Huang Yu, Global Institute for Advanced Study of Chinese Culture, Lingnan University
Neruda – Memoirs, by [Chile] Neruda, translated by Li Wenjin, Taipei: Gaia Culture, September 2020, 622 pages, NT$820
Readers who love the work of the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature and Chilean poet Neruda (pen name Pablo Neruda, formerly Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, 1904-1973) will not miss the French film "The Hunt for Neruda" released in 2016, and should have already seen the classic Italian business card "Il Postino". But if you want to know more about the poet Buddha-figure, it is also a good way to read his autobiography directly. This memoir, which contains Neruda's personal photo collection and handwriting, translated from the Chilean version that came out in 2017 into Chinese, was published in Taipei in 2020, and the whole book is 622 pages, heavy and hardcover, and definitely worth cherishing. The original title of the book in Spain is: Confieso que he vivido: Memorias. The Memorias in the subtitle is the plural form of a memoir in Spanish, and the literal translation of The Confieso que he vivido means "I confess that I have lived"—frankly, I have lived (Chinese Simplified translated as "I Confess That I Have Gone Through The Vicissitudes"). Carefully pondering the title sentence, we can know that when the author looks back on his life, he feels that there is no waste.
Dario Oses, the Chilean editor-in-charge of the book, begins with the preface, The Unfinished Biography: "Memoirs of Neruda – Frankly, I Didn't Live in Vain is a voluminous and unique work. Neruda continued to compile this memoir until his death in September 1973. His memoirs include his rewritings of previous works from different periods and with different provenances, as well as works that he re-created after examining and reflecting on his personal life. It contains three unpublished autobiographical speeches written in 1954. According to the editor-in-charge, the memoir was originally scheduled to be published in 1974 as part of the celebration of Neruda's seventieth birthday, but due to the poet's sudden death in 1973, the book, although still published as planned, became his posthumous work.
Neruda died on September 23, 1973, at the Santa Maria Clinic in Santiago, Chile. Just twelve days earlier, General Pinochet had overthrown Chile's democratically elected President Allende in a coup d'état and imposed dictatorship until 1990. As a close friend of Allende,the truth of whether the poet died of illness or was murdered is unclear. In 2013, Neruda's driver, Manuel Araya, revealed to the media that Neruda had called him to say that someone had stabbed him in the stomach. Subsequently, Chilean judge Mario Carroza ordered an autopsy to determine the cause of Neruda's death. Samples of his remains were sent to forensic laboratories in four countries for analysis. In 2015, the Chilean government said Neruda's death was "likely caused by a third party." It was only in 2016 that Neruda's remains were reburied in his hometown, Isla Negra in central Chile. However, the true cause of Neruda's death has not yet been ascertained.
Man cannot choose the fate of being born, and death is difficult to plan. The only things you can choose are love and creation– when and where to love? Who is in love with? With whom do you fall in love? What to write with? What works to write? Why write? More than a decade ago, in order to commemorate the centenary of Neruda's birth, Zhao Zhenjiang, an important Chinese translator of Neruda poetry, and his student Teng Wei edited and published "Neruda's Pictorial Biography 1904-1973", which summarized the poet's magnificent life with three key words "love, poetry and revolution".
Neruda 1904-1973
Poetry: Survival is expressed here
In her memoirs, Neruda responds carefully to the questions she is often asked, "When was the first poem written, and when was the first poem born?"—"I try to recall. When I was very young and only learned to write, I suddenly had a strong emotion, and then I casually wrote a few lines of sentences that were very different from my usual speech and had a bit of rhyme, and even I felt very strange. I transcribed those few words on paper, and I felt a strong sense of anxiety, an emotion that I couldn't say in the moment, a little painful, and a little sad. It was dedicated to my mother, the stepmother who cared for my childhood as gentle as an angel. Inspired and trembling, he showed the poem to his parents, but got his father's careless "literary criticism" - "Where did you copy it?" (p. 41)
In 1923, Neruda published his first collection of poems, Sunset, titled "Los crepύsculo de Maruri," describing the evening view seen from the balcony at 513 Rue Maruri, where he lived. The poet cherished himself with a broom and recalled:
My first book! I have always thought that the work of a writer is neither mysterious nor pathetic; rather, at least a plate made of clay, or a piece of wood carved with immature skill but with great patience. However, I don't think any craftsman can be as intoxicated as a poet once in his life into the first work he made by hand, and he is fascinated and feels like a dream. There will be no second time at this moment. Although the first book will be produced in a better and more exquisite version, although its intoxicating contents will be translated into various languages, like fine wine poured into his wine glass, circulating and fragrant in all corners of the world; but the moment when the first book is born with fresh ink and soft paper, like the fluttering of birds, like the sound of the first flowers blooming at the peak of its conquest, so fascinating, intoxicating, that moment will appear only once in the poet's life. (pp. 85-86)
Love: Sunshine and ocean shadows
Neruda had three important female partners in his life: Marijke Antonieta Hagenaar Vogelzang (nicknamed Maruka, nicknamed Maruka, 1900-1965), his life mentor Delia de Carril (1885-1989), who accompanied him to a foreign country when he was lonely, and Matilde Urrutia, his soul mate who accompanied him on his journey to a foreign country Cerda，1912-1985)。 At the beginning of the autobiography, Neruda recalls his first love as a teenager and related literary creations, writing love letters on behalf of his classmates to pursue Blanca Wilson, the daughter of the blacksmith, but instead gaining the favor of the other party.
