2023-11-15 15:46:08
by Culture Editorial Staff
Chile, civil and love poems, the passions of the poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, whose real name was Ricardo Elicer Neftal Reyes Basoalto
His name was Ricardo Elicer Neftal Reyes Basoalto but he chose another name, Pablo Neruda, in homage to the Czech writer and poet Jan Nepomuk Neruda. And with that name he became one of the most loved, known and cited voices in world poetry, also awarded with the highest recognition: the Nobel, won in 1971.
Flagship of Chilean and South American poetry in general, Pablo Neruda was born in Parral, Chile, on 12 July 1904, son of a railway employee and a teacher who died of tuberculosis when he was still very young.
Very precocious in his poetic vocation, he published his first book in verse at the age of 19, in 1923, Crepusculario.
The following year Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desperada was published: here Neruda sings about love and eros and causes a scandal, so much so that some publishers refuse to publish it, but readers and critics learn to love him: they will never stop to do it. For example, in Woman’s Body:
Woman’s body, white hills, white thighs,
you resemble the world in your attitude of abandonment.
My wild peasant body digs you
and makes his son jump from the bottom of the earth.
I was just like a gallery.
The birds fled from me
and the night entered me with its powerful invasion.
To survive me I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow to my bow, like a stone in my sling.
In 1927 he began a diplomatic career, which took him out of the country. He loses a very young daughter, divorces, approaches communist ideas and his poetry also takes on a civil character, the other vein that will maintain throughout his production. He returned to Chile in 1945 and was elected senator for the Communist Party. Deposed three years later with the advent of Videla, he goes into exile in various countries including Italy.
In 1950 the Canto general was published, one of his most famous works, a poem on the history of Chile and Latin America:
America, I do not take your name in vain. When I subject the sword to my heart, when I endure the dripping in my soul, when a new day of yours penetrates me through the windows, I am and remain in the light that creates me, I live in the shadow that determines me, I sleep and wake up in your dawn essential: sweet as grapes, and terrible, bringing sugar and punishment, soaked in the sperm of your kind, nourished by your hereditary blood.
With the advent of Salvador Allende as president he was appointed ambassador to France: in 1953, in Santiago, he published the Odas elementales, odes to feelings, states of mind but also objects of everyday life. Like the Ode to the Book:
Beautiful book, book, minimal forest, sheet after sheet, smell your element paper, you are morning and night, cereal, oceanic, in your ancient pages bear hunters, bonfire near the Mississippi, canoes on the islands, later roads and roads , revelations, insurgent peoples.
Onion, amphora of light, petal by petal your beauty was formed, crystal scales grew on you and in the secret of the dark earth your belly of dew was rounded. Under the earth it was a miracle and when your rough green stem appeared, and your leaves were born in the garden like swords, the earth accumulated its power revealing your naked transparency.
In 1971 the Nobel Prize winner died in Santiago in 1973 after seeing Augusto Pinochet take power: his nephew, in this interview with the Corriere, claims that it was the regime that killed him and not, as claimed by the official version, a cancerous cachexia caused from prostate cancer.
November 15, 2023 (changed November 15, 2023 | 2.45pm)
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