Related News
Neruda’s life published in Chinese
Print Edition
PABLO Neruda, the Nobel Prize-winning poet, was part of or witnessed some of the key moments of the 20th century. The initial whirlwind of the anti-colonial struggle in Asia; the Spanish Civil War; the backlash of the Cold War in his native Chile, leading to his being stripped of his senatorial immunity, and forced into exile; the government of President Salvador Allende, which he represented in France; and the bloody coup of September 11, 1973, in Chile, shortly after which he died — under not yet fully clarified circumstances — at the relatively young age of 69.
The first Chinese edition of his posthumous memoirs, “I Confess that I Have Lived,” has now been published in an elegant edition by Thinkingdom, in a translation by Lin Guang, with an initial print-run of 30,000 copies. Neruda is one of the most widely read foreign poets in China, a country he visited repeatedly, and about which he wrote poetry and prose.
Many consider Neruda to be the greatest poet of the 20th century, the equivalent to verse what Picasso was to art, Chaplin to film and Einstein to science. For some, Neruda is the most widely read poet ever. But what is the secret of his popularity?
First of all, there’s the power of his language. Nothing ordinary was alien to Neruda. He wrote odes to wine and to the onion, to bees and to bikes. He called a spade a spade. No metaphysical abstractions for him. As he put it once,
“We write for common folk... For modest people that sometimes are not even literate. However, on this Earth, before there was writing and printing, there was poetry. That is why we know that poetry is like bread and must be shared by all, by literates and peasants. And by all our vast, incredible, family of peoples. And I must confess that to write in a simple fashion has been my biggest challenge.”
This writing came through in his verses about Chile, which have shaped the way we perceive ourselves and our geography. And reaching out beyond his homeland, his perspective was that of the humble people, the oppressed of this world, something for which his years in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, when he befriended fellow poets like Federico Garcia Lorca and Miguel Hernandez, were key.
Less remarked upon has been the imprint left on him by his formative years in Asia, where he was posted, still in his twenties, as consul ad honorarium from 1927 to 1932, in Rangoon, Colombo, Java and Singapore. His experience of Asia under colonialism would shape his view of the New World, shown in his “Canto General de America,” one of his masterworks. In his 1971 Nobel Prize Lecture, Neruda looked at Asia as an almost necessary experience:
“There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song — but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and believing in a common destiny.”
Chile’s crazy geography always fascinated Neruda. Suddenly, however, he started to paint on the broader canvas of the Americas. In the forties, as a diplomat posted in Mexico, he befriended painters like David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and started to write about imperialism, colonialism, underdevelopment and Latin America’s identity. He referred to Mexico as the touchstone of the Americas, due to its cultural force. His “Canto General de America” is the poetic equivalent of the murals painted by Siqueiros and Rivera. Neruda thus forged, through his verses, a Latin American identity based on shared experiences. He underlined the “shared roots” of countries as distant and different from each other as Mexico and Chile searched for a culture based not on mores imported from Europe, but on the roots of “brown America.”
And that is why Neruda’s verses about Asia’s awakening and that of our America resonate today. His five years in Asia, during which he visited Shanghai, left their mark. He grasped the underlying force of millenarian civilizations like China and India and the enormous energy and creativity to be released once the shackles of colonialism were removed. In turn, this allowed him to see the Americas not as a European outpost in the Western Hemisphere (as many of his contemporaries did), but one with its own pre-Columbian roots and distinct identity. As Latin America and China reach out to each other across the Pacific, we can do worse than to read and re-read Neruda.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
