on American soil, the space that you cover
with your fluvial corona of bled rays,
let me cast them scornful oblivion
because they want to mutilate me with your absence.
Neruda refused to have his own poems included in Laurel. The 1,134-page anthology included his friends Alberti, Cernuda, Aleixandre, Altolaguirre (the printer of Spain in the Heart), and Lorca. The bottom of its last page reads: “(The authors had included the poets Pablo Neruda and Léon Felipe in this anthology. While it was at the printers, these gentlemen asked the editors that their works be excluded. Regretfully, we complied with their wishes.)”
Paz wrote years later:
There was a change after that. He began to use the same disparaging terms for both “pure poets” and Trotskyites. [Paz was a Trotskyite himself, opposed to Stalin’s leadership.] Once I dared to defend [both of] them; he looked at me with surprise, almost incredulously, and then he responded harshly. We didn’t talk about the subject again, but I felt that after that, he thought of me as untrustworthy. I had fallen from his grace.
Indeed, when a banquet in honor of Neruda happened to be given just days after the publication of Laurel, the tensions came to a head. Neruda appeared to be uncharacteristically drunk that evening. At one point he told the others sitting with him at the table of honor, “I would like to say hello to Octavio.” Paz was sitting at one of the enormous tables on the other side of the room. José Luis Martínez, who would become an illustrious leader of several Mexican cultural institutions, went to get him. But when Paz arrived to greet Neruda, he was met with a sudden dismissal: “I don’t say hello to faggots,” Neruda told him. “I call you a faggot because you’re allied with those sons of bitches, those faggots [Bergamín and the other editors of Laurel].” The insult was so distasteful that it unnerved Delia, who turned to Neruda and asked, “Pablo, what are you doing?”
As he said his good-byes at the end of the night, he sarcastically complimented Paz on his shirt, saying it was “whiter than [his] conscience.” He then insulted Paz’s mother and grabbed Paz’s shirt so strongly that he tore part of the collar. A rant on the authors of the “damned anthology” followed.
Later that night, Neruda told the Spanish poet Juan Larrea: “I don’t know what you will think, Juan. But I’ll tell you that to me, poetry doesn’t interest me now. From now on I think I will dedicate myself to politics and seashell collection.” Poetry for Neruda, however, was inescapable; it was his main outlet for political expression. But Neruda’s comment to Larrea is telling of his ambition to become more active politically off the written page.
* * *
The second half of the third volume of Residence on Earth moves from Spain to the Russian front. In the summer of 1942, Hitler began a siege on the industrial city of Stalingrad. The siege was one of the most pivotal and bloodiest battles of the war. Stalin forbade civilians from fleeing on order of being shot; he put them to work barricading and setting up defenses. A major bombardment by Nazi planes caused a fierce firestorm to rage through the city; thousands died and the city was left in ash and rubble. Savage fighting continued. Tanks rolled out of factories and into battle so quickly they weren’t even painted. Over half a million soldiers died in the battle, while the total casualties were near two million.
Communists and others all over the world were pleading for the Allies to open a second front and help defend Russia. To this end, Neruda wrote a long “Song to Stalingrad”:
Russia, today you know loneliness and cold.
When thousands of howitzers shatter your heart,
Stalingrad, when scorpions with crime and venom
come to gnaw on your insides,
New York dances, London meditates, and I say “merde,”
because my heart can’t stand any more and our
hearts can’t stand more, they can’t
in a world that lets heroes die alone.
You leave them alone? Now they’ll come for you!
You leave them alone?
Do you want life
to flee to the tomb, and that the smiles of men
will be erased by the latrine and the cavalry?
Why don’t you respond? . . .
Neruda wrote this poem to raise the public’s consciousness and inspire activism from the grassroots, from the proletariat to the intellectual. He first read it at the electricians’ union theater in Mexico City. The workers were so inspired they made posters of the poem and put them up throughout the capital. The poem quickly spread north, to the United States and Canada, and across the ocean.
But many critics quickly came out against Neruda’s political poetry, and, once again, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was uncomfortable with his public remarks. In defiance of the criticism, Neruda wrote “New Love Song for Stalingrad”:
I wrote about the weather and about water,
I described mourning and its bruise-colored metal,
I wrote about the sky and the apple,
now I write about Stalingrad.
The rhyme scheme is lost in translation; the second line always rhymes with the fourth’s “Stalingrado.”* The poem continues for another twenty-seven strophes, each one pounding the name “Stalingrado” into the reader’s mind, reinforced by the powerful rhyme.
Reviewing the first English translations of Residence on Earth—all three volumes—the New York Times claimed that Neruda “reaches a peak of fervor in two long poems to Stalingrad. In fact, he appears to communicate his convictions most trenchantly when he is writing of the great events of his generation.”†
* * *
In January 1943, after over a year of intense pressure from the United States, Chile finally ended its neutrality and broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, Japan, and Italy. Shortly after, Neruda was invited by the U.S. State Department to participate in “Night of the Americas,” a program of song, dance, and music by celebrated American and Latin American artists. The Council for Pan-American Democracy was the stated organizer.
The event was hosted at the large Martin Beck Theatre
