Yet there was no fraternity between Neruda and two of the other most important poets from his own country, both significantly older, Pablo de Rokha and Vicente Huidobro. Tensions had been mounting among all three, de Rokha most notably taking some strong swipes at Neruda in the press. But a 1934 accusation by a disciple of Huidobro that Neruda had plagiarized one of his love poems brought about a conflagration, and a vehement and at times nasty “literary war” broke out on all sides.
At the time, Volodia Teitelboim was an eighteen-year-old member of the Chilean Communist Party and a burgeoning writer, deeply impressed by the forty-one-year-old Vicente Huidobro, the “older brother” of Chile’s intelligentsia. One day at the National Library, Teitelboim was reading The Gardener, by the Bengalese Rabindranath Tagore. It was published in 1913, the same year Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for his “consummate skill” and his “profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse.” When Teitelboim read The Gardener’s thirteenth poem, he thought immediately of Neruda’s Poem XVI. From Tagore:
You are the evening cloud floating in the sky of my dreams.
I paint you and fashion you ever with my love longings.
You are my own, my own, Dweller in my endless dreams!
From Neruda:
In my sky at twilight you are like a cloud
and your color and form are as I love them.
You are mine, you are mine, woman with sweet lips,
and my infinite dreams live in your life.
The rest of the poem continues to be very similar to that of Tagore, who was one of Neruda and his friends’ favorite poets in their student days. After comparing the two texts, Teitelboim consulted a poet friend, and then on the front page of the cultural magazine Pro’s November 1934 issue, under the title “El affaire Neruda-Tagore,” he printed the two poems beside each other. There was no need to accuse Neruda of plagiarism in so many words: arranged this way, it was clear how similar they were.
Pro was a project of Huidobro’s; he had founded or helped lead a handful of vanguard magazines. Since no individual byline was attached to that first page, people directly attributed the charge to Huidobro, even though it was all Teitelboim. Huidobro, in Spain at the time, claimed he wasn’t even aware of it.
Neruda, who had praised Huidobro’s poetry in the past, especially in Claridad, barely reacted at all. Earlier in Neruda’s life, his insecurity would have caused him to lash out in response, but now, by showing restraint, he trivialized the accusation and made his accusers appear petty.
But then Pablo de Rokha joined in the fray. He was already known for acrimonious actions against other poets—at the time the plagiarism affair came to the forefront, de Rokha was going after Huidobro, incensed that his wife had been left out of an important new anthology of Chilean poetry published under Huidobro’s direction (with Teitelboim as a principal editor). De Rokha had shown animosity toward Neruda for some time, likely rooted in jealousy of the younger poet, who had surged ahead of him in public recognition. There were his negative critiques of Neruda, including the aforementioned rebuke of Residence, “Epitaph to Neruda.” A year before that, in 1932, he wrote a nasty but eloquent newspaper column entitled “Pablo Neruda: Poeta a la moda,” in which he called out Neruda for being an “opportunist” who “administers his fame prudently and patiently.” Of all his works, he attacked Neruda’s most popular one at length, the “trendy” Twenty Love Poems, as being nothing more than the “typical bible of versified mediocrity.”
A month after Teitelboim published the two poems side by side, de Rokha attacked Neruda in a short article published in La Opinión, where he was a columnist:
To be a plagiarist, you must be possessed of an out-of-control opportunism, a filthy and enormously objective vanity, like that of an actor or a failed buffoon, a great capacity for fraud and lying, a simultaneously miserable and egomaniacal and despicable perception . . . It has been shown and published that Pablo Neruda has plagiarized Tagore, the Indian poet.
At this point, in reaction to the public accusation, Neruda said that yes, he had borrowed from Tagore, but he insisted that it wasn’t plagiarism but rather a “paraphrase” of Tagore’s poem. Supposedly, several of Neruda’s friends claimed that before the first edition of Twenty Love Poems came out, they had suggested that a note should be put in the book, explaining, or rather “putting on record,” the fact that Poem XVI was a paraphrase of Tagore’s The Gardener.
Tomás Lago and Diego Muñoz called Huidobro out for what they saw as a trifling and even treacherous act against a fellow progressive Chilean. Now Huidobro found himself forced into the controversy. The January 1935 issue of the magazine Vital, which he also ran and which had a much broader and more significant readership than Pro, appropriated the front page Teitelboim had printed in the November 1934 issue of Pro, noting up top that the following poems had been published without any comments. It then featured the two poems side by side once again, with “El affaire Neruda-Tagore” in large type above it.
While Pro contained no commentary, in the Vital issue Huidobro included two raw letters he wrote attacking Lago and Muñoz. In one, he stated that he knew Lago had
lied and spouted your usual bullshit about me . . . They’ve already told me that you are a gossip and a busybody like an old whore. Shameless jerk. Your lies can’t affect my life, the facts of
