Pablo Neruda
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by Philip Gambone

In 1943, toward the end of his residence in Mexico, where he served as the Chilean consul, the poet Pablo Neruda received an honorary doctorate from the Universidad de San Nicolás de Hidalgo in Morelia. In his acceptance speech, Neruda praised the beauty of the country in which he had spent the last three years. He said that in Mexico, his "wandering heart rediscovered the silhouette of light and shade which flees and endures, the language of wet leaves, the lofty example of the pure countryside."

Later, in his Memoirs, Neruda elaborated: "Every kind of magic is always appearing and reappearing in Mexico. From the volcano born before a peasant's eye in his humble orchard, while he was planting beans, to the wild search for the skeleton of Cortés, who, rumor has it, rests in Mexican soil with his gold helmet protecting the conquistador's skull these many centuries, and the no less intense hunt for the remnants of the Aztec emperor Cuauhtémoc." For the rest of his life, Mexico's magic continued to inspire Neruda "like a small stray eagle circulating through my veins."

"It is not possible to speak about Neruda," another Chilean poet, Julio Escámez, once wrote, "without considering what he lived through and learned in Mexico. The dazzling popular Mexican culture, the lively and decisive indigenous life there, the great challenges of nature and cultural colonization, converted him into an epic and cosmic poet."

That epic and cosmic vision found its greatest expression in Neruda's magnum opus, Canto general—his panoramic survey of the New World. Within the 500 pages of this vast poem, Neruda "packed the whole history and life of America, all the politics and myths dearest to him," notes the Hispanist Luis Monguió. "In Canto general, he interprets history according to Karl Marx, writes a new Légende des siècles like Victor Hugo, and prophesies like William Blake." The poem is a work "to be read as a cosmogony," Monguió continues, "a Nerudian vision of the origin and creation of the world and American man."

Canto general
*

Neruda began writing Canto general in 1938. At first, the vast array of poems was conceived as a homage to his native Chile, but as Neruda visited more of Latin America—Mexico, Panama, Colombia, Peru—he began to expand it "geographically and spiritually," as one of his biographers, Adam Feinstein, puts it. "It was becoming a song to the entire continent rather than to his homeland."

"I am here to tell the story," Neruda declared in the opening poem, "Amor America (1400)":

From the peace of the buffalo
to the pummeled sands
of the land's end, in the accumulated
spray of the antarctic light
and through precipitous tunnels
of shady Venezuelan peacefulness
I searched for you, my father,
young warrior of darkness and copper,
or you, nuptial plant, indomitable hair,
mother cayman, metallic dove.

Neruda's friendship with the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera helped to kindle his passionate interest in Latin America's Indigenous history. One critic goes so far as to call Canto general "a mural in itself." By the time he left Mexico in 1943, Neruda became ever more committed "to lyricize and socialize the consciousness of the continent,"writes another of his biographers, Mark Eisner.

In 1945, Neruda was elected a senator representing the provinces of Tarapacá and Antofagasta. It was also the year he joined the Communist Party of Chile. During the next few years, his outspoken lectures and poems, and his virulent speeches in the Senate got him into trouble with a government that was becoming a police state. In 1948, he was ousted from the Senate and an order was issued for his arrest. Neruda went undercover. During that "year of hiding and danger," he finished Canto general.

His friend Aída Figueroa thought that Neruda's confinement was, in fact, "propitious" to his work. "He couldn't even walk out on to the street," she recalled years later. "But in hiding, the only thing he did was write poetry. It was his rebellion against these limitations that produced Canto general."

Neruda's combination of leftist politics with poetry did not win him the favor of all of his contemporaries. Octavio Paz, for one, called his work "contaminated by politics." "Better a text by Lenin," Paz wrote, "than a bad poem by Mayakovsky or Neruda."

A kinder and more nuanced appraisal is that of Cossío del Pomar, founder of San Miguel's art school, Bellas Artes: "I would place Pablo Neruda … among the communists for whom it meant the equality of mankind and man-to-man combat against injustices that favored the privileged classes. He didn't write to attack but rather to make people aware of injustices."

