Pablo Neruda and Complex Topography

Abstract

Pablo Neruda's Canto general was first published in Mexico in 1950. It is the song of a continent, written to bring a new kind of America into being. Arguably the epitome of the Nerudian oeuvre, the book attempts to produce an exuberant, extraordinary fertility. In Neruda's own words, it is a poem emerges from a secret womband flows, fertilizing and singing. It kindles with its swelling waters, it works at milling flour, tanning hides, cutting wood, giving light to cities. It is useful, and awakens to find banners along its banks: festivals are celebrated beside the singing water.1Neruda's inexhaustible belief in the power of his poetry, in its ability to propose and develop new modes of being, contrasts starkly with Wright's own. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, understanding the difference between the two poets' public receptions is essential to understanding some of the differences between the trajectories of their poetries. In Neruda, we have a poet who feels cherished by his reading public. My contact with the masses makes me think, he was to say in an interview in 1965, that some of the people most receptive to my poetry are the Chilean people [...]. In few countries in the world is a poet listened to with so much attention and dignity as in our small country.2 Indeed, by the 1960s Neruda was a national and international icon. Although he had been famous in Chile from his late teens, now his poems were translated into dozens of languages and received by millions of readers. To this day, he remains one of the most widely translated poets in history. Next to Neruda's, then, Wright's public presence is distinctively paler. A growing scepticism about the power of poetry to affect change in those areas of the world she thought most important led Wright to channel her energy into other projects. Neruda, by contrast, was never forced to confront questions about the necessity of poetry, or about its relevance in particular social contexts. Consequently, his singing could continue unhindered.In this chapter I will discuss what, precisely, is so problematical about Neruda's lack of restraint. For this very bounty of optimistic energy is what pushes the Nerudian voice to roll blindly into places where it otherwise might have travelled with greater caution (or might not have travelled at all). As his career progresses, Neruda will come to believe he, via his language, can touch everything. As a result, where a feature of Wright's poetics is the problematical relationship between language and the wider world, for Neruda this question is absorbed into a broader one having to do with his body 's problematical relationship to Chile, particularly in his constant re-imagining of his location. For Neruda, language is not an abstract visual cipher, but emerges in the corporeality of his being. The nature of Nerudian language precludes the distance art, as considered in Western terms, assumes between speaker and audience, signified and signifier, and even man and nature.3 The poetic word is, above all, the spoken word, which is bom in the blood and takes flight through the lips and mouth, as he writes in La palabra (the word).4 Yet this fleshy, earthy aspect of Nemda is complicated by his disregard for the physical limits imposed by such corporeality. For there are many, many Nemdas: the natural, the erotic, the nationalist, the political, the solitary, and the personal; of his poetic personae he would confess, in his 1958 volume Estravagario: We are many.5 He seemed to encourage this multiplicity internationally, too, allowing various translators to work on the same poem, at times even simultaneously.6 By so readily assuming an organic relationship with the wider world, therefore, we will see Nemda's poetic language actually becomes a kind of invasive species. Writing from so many places at once, Nerudian colonization is often overwhelming.A Residence in the EarthBefore looking at the problems of Neruda's boundless organicism in Canto general, it is necessary to begin by isolating its emergent properties in some of the poems from Residencia en la tierra (? …