by Pablo Neruda
LIVING WITH THE LANGUAGE
I was born in 1904. In 1921 one of my poems came out in a magazine. In 1923 my first book, Crepusculario, was published. I am writing these recollections in 1973. Fifty years have gone by since that exciting moment when the poet hears the first cries of the printed infant, alive, kicking, and doing its best, like any other newborn, to call attention to itself.
You can’t live an entire lifetime with a language, stretching it lengthwise, exploring it, poking around in its hair and its belly, without having this intimacy become second nature to you. That’s what happened to me with Spanish. The spoken language has other dimensions: the written language acquires unexpected elasticity. Using language like clothes or the skin on your body, with its sleeves, its patches, its transpirations, and its blood and sweat stains, that’s what shows a writer’s mettle. This is style. I found that my time was in a ferment over the revolutionary trends in French culture. These always attracted me, but somehow they were not the right fit of clothes for my body. Huidobro, a Chilean poet, took charge of the French innovations, adapting them admirably to his way of life and expression. At times, it seemed to me, he outdid his models. Something of the kind happened, on a larger scale, when Darío burst in upon the scene of Hispanic poetry. But Darío was a huge elephant, a music-maker who shattered all the glass windows in the Spanish language of his time to let in the air of the world. And it came in.
Our language sometimes separates us Latin Americans from the Spaniards. However, it is the ideology of the language, more than anything else, that causes the split. Góngora’s frozen beauty is not made for our latitudes, but there is no poetry from Spain, not even the most recent, without an aftertaste of Góngora, without his richness. Our American stratum is dusty rock, crushed lava, clay mixed with blood. We don’t know how to work in crystal. Our elegant poets sound hollow. A single drop of Martín Fierro’s wine or of Gabriela Mistral’s turbid honey is enough to put them in their place: standing stiffly in the parlor like vases with flowers from someone else’s garden.
Spanish became a gilded language after Cervantes, it took on a courtly elegance, it lost the wild power it had brought in from Gonzalo de Berceo and the Archpriest of Hita, it lost the genital fire that still burned in Quevedo. The same thing happened in England, in France, in Italy. Chaucer’s extravagances, as well as Rabelais’s, were castrated; the precious style inherited from Petrarch made emeralds and diamonds glitter, but the source of greatness began to burn itself out.
This earlier wellspring had everything to do with the whole man, his freedom, his prolific nature, his excesses.
At least that was my problem, although I didn’t put it in those terms, not even to myself. If my poetry has any meaning at all, it is this tendency to stretch out in space, without restrictions, and not be happy to stay in a room. I had to break out of my limited world by myself, not having traced it out within the framework of a distant culture. I had to be myself, striving to branch out like the very land where I was born. Another poet of this same hemisphere helped me along this road, Walt Whitman, my comrade from Manhattan.
CRITICS MUST SUFFER
The Songs of Maldoror, basically, form part of a great serial story. Don’t forget that Isidore Ducasse took his pseudonym from a novel by the feuilletonist Eugène Sue: Latréaumont, written in Châtenay in 1837. But Lautréamont, we know, went much further than Latréaumont. He went much lower, he wanted to be Satanic. And much higher, a fallen archangel. At the height of his unhappiness, Maldoror celebrates the marriage of heaven and hell. Fury, dithyrambs, and agony make up the irresistible waves of Ducasse’s rhetoric. Maldoror: Maldolor.
Lautréamont planned a new phase; he repudiated his gloomy side and did the prologue to a new optimistic poetry he never had the chance to write. The young Uruguayan was carried off by death in Paris. But the promised change in his poetry, the swing toward goodness and health, which he did not fulfill, has stirred up much criticism. He is venerated for his sorrow and condemned for his move toward joy. The poet must torment himself and suffer, he must live in despair, he must go on writing his song of despair. This has been the opinion on one social level, the opinion of one class. This cut-and-dried formula was followed by many who succumbed to the suffering imposed by unwritten, but still cut-and-dried, laws. These invisible laws condemned the poet to the hovel, worn shoes, the hospital, the morgue. That made everyone happy: everybody had a good time and few tears were shed.
Things changed because the world changed. And we poets suddenly led the rebellion toward joy. The unhappy writer, the crucified writer are part of the ritual of happiness in the twilight of capitalism. Taste was skillfully channeled toward the buildup of misery as a catalyst for great creativity. Decadent living and suffering were prescribed for writing poetry. Hölderlin, mad and unhappy; Rimbaud, embittered, perpetually wandering; Gérard de Nerval, hanging himself from a lamppost in a small, run-down side street; they gave the last years of the century not only the paroxysm of beauty but the road of suffering. Dogma made this road of thorns the poet’s inbred prerequisite for the creations of the spirit.
Dylan Thomas was the last of those steered to his martyrdom.
Oddly, these ideas of the old surly bourgeoisie still hold true in the minds of some. Minds that don’t take the world’s pulse through its nose, which is where it should be taken, because the world’s nose smells what is in the future.
