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The Song Was Not in Vain

Memoirs By Pablo Neruda Translated from the Spanish by Hardie St. Martin Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $12.50, 370 pp.

They had everything they wanted on their side. They had harlequins and jumping jacks, lots of clowns, terrorists with pistols and chains, phony monks and degraded members of the armed services. They all rode the merry-go-round of petty spite.

Neruda would just live to see the generals and fascists have their way. He wrote the last entry in the Memoirs three days after Allende's assassination: "...the tanks went into action, many tanks, fighting heroically against a single man: the President of the Republic of Chile, Salvadore Allende, who was waiting for them in his office, with no other company but his great heart, surrounded by smoke and flames." Five days later the poet for whom Jean-Paul Sartre rejected the Nobel Prize in 1964 died heartbroken, having witnessed in his own country the same tragedy he had seen 35 years before in Spain.

III.

"The most succulent item of all, the United Fruit Company Incorporated reserved for itself: the heartland and coasts of my country..."

Neruda's Memoirs are both moving and somehow unfulfilling. They are filled with philosophy and hope, much as is his poetry; and entangle the reader into an emotionally exhausting extent in the triumphs and tragedies of history. But the function of memoirs is to make a person more accessible, Neruda's don't bring us much closer to the poet than his verses already did. In a sense, the Memoirs are the prose form of his poetry--both are filled with nature, indignation and politics. And to a reader of Neruda's poetry, his Memoirs will contain little that is new.

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The Memoirs do give us wonderful sketches of Neruda's friends and contemporaries--Garcia Lorca, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Eduardo Frei, Soong Ch'ing Ling, the wife of Sun Yat-sen, and Cesar Vallejo among others--but they somehow leave us without the personal detail of Neruda himself. The Memoirs, for instance, barely mention Neruda's first wife or marriage, an 18-year venture--and have no more than one or two dozen specific time references.

Neruda prefers to stick to the philosophical rather than the mundane and perhaps it is the voyeur in us that is left feeling unfulfilled. We learn about Neruda, the poet-philosopher, but little about Neruda, the fallible man, demystified and much like us. The impression left from the Memoirs is of a man almost too selfless, too moral, too forgiving. His only flaw seems to be a culturally-determined sexism.

But this perfection is, of course, a function of memoirs--to determine the way in which one will be viewed by history. The disagreements with popular sentiment, the quarrels with historical revelations, as in the case with Neruda's impressions about Stalin, can be glossed over.

If Neruda doesn't grant us picky details, he makes up for it in inspiration. In a style that is as lucid, simple and accessible even in translation as any of his poems, the Memoirs unfold a philosophy full of warmth and hope, nationalism and internationalism. All this, despite having witnessed and written about some of the saddest, most discouraging episodes in recent history. Although his Memoirs end, as did his life, with the recognition of yet another tragedy, Neruda, who found hope in the past, would have realized that American dollars and cruel, powerhungry generals can not permanently retard progress toward a more just world. He always saw the glimmer of a final victory and allowed the world to see it as well when it acknowledged his work and his struggle in the 1971 Stockholm ceremonies. In his speech to the world he said:

I wish to say to the people of good will, to the workers, to the poets, that the whole future has been expressed in this line by Rimbaud: only with a burning patience can we conquer the splendid City which will give light, justice, and dignity to all mankind.

In this way the song will not have been sung in vain.

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