There are two interesting stories in the first part of the memoir, "The Young Man in the Country", "Love in the Straw Heap" and "The Girl Who Returned Home". The former describes the first sexual love experience of the young Neruda, as the title suggests, which is happening in the wheat straw pile in the middle of the night, and the object is a strange woman who comes quietly and passionately, and it is not until noon lunch time the next day that he has just entered adolescence and vaguely identifies the secret visitor of the previous night at the dinner table. The autobiography also contains an unforgettable episode about a "returning girl" a few days after the first experience. The young Neruda who rode home on horseback, entrusted by others, carried a young girl in her twenties, the latter's hands were very restless, and the teenager's blood was strong, but because they could not find a place to tie the horse all the way back, the two eventually failed to achieve their good deeds. Fifty years later, Neruda still remembers this experience, believing that "in the long course of my life, it was one of my most frustrated and frustrated days" (p. 53).
This emotion of love and undeserved brewed up Neruda's second collection of poems, Veintepoemas de amor y una canción (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair), published a few days before he turned twenty. In his memoirs, the poet concludes that the collection of poems "is a sad, idyllic work that contains the most painful and intense emotions of my youth, and also mixes the amazing natural scenery of the south of my homeland." This is a work that I love because, despite its melancholy atmosphere, it gives me the thrill of being" (p. 88). The twenty-one poems in this collection are dedicated to three women whom Neruda loved but could not keep. In his memoirs, Neruda describes the two women whose names represent the ocean and the sun (mar y sol) and the ocean and the shadow (mar y sombra):
I'm often asked a hard question to answer: Who is the woman in Twenty Love Poems? The collection is interspersed with two or three women, such as Marisol and Marisonbra. Marie Sol comes from her home where the night sky is full of stars, she is the goddess of pastoral love, and her black watery eyes are like the wet sky of Butterfly Dream Valley. ...... Lively, pretty images, accompanied by the waters and waters of the harbor, and the crescent moon between the mountains, Marisor appears in almost all the psalms. Marissumpra, a girl who studied in the capital, transformed into a gray beret, transformed into an incomparably gentle eye, and also transformed into the scent of honeysuckle flowers that often emitted the smell of college students, and also presented the appearance of returning to calm after a passionate meeting in the secrets of the big city. (89 pages)
In the preface to the translators of the translation of this collection of poems, chen li and Zhang Fenling, two Taiwanese translators, examine it this way: "When Neruda was fifty years old, he said that the 3rd, 4th, 6th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 12th, 16th, 19th, and 20th were written for Marissool (Teresa); the remaining ten (i.e., 11, 5, 7, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, and 18) were written for Marysonbra . Time blurs or confuses memories, and Neruda sometimes says that the 'grey beret' is Mariusumbra's, and sometimes wears it on Marisor's head. Perhaps both girls had worn the same hat, or perhaps the two adolescent lovers had fused into one in the poet's mind. At the age of sixty-five, Neruda also said that the nineteenth love poem was actually dedicated to Maria Parodi, another woman he had met in the port of Savidra, which smelled of the sea and honeysuckle. ”
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is arguably the most popular, most published and translated edition, and most widely circulated collection of Neruda's works in the world. At the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature ceremony, Dr. Carl Lagone Siero, an academician of the Swedish Academy, commented on the collection of poems in his acceptance speech: "From his Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, we can get a glimpse of what Neruda's poetry means to most people who speak his language. Again and again, people put music on it and sang it everywhere, but often didn't know who the author was. The translation of this collection of poems was published more worldwide, reaching a million copies a decade ago. However, the encounters described in those pictures full of plump and gloomy beauty are always carried out by two strangers to each other in the foggy cold dusk. ”
The twentieth love poem was written to Marisor, and one of them was very popular and widely circulated- "Love is so short, forgetting is so long". This sentence comes from the twentieth love poem "Tonight I Can Write", which begins with a straightforward confession to the girl he loves, and also knows that the girl may not have the same feelings for herself:
Tonight I can write the saddest psalms.
