantity, but that he naturally generated so much in a stretch that a superior level couldn’t always be maintained. Interestingly, it was when he was in Burma, suffering through one of his most frustrating, unproductive periods, through lentitude, with his mental environment restraining the flow of his creative energy and forcing him to be more deliberate, that he wrote this book of unprecedented “great perfection.” As he was forced to extract his poems from the “churning,” the results were consistently of outstanding quality. Many readers and critics claim that, while they might not all be masterpieces in themselves, there are simply no “bad” or “weak” poems in Residence on Earth from the time he wrote in Asia. One would be hard-pressed to make that statement about any of his other books.
Returning to Burma from his trip to Saigon and Japan and the other stops in between, Neruda had written Laura, highlighting the challenge of finding language to express the fantastical elements he was observing, experiencing: “It seems difficult to tell you all about the infinite rare things that fill this side of the world; everything is distinct: the customs, the religions, the clothing, they all seem to belong to a country seen in dreams rather than in everyday reality.”
Neruda, compositionally, was developing a way to interpret these “exotic colors,” these “infinite rare things,” these “strange brews stirred by the marvelous fingers of the absurd,” as he had described them in his dispatch to La Nación. He was witnessing the wonders of the world in front of him, while also experiencing and interpreting them internally in his mind.
And dreams. During this period, he frequently refers to dreams, be it in his “Reports from the Orient” or when he writes, from an opium den, to a friend in Chile that he’s working on a book that will be called “Nocturnal Collection”—his original title for Residence on Earth—and he’s confident “that it will express huge swaths of my inner world.”
Just as venture of the infinite man was a variation of surrealism and other styles that he crafted on his own to suit himself, he had now developed that further: the poems of this first volume of Residence on Earth redefined Spanish poetry with Neruda’s individualized form of surrealism. He had created a new rhetoric distinctly his own, quickly labeled Nerudismo, which featured a transformational use of expressive symbols with esoteric images. With them, he was able to put a language to all the dreams, to the strange things, both external and internal and in between, in order to find a way to express them to himself, to his readers.
This new ars poetica is described in the Residence poem bearing that title in the new book:
Between shadow and space, between harnesses and virgins,
endowed with a singular heart and fatal dreams,
impetuously pale, withered in the forehead
and in mourning like an angry widower every day of my life,
oh, for every drink of invisible water I swallow drowsily
and with every sound I take in, trembling,
I feel the same missing thirst and the same cold fever,
an ear being born, an indirect anguish,
as if thieves were arriving, or ghosts,
and inside a long, deep, hollow shell,
like a humiliated waiter, like a bell gone a bit hoarse,
like an old mirror, like the smell of an empty house
where the guests come back at night hopelessly drunk,
and there’s an odor of clothes thrown on the floor, and an absence of flowers
—or maybe somehow a little less melancholic—
but the truth is, suddenly, the wind lashing my chest,
the infinitely dense nights dropped into my bedroom,
the noise of a day burning with sacrifice
demand what there is in me of the prophetic, with melancholy
and there’s a banging of objects that call without being answered,
and a restless motion, and a muddled name.
Today the book remains a powerful articulation of the poet’s endeavor. The writer Jim Harrison notes in the introduction to New Directions’ 2004 centennial edition of Residence on Earth, “In every line you trace with great difficulty the bruised consciousness that produced it because unlike most poetry it proceeds from the inner to the world outside the poet.” The Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ariel Dorfman, who grew up in Chile, commented:
Whenever I’m feeling a need to understand the turbulence, the chaos of life, how life erupts in different ways and in the everyday, I always go to Residencia en la tierra, and I’ll go to it continually. And especially during my adolescence, my late adolescence [in the 1960s], I felt that to be very good company for me, because it is very much the way in which Neruda was referring to a reality in Latin America where everything is unsettled, where there is no center, there is no core, there is no foundation, and yet the foundation is in the words themselves.
Yet it took time to elicit such a positive reaction—or any reaction—from his contemporaries. It was a bit too avant-garde for the mainstream reader of the time. Just as he did with Twenty Love Poems, Neruda struggled to convince a publisher to take it on. The battle with this book would be tougher, and the response not nearly as sensational as when his first masterpiece was released.
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Though Neruda was excited by the developments with his writing, more mundane matters required the poet’s attention. In June, he sent an urgent cable to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs saying that he’d been without funds for two months. In a letter to Héctor Eandi, Neruda wrote:
Consuls like me—“honorary”—receive a miserable salary, the lowest of the entire staff.
