Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
WhatsApp
Email
Pablo Neruda
Photo: Jeso Carneiro via flickr
CC BY-NC 2.0
(Berlin. September 23, 2023, npla).- September 23 of this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Pablo Neruda, an occasion to remember an extraordinary person. As a writer and poet, with all his work, Neruda was a beacon of hope for human conditions, for equality and solidarity with the nameless and marginalized on his continent. He raised his voice against exploitation, fascism and injustice far beyond the Latin American continent.
Against fascism
Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto was born on July 12, 1904 in the southern Chilean town of Parral. He only later adopted his pseudonym Pablo Neruda. His artistic talent became apparent early on. He won prizes and published his first self-financed book in 1923. In Santiago de Chile he studied French and education. From 1927 he entered the diplomatic service and in the first few years worked as an honorary consul in various countries in Southeast Asia. From 1933 he was consul in Buenos Aires and a year later moved to Spain as Chilean consul, first to Barcelona and then to Madrid. On July 17, 1936, the Spanish Civil War began with Franco’s coup. Neruda was influenced by the death of his artist friend Garcia Lorca, who was shot by Francoists. Although committed to absolute neutrality, Neruda decided to campaign against fascism. His works became clearly more political. When the Spanish putschists were about to conquer Madrid, he had to flee to Paris via Marseille. Using his Spanish experiences, he published his volume of poetry in France “The poets of the world defend the Spanish people”. In 1938 he returned to Chile and worked as an editor of many articles against global fascism, before the Popular Front came to power in Chile a year later. He was entrusted by the Chilean government to enable Spanish refugees and exiles to travel safely to South America from Paris. In a few months he brought around 2,000 victims of the Franco dictatorship with the specially converted passenger steamer Winnipek safely to Chile and saved many from persecution and death. His next stop was Mexico, where he worked for three years in the position of consul general in addition to many literary activities.
Escape from Chile
From March 1945 he ran on the list of the Communist Party of Chile as an independent candidate and became a party member after his election. Shortly after winning the election, the incumbent president of Chile radically changed his political course under the influence of the beginning of the Cold War, which, in contrast to his election promise, became clearly anti-communist. Neruda publicly criticized this change of heart, and an arrest warrant was issued against him. As in Madrid, he escaped his captors at the last minute and had to change his hiding place almost every day for the next year and a half underground. The ordinary people of Chile had not forgotten the courage with which he had opposed President González and gave him refuge and protection. It was during this time that his great work “Canto General” (“The Great Song”), an extensive collection of 15,000 verses in which he poetically processed the painful history of the Latin American continent and not only described landscapes, nature and the people of South America in an immense number of examples and images, but also gave them a voice in a way that was unique in Latin American literature. Once again an escape was unavoidable. With the help of his party, he managed to escape over impassable mountain paths to Argentina and from there to Paris a third time with a fake passport.
Political commitment until death
At the Second World Peace Congress in Warsaw in 1950, he received the Peace Prize together with Pablo Picasso. In the following years, Neruda traveled to a number of peace congresses in Europe, India and China and publicly advocated for democratic conditions, socialism and against fascism and the oppression of the peoples. After returning to his homeland, Neruda was nominated by the Communist Party as a presidential candidate, but resigned in favor of his friend and party colleague Salvador Allende, also a candidate for the electoral alliance Popular Unity, on his candidacy. Allende won the 1970 presidential election. Persuaded, Neruda became ambassador to France again. In October 1971 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm, but his health continued to deteriorate.
September 11, 1973 changed everything. On this day, the military coup of reactionary forces under General Pinochet against the democratically elected government began Popular Unity. The complete destruction of the first socialist attempt to give Chile a human face began. Twelve days after the coup, on September 23rd, Pablo Neruda died. It was never clarified whether he succumbed to his cancer or died as a result of an intentionally administered lethal injection. After his death, his house was looted and destroyed by the military. His funeral took place only in the presence of his wife and a few loyal people. It was a final sign of humanity and solidarity for the oppressed, the forgotten and the lawless of Latin America. Soldiers with submachine guns at the ready were present at the ceremony as a silent threat and watched the events.
The Great Song
The highlight of his literary development is Neruda’s central work „Canto General“. The extensive volume of poetry has been translated into countless languages. The complexity of the entire spectrum of South America appears in pictorial associations. Neruda, who always saw himself as a poet of the people, literary connects the historical liberation struggles of the continent, the cold winds of his homeland, the crimes of the usurpers, the beauty of the birds of the jungle and the glow of the sea, thereby creating a mental universe of people , nature, animals, plants, combined with the indictment of Coca-Cola imperialism. In Paris, Neruda met the exiled Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis. At Allende’s request, it was agreed that parts of the “Canto General“ to be set to music in a large oratorio. The plan was to perform the work at the National Stadium in Santiago de Chile, but that was never to happen. At the scheduled time of the performance, the stadium had already been converted into a concentration camp and torture prison for the putschists. At the same time, Greece freed itself from its fascist colonels. Theodorakis was able to return to his homeland, and as a symbol of international solidarity, the oratorio was premiered in three concerts in Athens in the summer of 1974 instead of in Santiago. In front of more than a hundred thousand frenetically celebrating Greeks, who had recently shaken off the dictatorship of the military government, there was hope that the same thing would be possible in Chile. In the following years the work was performed in various places around the world.
Poetry and politics, main and secondary contradictions
Self-promotion or the voice from the ivory tower were never Neruda’s thing. Critics called his poetry banal, even populist, but he himself wanted to give the mute and silent people of Latin America a poetic voice, regardless of their level of education. His work was for people “out of school and out of shoes,” as he put it. In his autobiography he describes how he recited his poems to simple, poorly paid workers in a union hall and moved those listening to tears. Neruda gave wings to words because he spoke of them and for them. His words gave the nameless people back their dignity and their dreams. It must also be mentioned, however, that Neruda’s understanding of politics was not necessarily characterized by a thorough and deep analytical understanding. He understood a lot of things superficially, perhaps naively. Like many others, he initially glorified Stalinist politics. It also makes no sense to approach the poet with today’s expectations of a critical examination of one’s own privileges: in his autobiography “I confess, I have lived” he admits that in Sri Lanka a woman who was supposed to clean his apartment to have raped. He abandoned and disowned his daughter Malva Marina because she suffered from an incurable illness.
But you can always feel in his work the unconditional will to work on building human socialism and to put his person, his office and his influence into the balance. Neruda was seen as an ally and a beacon of hope who drew a line under centuries of exploitation and contempt for humanity.
„In this moment, in this blink of agony, we know that the light will finally penetrate through the half-open eyes. ….. This hope is irrevocable.”
The satraps
Nixon, Frei and Pinochet
until today, until this
Month of September 1973
with Bordaberry, Garrastazu and Banzer
voracious hyenas
our history, gnawing
on the victory flags that were won
with so much blood and so much fire,
stuck in their front yards
hellhounds,
Satraps, already sold a thousand times
and traitors, instigated
from the wolves of New York,
machines hungry for suffering,
working with the blood sacrifice
of their martyred peoples
greedy, busy rent boys, the
Bargain the bread and air of America,
Feces, cesspools, packs
by treacherous brothel lords
without any other law than torture
and the tormenting hunger of the people.
(Pablo Neruda’s last poem,
written September 1973)