Pablo Neruda: Poems Pablo Neruda

Spanish Civil War

After returning to Chile, Neruda was given diplomatic posts in Buenos Aires and then Barcelona, Spain.[30] He later succeeded Gabriela Mistral as consul in Madrid, where he became the center of a lively literary circle, befriending such writers as Rafael Alberti, Federico García Lorca, and the Peruvian poet César Vallejo.[30] His only offspring, his daughter Malva Marina (Trinidad) Reyes, was born in Madrid in 1934, the product of his first marriage to María Antonia Hagenaar Vogelzang. The child was plagued with severe health problems, particularly suffering from hydrocephalus.[31] She died in 1943 at the age of nine, having spent most of her short life with a foster family in the Netherlands after Neruda ignored and abandoned her, forcing her mother to work solely to support her care.[32][33][34][35] Half of that time was during the Nazi occupation of Holland, when the Nazi view of birth defects was that they denoted genetic inferiority. During this period, Neruda became estranged from his wife and instead began a relationship with Delia del Carril, an aristocratic Argentine artist who was 20 years his senior. The child was repudiated, mocked, and abandoned by her father and died in utter indigence when she was 8 years old in war-devastated and Nazi-occupied Netherlands.[36]

As Spain became engulfed in civil war, Neruda became intensely politicized for the first time. His experiences during the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath moved him away from privately focused work in the direction of collective obligation. Neruda became an ardent Communist for the rest of his life. The radical leftist politics of his literary friends, as well as that of del Carril, were contributing factors, but the most important catalyst was the execution of García Lorca by forces loyal to the dictator Francisco Franco.[30] Through his speeches and writings, Neruda threw his support behind the Spanish Republic, publishing the collection España en el corazón (Spain in Our Hearts, 1938). He lost his post as consul due to his political militancy.[30] In July 1937, he attended the Second International Writers' Congress, the purpose of which was to discuss the attitude of intellectuals toward the war in Spain, held in Valencia, Barcelona, and Madrid and attended by many writers including André Malraux, Ernest Hemingway, and Stephen Spender.[37]

Neruda's marriage to Vogelzang broke down, and he eventually obtained a divorce in Mexico in 1943. His estranged wife moved to Monte Carlo to escape the hostilities in Spain and then to the Netherlands with their very ill only child, and he never saw either of them again.[38] After leaving his wife, Neruda lived with Delia del Carril in France, eventually marrying her (shortly after his divorce) in Tetecala in 1943; however, his new marriage was not recognized by Chilean authorities as his divorce from Vogelzang was deemed illegal.[39]

Following the election of Pedro Aguirre Cerda (whom Neruda supported) as President of Chile in 1938, Neruda was appointed special Consul for Spanish emigrants in Paris. There he was responsible for what he called "the noblest mission I have ever undertaken": transporting 2,000 Spanish refugees who had been housed by the French in squalid camps to Chile on an old ship called the Winnipeg.[40] Neruda is sometimes charged with having selected only fellow Communists for emigration, to the exclusion of others who had fought on the side of the Republic.[41] Many Republicans and Anarchists were killed during the German invasion and occupation. Others deny these accusations, pointing out that Neruda chose only a few hundred of the 2,000 refugees personally; the rest were selected by the Service for the Evacuation of Spanish Refugees set up by Juan Negrín, President of the Spanish Republican Government in Exile.

Mexican appointment

Neruda's next diplomatic post was as Consul General in Mexico City from 1940 to 1943.[42] During his time there, he married del Carril and learned that his daughter Malva had died at the age of eight in Nazi-occupied Netherlands.[42]

In 1940, following the failed assassination attempt against Leon Trotsky, Neruda arranged a Chilean visa for the Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, who had been accused of involvement in the conspiracy to assassinate Trotsky.[43] Neruda later stated that he had done it at the request of the Mexican President, Manuel Ávila Camacho. This allowed Siqueiros, who was then imprisoned, to leave Mexico for Chile, where he stayed at Neruda's private residence. In return for Neruda's assistance, Siqueiros spent over a year painting a mural at a school in Chillán. While Neruda's relationship with Siqueiros drew criticism, he dismissed the allegation that his intent had been to aid an assassin as "sensationalist politico-literary harassment".

Return to Chile

In 1943, upon his return to Chile, Neruda embarked on a tour of Peru, where he visited Machu Picchu.[44] This experience later inspired Alturas de Macchu Picchu, a book-length poem in 12 parts that he completed in 1945. The poem expressed his growing awareness of and interest in the ancient civilizations of the Americas. He further explored this theme in Canto General (1950). In Alturas, Neruda celebrated the achievement of Macchu Picchu but also condemned the slavery that had made it possible. In Canto XII, he called upon the dead of many centuries to be reborn and speak through him. Martín Espada, a poet and professor of creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has hailed the work as a masterpiece, declaring that "there is no greater political poem".