Write, for example, "The night is full of stars,
Those stars, brilliant blue, trembled in the distance."
The evening wind swirled and sang in the sky.
I love her, and sometimes she loves me.
The sadness mentioned in the opening comes from the poet's disappointment with the object of unrequited love, because the other party cannot respond to his love, so he writes poetry lyrically. However, in the last five paragraphs of this poem, the poet's feelings are intertwined, and complex emotions are about to come out:
Now I don't love her anymore, but I used to love her so much.
My voice tried to probe her sense of hearing through the wind.
Someone else's. She will be someone else's. Just like my past kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her deep eyes.
Now I don't love her anymore. But maybe I still love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
For in many nights as if this moment I embraced her,
My heart is not willing to lose her.
Even if this is the last pain she brings me,
And these are the last poems I wrote for her.
From the above paragraphs, it can be seen that the poet seems to have let go of the woman he once loved but could not have, and confirmed that he is no longer in love with her, but after knowing that the other party is about to get married, he still cannot let go, suspecting that his jealousy and pain may still be a manifestation of love. This poem is a dialogue between the poet and his own heart, and it is also a summary of these twenty poems. In the last poem, "The Song of Despair," the poet admits that all troubles come from the insatiability of the black hole of individual desires, the untenable desire for a single individual:
Oh meat, my flesh, the woman I have loved and lost,
In this damp moment, I call you and sing for you.
Like a cup, you hold endless tenderness,
And endless oblivion breaks you like a cup.
In the last paragraph, the image of the pier at dawn is repeated in the opening paragraph, and the feeling of abandonment is repeatedly emphasized:
Abandoned like a pier at dawn.
Only a trembling shadow remained writhing in my hand.
Ah, beyond everything. Ah, beyond everything.
This is the moment of departure. Oh, the outcasts!
(The above translation of the poem is quoted from the translation of Chen Li and Zhang Fenling, Taipei: Jiuge Publishing House Co., Ltd., October 2016 edition)
Abandoned by whom? Maybe it's being loved, maybe it's being remembered, maybe it's being time, maybe it's being fate. The so-called despair comes from the poet's understanding of the essence of love, understanding that once desire is realized, it is no longer tempting, and it is even more unsustainable, and only in the process of eternal pursuit and loss can love remain alive and strong. Poetry, which provides an outlet for this desperate cry, resonates deeply with thousands of courting readers.
Chilean poet Pablo Neruda
Revolution: the roots of literary creation
Just after Neruda completed Twenty Love Poems, Chilean society underwent dramatic changes, on the one hand, when "mass movements rose vigorously and sought more support among students and writers"; on the other hand, a wave of unemployment swept across the country, workers' leaders formed the National Federation of Trade Unions, the workers' movement surged, and demonstrations in Santiago were suppressed by the police (pp. 89-90). Thus, Neruda began to devote himself to the revolutionary journey of life with literary creation.
As a diplomat and then an exile, the poet traveled the world. In 1927, at the age of twenty-three, Neruda was appointed consul in Burma by the Chilean government, and over the next eight years he traveled to India, China, Japan, Java, Singapore, Argentina, Spain, and Paris. During this time, Neruda published El Honderoentusiasta (Passionate Thrower) and Residencia en la tierra (Resident of the Land). The latter collection of poems, published in 1933, is the first of three volumes to describe the social upheaval and human suffering that Neruda witnessed during his years of diplomatic travel and social activity. In his memoirs, he wrote: "In my work, Residencia is a dark and gloomy but essential book. The third volume of this work, "Spain in Our Hearts" (España en el corazón), expresses deep sympathy for the Spanish people who suffered from the civil war. In 1936, after the bombing of Madrid, Neruda left the area to reunite with his wife and daughter in Barcelona. In the same year, the Chilean consulates in both places were closed, and Neruda was no longer assigned consular duties, so he arrived in Monte Carlo via Marseille with his family, separated from his ex-wife, and then went to Paris with his second partner, Delia, and founded the editor of the magazine "World Poets defending the Spanish people" to organize a series of activities to help Spanish refugees and help them take refuge in France. In the 1940s, Neruda and Delia visited Mexico, the United States, Panama and other places and were warmly welcomed. He joined the Communist Party of Chile in 1945, was indicted by the Chilean government in 1947, and traveled to Argentina in 1949 to escape capture and traveled to Paris. The movie "The Hunt for Neruda" is based on this experience.