There are critics like creeping gourd plants whose guide shoots and tendrils seek out the latest sigh in fashionable trends, terrified that they will miss out on something. But their roots remain steeped in the past.
We poets have the right to be happy, as long as we are close to the people of our country and in the thick of the fight for their happiness.
“Pablo is one of the few happy men I have known,” Ilya Ehrenburg says somewhere in his writings. I am that Pablo, and Ehrenburg is not wrong.
That’s why I am amazed that magazine reviewers, who should know better, worry about my material well-being, although my personal affairs should not be part of the critic’s concern. I realize that the chance that I may be happy offends many. But the fact is, I am happy inside. I have a clear conscience and a restless intelligence.
To those critics who seem to begrudge poets a better standard of living, I suggest that they should be proud that books of poetry are printed, sold, and fulfill their mission of giving critics something to think about; they should be happy that writers are remunerated and that some, at least, are able to make a living from their honest labor. The critics should proclaim their pride in this, instead of always trying to spoil things.
That’s why a short time ago, when I read the paragraphs devoted to me by a young critic, a brilliant ecclesiastic, I didn’t think his brilliance prevented him from blundering badly.
According to him, my poetry was weakened by the happiness in it. He prescribed suffering for me. According to this theory, appendicitis should produce excellent prose, and peritonitis might possibly produce some sublime poems.
I continue to work with the materials I have, the materials I am made of. With feelings, beings, books, events, and battles, I am omnivorous. I would like to swallow the whole earth. I would like to drink the whole sea.
SHORT AND LONG LINES
As an active poet, I fought against my own self-absorption and so was able to settle the debate between the real and the subjective deep within myself. I’m not trying to hand out advice, but my experiences may possibly help others. Let’s take a quick look at the results.
It is natural for my poetry to be subjected to serious criticism as well as exposed to the vicious attacks of slander. It’s part of the game. I have no voice in this part of it, but I do have a vote. For the critic who gets down to essentials, my vote is in my books, in all my poetry. For the unfriendly slanderer, I also have a vote, and it, too, consists of my unbroken creative activity.
If what I am saying sounds vain, you are right. Mine is the vanity of the craftsman
who has practiced his craft for a good many years with a love that has never faltered.
And if I am satisfied about one thing, it is that one way or another, at least in my own country, I have made people respect the occupation of poet, the profession of poetry.
At the time I began to write, there were two kinds of poets. Some belonged to the upper crust and earned respect because of their money, which helped them reach legitimate or illegitimate standing. The other family of poets were the militant wanderers of poetry, bar lions, fascinating madmen, tormented sleepwalkers. And let’s not overlook those writers tied down, like the galley slave to his oar, to the little stool in government offices. Their dreams were almost always smothered by mountains of official stamped paper and by terrible fear of their superiors or of being laughed at.
I started life more naked than Adam but with my mind made up to maintain the integrity of my poetry. This ingrained attitude was not only valuable in itself but also stopped fools from laughing at me. And afterward, the fools who had a heart and conscience accepted, like the good people they were, the grim realities stirred up by my poetry. And those who were ill-willed gradually became afraid of me.
And so Poetry, with a capital P, was shown respect. Not only poetry but poets as well. All poetry and all poets.
I am keenly aware of this service to the people, and I won’t let anyone snatch this merit from me, because I like to wear it like a medal. They can question everything else, but what I am telling now is solid history.
The poet’s die-hard enemies will put forward many arguments that are no longer valid. They called me a hungry bum when I was young. Now they attack me by making people think I am Mr. Big, owner of a fabulous fortune, which I don’t own but would love to own, among other things to upset them even more.
Others measure the length of my lines to prove that I chop them up into small fragments or stretch them out too far. It doesn’t matter. Who sets up the rules about shorter or longer, narrower or wider, yellower or redder lines? The poet who writes them is the one who determines what’s what. He determines it with his breath and his blood, with his wisdom and his ignorance, because all this goes into the making of the bread of poetry.
The poet who is not a realist is dead. And the poet who is only a realist is also dead. The poet who is only irrational will only be understood by himself and his beloved, and this is very sad. The poet who is all reason will even be understood by jackasses, and this is also terribly sad. There are no hard and fast rules, there are no ingredients prescribed by God or the Devil, but these two very important gentlemen wage a steady battle in the realm of poetry, and in this battle first one wins and then the other, but poetry itself cannot be defeated.
It’s obvious that the poet’s occupation is abused to some extent. So many new men and women poets keep cropping up that soon we’ll all look like poets, and readers will disappear. We’ll have to go looking for readers on expeditions that will cross the desert sands on camels or circle the sky on spaceships.
