Confession of Light and Shadow | Neruda and the postman, to whom does the poem belong?

Poetry, what kind of existence does poetry exist in this world? It cannot set off a revolution or enrich the poor. It can only bring love. (Visual China/Photo)

A restored version of Il Postino was staged, and when I first saw it almost twenty years ago, its translation was "The Pre-Publicized Courtship"—perhaps Neruda was not widely known at that time, at least as anonymous as Márquez, who was also a South American writer, so the Chinese translator borrowed the name of the latter's "A Pre-Publicized Murder" to render it. Although Mario in "The Postman" did not exaggerate his courtship in advance, he only used poetry, metaphors, and ways unfamiliar to the people of the island to express love.

Twenty years later, though, we are still moved to tears by Mario's love and Neruda's poetry. Walking out of the theater, I went to look up the anecdotes of "The Postman" and learned of a tragedy that corresponded to Mario's death in the movie: Massimo Troisi, the famous Italian actor who played Mario, was seriously unwell during the filming of "The Postman", was hospitalized for heart surgery, and died of a heart attack in Rome 12 hours after the film was completed - some sources say that he died thirteen days after the filming.

"The Postman" is the masterpiece of Massimo Trosi, who is also the co-director of the film, who spent years trying to find funds to successfully shoot this film with a clear left-wing tendency in Italy; knowing that he had a heart problem, he still played mario the working man himself, exhausting his full strength. Without the filming of The Postman, Massimo Trocey might not have died sooner. But where are there so many ifs? We can also say that Mario might not have died if he had not known Neruda — perhaps survived his life in poverty and fraud by Italian politicians, as his father did.

In other words: how does poetry exist in this world? It cannot set off a revolution or enrich the poor. It can only bring love—and only in Italy and Chile half a century ago," and here and now we are not sure that Mario's love can be promoted by Neruda's poems. So why do we need poetry?

One of the most thought-provoking sentences in The Postman is not from Neruda, but from when Neruda accuses Mario of using Neruda's poems to show affection, Mario says: Poetry belongs to those who need it, not to the writers. This sentence caused the audience in the theater to laugh. As a poet, I, like Neruda, have to admit that there is truth and contradiction in this.

The film actually solves this contradiction, that is, if the "people who need poetry" end up writing poetry (such as Mario), then there is no such binary opposition. At the same time, the poet is completely faithful to his original intention of writing poetry: he belongs to the people who need poetry the most, such as Neruda, who returns to the island at the end of the film - he finally receives a gift from Mario: recorded on tape, representing the poetic voice in Mario's mind, the various sounds of the waves, the heartbeat, wind and breath before the birth of the child - at this time the "postman" is not just the profession of delivering letters from fans, but the symbol of sending poetry.

Poets are also postmen who deliver poetry to the world. Even if Mario hadn't written poetry, he had figured out what a poet was. The film reveals that metaphors and rhythms are elements of poetry that exist in the ordinary world, and when Neruda asks the fisherman's son Mario for a fishing net metaphor, we should know where the poet came from and where the mother of the poem is. In other words, it was Mario and his barren homeland who eventually re-educated the poet Neruda—Mario won love for Neruda's poetry, and Neruda gained a firmer understanding of what a poet should be because of Mario's awakening.

A few years ago, a film called "Neruda the Exiled Poet", was filmed in another exile after the Postman. I once commented: "The word exile has brought him back to his true identity as a poet, neither a noble parliamentarian nor a saint admired by the poor." Such a famous poet Neruda, only in exile he re-experienced the troubles and re-experienced the words he had hung on his lips before, "I am the son of the people". ”

The film also touched on the complex taste of the gap between the identities of the people and the poets mentioned above—the postman was once haunted by the fact that after Neruda left Italy and returned home, he did not write to Mario as promised—Mario's mother-in-law satirized where the great poets would remember us little people. In Neruda the Poet in Exile, a cadre from a poor background asks Neruda: "After the success of the revolution, did we become like you, or did you become like me?" Neruda replied, "We will eat and drink on the bed and make love in the kitchen." The word "we" means not to distinguish between each other.

The surreality of poetry is the most seductive revolution. Mario forgave Neruda because he knew that Neruda had demonstrated the charm of the literary revolution in his field, and that the gleaming words, like a wand of gold, had satisfied the people with a false and crude reality.

The truth of turning stones into gold is that stones are no different from gold, they are also the constituents of the earth and the grace of the earth, and the poems are revealing beauty, rather than fabricating beauty out of nothing. The people and the poets fulfill each other because of poetry, and so it should be.

Liao Weitang