Poet and politician
Douglas Dunn
Extravagaria Pablo Neruda (Cape £3.50).
Nef tali Beltran — better known by his pseudonym, Pablo Neruda — is now sixtyeight, with a recent birthday on July 12. His first book appeared when he was nineteen, and there have been many others since. Neruda's career has been a remarkable mixture of action and contemplation; positive political poetry in the modern Spanish poetic as participated in by Lorca, Alberti, Aleixandre, Machado, and the Peruvian Cesar Vallejo, has issued from Neruda's pen in a way that amply fulfills his dramatic experience of twentieth-century places and events. During the crucial 1930s, for example, when he was Chilean consul in Spain, he overreached his authority by declaring Chile on the side of the Republic. There can hardly be a modern poet whose experience of the world has been so intensely varied; Neruda's diplomatic career took him to Burma, Siam, China, India, Japan, and Mexico, and in these places — ranging from territories of the British Empire to states aggressively fascist — he undoubtedly found much to confirm his socialist political faith. In Chile itself he was for years politically undesirable, though at one time an elected senator; he was hunted by the secret police of the dictator Gonzalez Videla and forced into exile in France. With the election of Allende's Marxist government in Chile he became ambassador to the Quai d'Orsay.
Extravagaria untranslatable Spanish pun: — the original title was Extravagario — was published in 1958, and is said to be Neruda's favourite collection. It seems odd that Neruda's British readers have had to wait so long; but it is only in recent years ..hat Neruda's poetry has emerged, despite his fame in the Spanish-speaking countries. Alastair Reid, whose conscientious labours are responsible for Extravagaria, has done much for his reputation in Britain, although the American poets Robert Bly and James Wright are possibly ',lie better translators, and — Bly especially — spreading the word by example as much as translation.
As collections of poetry go, it's a long book, not only stretched to over 300 pages by the good practice of original originals beside translations, but also by Neruda's characteristic probing, ruminative-cumulative style, building the poem up out of many images. His poems sometimes suffer by being too long; his strengths are softened by directionless surrealist narrative, as if he lacked the faculty of knowing when to stop, or wrote out of a principle of satisfying the mood of the poem's subject which might reduce formal necessities to merely secondary importance. There are poems in Extravagaria that are — by any standards — slack and rambling. And nowhere in the book are there poems as good as 'Gentleman Without Company' and 'Sexual Water' (which date from the Late 1920s and early 1930s) or his best polical poems, United Fruit Company' and 'The Dictators' (from Canto General, 1915). But the book spreads itself over all Neruda's concerns, ideas, his entire life, and was written when he had returned to Chile after many years abroad; much of it is retrospective, much of it a fresh discovery of what he had loved. It has the force of a long poem as much as a collection of shorter pieces.
It seems that as Neruda has grown older, the political drive has lessened, and his surrealist manner become less mysterious and more a traditionally intense lyricism. When he asks questions about Nature, the result is less than surrealism and more pathetic fallacy, the mysticism of the materialist critic, as in the interrogative fantasia of 'Through a Closed Mouth the Flies Enter ':
Where did the coal sleep that it awoke so dark?
And where, where does the tiger buy its stripes of mourning, its stripes of gold?
Neruda's cosmology despises knowledge learned of empirical science or study. Poetry, and the life of poetry, he seems to claim, are the natural enemy of productive curiosity, the kind of human enterprise that makes materialist objects. This may well be true, but does a question like "When do roots converse?" really have any weight at all? As he says, "We ask questions then die." Poets love the ineffable; to ask these questions makes them seem more like poets, less like men, and they like that. But as they grow older they seem to learn that mysteries are merely mysteries — worth recognising, and inescapable, but not the most immediate problems lives must grapple with. Neruda seems always to have known that; and since the poems of Odas Elementales, which come immediately before Extravagaria, he has been plainer, simpler, more concerned with the knowable. There could hardly be a more demotic celebration, for all its elegance, than a ,)ocm called 'Ode to My Socks.'
Neruda has washed his hands of having power over others, of wanting to establish a dominant new world order on any lines. He is for " the justice of eating," the joy of simple pleasures, immersion in an undisturbed natural beauty; he is for Gil:mess, unity, the 'living fragrance '; he is a genuine universalist of the good life who despises formalities, pomposities, and everything that interrupts the flow of the world. He is political without being petty or crotchety or exclusive, which cannot be said of some of his imitators; his commitment is not to some of the world, some of its books, some of its people, but to everything.
They have spoken to me of Venezuelas, of Chiles and Paraguavs: I have no idea what they are saying.
1 know only the skin of the earth
and I know it has no name.
Neruda is one of the masters of modern poetry; he will undoubtedly survive the popularity extended to him by those whose interest in poetry is manifestly fragile or politically selective. In a way, they have backed the wrong horse; there is no doctrine in Neruda, only love, humanity, and the most radiantly disinterested idealism. He is a poetical Bolivar, a hero of images.
Douglas Dunn's latest collection of poems, ' The,Happier Life,' has recently been published
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