Poetry is a deep inner calling in man; from it came liturgy, the psalms, and also the content of religions. The poet confronted nature’s phenomena and in the early ages called himself a priest, to safeguard his vocation. In the same way, to defend his poetry, the poet of the modern age accepts the investiture earned in the street, among the masses. Today’s social poet is still a member of the earliest order of priests. In the old days he made his pact with the darkness, and now he must interpret the light.
ORIGINALITY
I don’t believe in originality. It is just one more fetish made up in our time, which is speeding dizzily to its collapse. I believe in personality reached through any language, any form, any creative means used by the artist. But out-and-out originality is a modern invention and an electoral fraud. There are some who want to be elected Poet Laureate in their country, in their language, or in the world. So they run in search of electors, they fling insults at those who seem close enough to compete for the scepter, and poetry turns into a farce.
Still, it is essential to keep one’s interior bearings, to stay in control of the additional material that nature, culture, and a socially committed life contribute to bringing out the best in the poet.
In the past, the most noble, the consummate poets, like Quevedo, for example, wrote poems headed with this warning signal: “Imitation of Horace,” “Imitation of Ovid,” “Imitation of Lucretius.”
For my part, I keep up my own tone, which gathered strength by its own nature as time went along, like all living things. There is no doubt that feelings are a major part of my earliest books, and so much the worse for the poet who does not respond with song to the tender and furious summons of the heart! Yet, after forty years of experience, I believe that the poet can take a firmer grip on his emotions in his work. I believe in guided spontaneity. For this, the poet must always have some reserves, in his pocket, let’s say, in case of emergency. First, a reserve of mental notes on established poetic forms, of words, sounds, or images, the ones that buzz right past us like bees. They must be caught quickly and put away in one’s pocket. I am lazy in this respect, but I know I am passing on some good advice. Mayakovsky had a little notebook he was constantly going into. There is also the reserve of feelings. How can these be preserved? By being conscious of them when they come up. Then, when we face the paper, this consciousness will come back to us more vividly than the emotion itself.
In a substantial part of my work I have tried to prove that the poet can write about any given subject, about something needed by a community as a whole. Almost all the great works of antiquity were done strictly on request. The Georgics are propaganda for the farming of the Roman countryside. A poet can write for a university or a labor union, for skilled workers and professionals. Freedom was never lost simply because of this. Magical inspiration and the poet’s communication with God are inventions dictated by self-interest. At the moments of greatest creative intensity, the product can be partially someone else’s, influenced by readings and external pressures.
Suddenly I interrupt these observations, which are a bit on the theoretic side, and I start remembering the literary life in Santiago when I was a young man. Painters and writers worked in a creative ferment, without public response. An autumnal lyricism hovered over painting and poetry. Each artist tried to be more anarchic, more demoralizing, more disorderly than the others. There were deep and troubled stirrings among Chile’s social classes. Alessandri made subversive speeches. On the nitrate pampas the workers, who would create the most important people’s movement on the continent, were organizing. Those were the holy days of the struggle. Carlos Vicuña, Juan Gandulfo. I quickly joined the student anarcho-syndicalist movement. My favorite book was Andreyev’s Sacha Yegulev. Others read Artsybashev’s pornographic novels and attributed an ideological thrust to them, exactly as people do today with existentialist pornography. Intellectuals made themselves at home in bars. The good old wine gave poverty a glittering golden aura that lasted till the next morning. Juan Egaña, an extraordinarily gifted poet, was going to pieces, headed for the grave. A story was making the rounds that he had inherited a fortune and had left all his money in bills on a table in an abandoned house. His drinking companions, who slept by day, went out at night to fetch wine by the keg. But Juan Egaña’s poetry is a beam of moonlight that has never sent the slightest shudder through our “lyric forest.” This was the romantic title of the wonderful modernist anthology put out by Molina Núñez and O. Segura Castro, a very complete book, filled with greatness and generosity. It is the Summa Poetica of a chaotic era, marked by huge gaps as well as pure, resplendent poems. The personality who made the greatest impression on me was Aliro Oyarzún, the dictator of the new literature. No one remembers him now. He was an emaciated Baudelairean, a remarkable decadent, Chile’s Barba Jacob, tormented, cadaverous, handsome, and mad. He spoke with a cavernous voice from the top of his tall stature. He invented a hieroglyphic style of stating aesthetic problems which is peculiar
to a certain segment of our literary world. His voice soared; his forehead was a yellow dome of the temple of intelligence. He would say, for example: “the circle’s circularity,” “the Dionysian in Dionysius,” “the obscurity of the obscure.” Yet Aliro Oyarzún was no fool. In him were combined the paradisiacal and the infernal sides of a culture. He was a cosmopolite who gradually killed his real nature with his theories. They say he wrote his only poem in order to win a bet, and I can’t understand why that poem is not in all the anthologies of Chilean poetry.
BOTTLES AND FIGUREHEADS
Christmas is approaching. Each Christmas takes us closer to the year 2000. We poets of today have been struggling and singing for happiness in the future, for the peace of tomorrow, for universal justice, for the bells of the year 2000.