Communism

Bolstered by his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, Neruda, like many left-leaning intellectuals of his generation, came to admire the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin. He did so partly due to the role it played in defeating Nazi Germany and partly because of an idealistic interpretation of Marxist doctrine.[45] This sentiment is echoed in poems such as Canto a Stalingrado ("Song to Stalingrad") (1942) and Nuevo canto de amor a Stalingrado ("New Love Song to Stalingrad") (1943). In 1953, Neruda was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize. Upon Stalin's death that same year, Neruda wrote an ode to him, as he also wrote poems in praise of Fulgencio Batista, Saludo a Batista ("Salute to Batista"), and later, Fidel Castro. His fervent Stalinism eventually drove a wedge between Neruda and his long-time friend, Mexican poet Octavio Paz, who commented that "Neruda became more and more Stalinist, while I became less and less enchanted with Stalin."[46] Their differences came to a head after the Nazi-Soviet Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact of 1939, when they almost came to blows in an argument over Stalin. Although Paz still considered Neruda "The greatest poet of his generation", in an essay on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, he wrote that when he thinks of "Neruda and other famous Stalinist writers and poets, I feel the gooseflesh that I get from reading certain passages of the Inferno. No doubt they began in good faith [...] but insensibly, commitment by commitment, they saw themselves becoming entangled in a mesh of lies, falsehoods, deceits, and perjuries, until they lost their souls."[47] On 15 July 1945, at Pacaembu Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil, Neruda read to 100,000 people in honor of the Communist revolutionary leader Luís Carlos Prestes.[48]

Neruda also hailed Vladimir Lenin as the "great genius of this century," and in a speech he gave on 5 June 1946, he paid tribute to the late Soviet leader Mikhail Kalinin, whom Neruda regarded as a "man of noble life," "the great constructor of the future," and "a comrade in arms of Lenin and Stalin."[49]

Neruda later came to regret his fondness for the Soviet Union, explaining that "in those days, Stalin seemed to us the conqueror who had crushed Hitler's armies."[45] Of a subsequent visit to China in 1957, Neruda wrote: "What has estranged me from the Chinese revolutionary process has not been Mao Tse-tung but Mao Tse-tungism." He labeled this Mao Tse-Stalinism as "the repetition of a cult of a Socialist deity."[45] Despite his disillusionment with Stalin, Neruda never lost his fundamental faith in Communist theory and remained loyal to "the Party." Anxious not to provide ammunition to his ideological enemies, he would later refuse publicly to condemn the Soviet repression of dissident writers like Boris Pasternak and Joseph Brodsky, an attitude with which even some of his staunchest admirers disagreed.[50]

On March 4, 1945, Neruda was elected as a Communist Senator representing the northern provinces of Antofagasta and Tarapacá in the Atacama Desert.[51][52] He officially joined the Communist Party of Chile four months later.[42] In 1946, the Radical Party's presidential candidate, Gabriel González Videla, asked Neruda to act as his campaign manager. González Videla was supported by a coalition of left-wing parties, and Neruda fervently campaigned on his behalf. However, once in office, González Videla turned against the Communist Party and enacted the Ley de Defensa Permanente de la Democracia (Law of Permanent Defense of the Democracy). The breaking point for Senator Neruda was the violent repression of a Communist-led miners' strike in Lota in October 1947 when striking workers were herded into island military prisons and a concentration camp in the town of Pisagua. Neruda's criticism of González Videla culminated in a dramatic speech in the Chilean senate on January 6, 1948, which became known as "Yo acuso" ("I accuse"), during which he read out the names of the miners and their families who were imprisoned at the concentration camp.[53]

In 1959, Neruda was present when Fidel Castro was honored at a welcoming ceremony hosted by the Central University of Venezuela. There, he spoke to a massive gathering of students and read his poem Un canto para Bolívar ("A Song for Bolívar"). Prior to this, he shared his sentiments: "In this painful and victorious hour that the peoples of the Americas are living, my poem, with changes in location, can be understood as directed towards Fidel Castro, because in the struggles for freedom, the destiny of a man always emerges to instill confidence in the spirit of greatness in the history of our nations."[54]

During the late 1960s, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was asked for his opinion on Pablo Neruda. Borges stated, "I think of him as a very fine poet, a very fine poet. I don't admire him as a man; I think of him as a very mean man."[55] He said that Neruda had not spoken out against Argentine President Juan Perón because he was afraid to risk his reputation, noting "I was an Argentine poet; he was a Chilean poet; he's on the side of the Communists; I'm against them. So I felt he was behaving very wisely in avoiding a meeting that would have been quite uncomfortable for both of us."[56]