*Cossío del Polmar

With the persecution closing in on him, Neruda made the decision to flee Chile. In February 1949, he crossed the Andes into Argentina. The next year, two editions of Canto general were published in Mexico, one of which was illustrated by David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera. Two clandestine editions also appeared in Chile.

Neruda, Rivera and Siqueiros signing copies of Canto General
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Divided into fifteen books or cantos, Canto general includes powerful, outspoken poems on the tragedy and injustice of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Canto III, the poem "The Conquistadors," depicts Cortés as a cold plunderer, who had only a "heart dead in the armor." Cortés advances through Mexico toward Tlaxcala,

burying daggers, beating
the lowlands, the pawed-up
fragrant cordilleras
camping his troops among orchids
and crowning pines,
trampling jasmine.

When the emperor offers him gifts—a dove, a pheasant, a zither—Cortés wants one thing more, "the roomful of gold." And even when the chests are full and the emperor calls him his brother, the conqueror only "whets his daggers." In the poem "Cholula," also from Canto III, the conquistadors

entered killing on horseback,
they cut off the hand that offered
its tribute of gold and flowers,
they closed off the plaza, exhausted
their arms until they were numbed,
killing the flower of the kingdom
plunging up to their elbows in the blood
of my startled brethren.

The poetry of Pablo Neruda Canto General (English ed.)
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Canto IV, titled "The Liberators," includes two more poems about the conquest of Mexico. In "Cuauhtemoc (1520)," Neruda pays homage to the youthful final emperor "shaken in Mexico's / metallic darkness."

They didn't choke
your smile, they didn't make
the secret corn's kernels
fall, but they dragged you,
captive conqueror,
through the far reaches of your kingdom,
amid cascades and chains,
over sandbanks and thorns,
like an incessant column,
like a sorrowful witness,
until a noose snared
the column of purity
and hanged the dangling body
over the hapless land.

Cuauhtemoc and Cortes
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In my opinion, the greatest of all Neruda's Mexican-themed poems in Canto general is "Brother Bartolomé de las Casas," also from Canto IV. When the poem opens, Neruda is returning home on a cold winter night from a union meeting, his head full of "the dull / throb of constant suffering." Pained by thoughts of corruption and enslavement, he enters his home. But inside, "an ancient light shines forth, smooth / and hard as metal, like a buried star."

This ancient light is Padre Bartolomé de las Casas, the former conquistador turned Dominican friar, who spent the majority of his life writing and lobbying against the abuses and atrocities committed against the Indians by the Spanish in the New World. "Mankind's given few lives like yours," Neruda declares.

Father, it was fortunate for mankind
that you arrived on the plantation,
that you bit into crime's
black grains, drank
the daily cup of wrath.
Naked mortal, who put you
between the fury's teeth?

Neruda found parallels between his own life as a writer/activist and that of Padre Bartolomé. Against the conquistadors' cynical, sarcastic accusations—"There goes the agitator"; "The foreigners paid him"; "He has no homeland"; "He's a traitor" —the priest was resolute, "iron in its natural stock."

He invites the good father, to enter his house. "I'll show you the letters, the torment / of my people, of persecuted mankind. / I'll show you the ancient sorrows". The poem ends with an appeal for help:

And to keep me from falling, to help me plant my
feet firmly on the ground, to continue fighting,
bequeath to my heart the errant wine
and the implacable bread of your sweetness.

Fray Bartolomé de las Casas
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While Canto general is an uneven work—it clearly has "its ups and downs," said Neruda's fellow Chilean poet Nicanor Segundo Parra—the specifically Mexican poems in the epic are unquestionably some of the most powerful. Neruda's three-year stay in Mexico profoundly inspired him, both poetically and politically, and contributed to the making of this modern Latin American masterpiece.

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. He is the author of five books, most recently As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. It is available through Amazon, at the Biblioteca bookshop, and at Aurora Books off the Calzada de la Aurora.

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