2023-09-22 21:38:10
by DANIELE PICCINI
From Saturday 23 September, «I confess that I lived», his book-testament, will be published by the newspaper, 50 years after the death of the Chilean Nobel Prize winner
Can we really be passionate about the lives of others? Reading Confesso che I lived seems to remove any doubt in this regard, as Neruda’s life appears in this memoir to be rich and varied, colourful, cheerful and at the same time dramatic. Suffice it to say that the work of autobiographical narration was completed by the poet in 1973: even the last pages are dated to the days just following the coup d’état in Chile, which led to the killing of Salvador Allende and Pinochet’s seizure of power. The date that appears at the end of the long and passionate story is in fact that of 15 September 1973: the coup had taken place on 11, 23 September (fifty years ago) Neruda himself would have died in hospital, in Santiago de Chile, for causes always remained suspect. This is how this book-testament (from Saturday 23 September on newsstands with the «Corriere della Sera») feels like a precipitation in the final part, rolling towards tragedy, towards the end of an era and towards the death of its own author -hero. It can be said that Neruda barely had time to complete these pages, handing them over to us as a legacy.
What does the Chilean poet want to say about himself, narrating his life in a way that is not necessarily linear, but rather through episodes, through paintings, through flashes? The first concern, he would say, is to represent himself and his poetry as belonging to a people. If Neruda has no hesitations in recognizing himself in the role and even in the profession of poet (the eleventh of the twelve notebooks that make up the book is entitled Poetry is a profession), he is however clear that he was a poet of all, for all . He says it and reiterates it, recalling on several occasions the aptitude of his poetry to be read and memorized by the humble. And this side of unconditional popularity is like a counterweight, in the book, to the fabulous story of a life as a globetrotting writer, who met almost all the protagonists of culture and literature of his time. The portraits actually multiply, from García Lorca to Eluard, from Aragon to Picasso, from Hikmet to Jorge Amado to Quasimodo.
However, alongside the great writers and intellectuals known and frequented in different parts of the world, first and foremost in cosmopolitan Paris and in civil war Spain, there is the people, to whom Neruda wants to belong, just as every poet should. In fact, he writes: «Poetry has lost its connection with the distant reader… It must recover it… It must walk in the darkness and meet with the heart of man, with the eyes of the woman, with the strangers on the street, those who at a certain time of twilight, or in the middle of a starry night, they need perhaps just one verse…”. It is the reader-reader, not the fellow poet, not the experts that Neruda seeks. And it is that popularity and humanity of his singing that according to him finally opened the doors of literary institutions to him, up until the 1971 Nobel Prize.
So if Neruda talks about his wandering and picaresque life, as a diplomat and intellectual, first in the East and then in Europe, about his encounters and his loves, I Confess that I Lived is also a continuous discourse on poetry and the condition of poet, starting from concrete experience and not without dragging along some proverbial idiosyncrasies (such as the hostility with Vicente Huidobro) and some underlying predilections. For example, the author says: «What is most similar to poetry is a bread or a terracotta plate, or a piece of wood delicately carved, it doesn’t matter if by clumsy hands», words in which it is easy to recognize the intonation of the one who he wrote the elementary Odes. Without a doubt, I Confess That I Have Lived is the testament of a poet who reflects on his own art and the fate of that art in the world, to the point that even the communist ideology he embraces seems to be a component of his poetic work, not a totalizing data. It is not for nothing that Neruda denies having had an important political role, despite his commitment, militancy and positions: «Many people believe that I am or have been an important political man. I don’t know where they got such an illustrious legend from.” The meaning of this diminution is clear: the life that is told is not that of a man of the apparatus, but of a poet, one who has always made poetry his ultimate horizon.
This is how after having witnessed the Spanish civil war, having written an ode for the death of Stalin and celebrated the Cuban revolution, the communist militant, the Marxist Neruda can in his memoir leave traces of the lacerations and torments for a certain real socialism, especially after what emerged at the XX Congress of the CPSU in 1956 (Neruda speaks not for nothing of the “dark night of Stalin” and also of the distortions of Maoism).
Legendary and whirlwind, full of friends and enemies, loves and abandonments (think of the long bond with Delia del Carril, interrupted to join Matilde Urrutia), the life he confesses to having lived is that of a poet. It is no coincidence that just like the poet par excellence Neruda appears towards the end of The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. Which thus reconstructs the last scene of that existence, after the coup. Another collective, public rite: «Little by little the Poet’s funeral transformed into the symbolic act of burying freedom».
September 22, 2023 (modified September 22, 2023 | 9.36 pm)
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
#Pablo #Neruda #poets #autobiography #Corriere #della #Sera #time.news