Hunted by the Chilean government, Neruda made his home, and writing poetry was the only way he could gain a sense of presence. In the "Motherland in Darkness" section of his memoir, Neruda writes about the "roots":
While reading my poems and translating my poems, Ehrenburg accused me of having too many "roots", too many "roots" in your poems. Why so many?
That's right. The land of the frontier is rooted in my poetry and can never leave. My life drifted for a long time, constantly running and running, but always returning to the southern woods, back to the forgotten forest.
……
Or later, when I rode across the mountains to Argentina, under the green dome of the giant trees, I encountered a barrier: one of the trees had roots higher than our horses, cutting off our way. We took great pains to use axes to clear the road, and the roots were like collapsed cathedrals, discovering their enormity and letting us know where they were respectable. (278 pages)
In the eleventh chapter of his memoir, "Poetry is a Profession," Neruda writes, "In our age of war, revolution, and great social upheaval, it is a privilege to be able to write poetry smoothly and to develop poetry to a state that is not questioned." Ordinary people either face poetry in solitude or in the gathering of the masses on the mountain; so they either hurt others or they are hurt by others. ...... When I was writing my earliest lonely poems, I never imagined that I would read my poems aloud in squares, on the streets, in factories, classrooms, theaters, and gardens many years later. (p. 357)
And Neruda also specifically explained that his poetry has no boundaries, but the posture of writing, like the root of a tree, always tries his best to lean towards his beloved motherland, but shrouded in darkness:
If my poem has any meaning, it is that it has a certain tendency to extend infinitely, as if it were not willing to stay in a small room. My barriers must be overcome by me. I'm not going to limit myself to some distant cultural box. I have to be myself, I have to extend myself to the narrow land where I was born. (370 pages)
In 1971, Neruda gave a speech at the Nobel Prize ceremony, recalling the experience of arriving in Argentina on horseback:
In that boundless, inaccessible place, in the lush and snowy silence, the woods, the thick vines, the humus that has been deposited for thousands of years, the trunks that suddenly fall into another obstacle to our progress, make each of us dizzy during the journey. A dazzling and mysterious nature is filled with cold, ice and snow, and the growing threat of hunting. Loneliness, danger, silence, and the urgency of my mission are all intertwined.
It can be seen that Neruda spent his life creating poetry as a way to take root in the land under his feet, in order to find his own value and meaning in the scattered time and space. In this speech, Neruda summed up the poet's responsibility this way:
As for those of us, those of us writers in the vast expanse of the Americas, we hear the call to flesh and blood characters to fill that vast expanse of space. We are well aware of our duty as pioneers — and at the same time, it is indispensable for us to engage critically in that desolate world, where injustice, suffering and suffering will be less; and we feel obliged to restore the ancient dreams that are still envisioned by stone statues, destroyed monuments, dead steppes, dense primeval forests, and thunderous rivers. We must make every corner of the continent, which cannot express its will, speak its own words; the task of making such assumptions and expressing them makes us fascinated. Perhaps this is just the reason that governs me as an insignificant character; in this case, my exaggerated words, my voluminous works, and the verses I deliberately deliberately deliberately deliberate are but the most ordinary trifles of everyday life in the Americas. I want to write every verse of mine as solidly as an object that can be seen and felt; I try to make every poem I write an effective instrument of labor; I want each of my poems to become a signpost at a crossroads, like a stone or a piece of wood, so that others, and those who come after me, can leave new signs on it.
For Neruda, because of poetry, revolution, and love, his life was not in vain. Every reader who loves Neruda's poetry must also hope to absorb the vitality of life and taste the sweetness and bitterness of love by reading Neruda's poetry. In fact, if you have not devoted yourself to love, to action, to change at least once, who can admit that they have really lived?
Editor-in-Charge: Zheng Shiliang
Proofreader: Zhang Liangliang