Pablo Neruda: A Centennial Celebration

By

Ismail Serageldin

Your Excellency, Ladies and gentlemen,

It is a great honor to be selected as one of the 100 persons to receive the Pablo Neruda medal on the centennial of the birth of the great poet. I am deeply humbled and honored by that selection. It will be an inspiration for me and my colleagues at the Library to redouble our efforts on behalf of the values of humanism and excellence that the Bibliotheca Alexandrina stands for and which Pablo Neruda held dear . Indeed, it is altogether fitting that we should be celebrating the centennial of the great man in the Library of Alexandria.

Exactly 100 years ago today, on the 12 th of July 1904, Neftali Ricardo Reyes, was born in the town of Parral in Chile . The baby was to have a very full life, and would leave his mark, not just on his native Chile , but on the whole world, under the name that he made famous: Pablo Neruda. A life of idealism and achievement, that cost him much but earned him both admiration and respect and ultimately the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, just before his untimely death in 1973.

His life is well known, and I will not recount it here. But I would like to share with you all a few personal remarks about how I perceive his genius. I believe that Neruda's greatness is not only due to the quality and quantity of his production. Indeed, he was prolific: His Obras Completas ran close to 4000 pages. Indeed he displayed variety and mastery of a great range: from journals to poetry, from the early surrealism to the later distinctive humanist style. No, for me, his uniqueness, and his greatness came from two great fountainheads: the quality of his verse and his deep commitment to justice and the human condition….

In the essential quality of his verse, there is --- to borrow and adapt a phrase from Derek Walcott – a certain distinctiveness about the run of his verse, its posture in the mouth and in the ear, its constant drama of tone and tune. Yet despite these qualities, he travels well from culture to culture. His poetry, though woven on the Hispanic loom, does not remain prisoner of that melodious tongue. Translations abound, and his verses captivate people of all cultures by the profound humanism that they inspire and by the evocative imagery that they conjure. They are poems that begin in delight and end in wisdom. They have even inspired artists working in other mediums, such as Atil Adnan's 1983 painting of Al-Bayati's Qurban to Neruda!

To be sure, Pablo Neruda, the eternal rebel, the exile, the traveler returning to his homeland, produced more than poetry. His journals have moved us as they chronicled a life and captured certain moments in history with uncommon sensitivity and insight. But in the end, it is his choice of instrument, poetry, and his mastery of it, that assures his immortality, for there is a …

“There is a difference between a poem and a journal. The poem essentializes life. The poem does not obey linear time; it is, by its belligerence or its surrender, the enemy of time; and it is, when it is true, time's conqueror, not time's servant.”

These words by Walcott in Homage to Robert Frost seem particularly apposite to me in this context as well.

As to the other fountainhead of his greatness, Neruda was the man who could say “no”. He would not compromise his principles, and his idealism guided his actions as well as his writing. He appears, Like Anouilh's Antigone, the one capable of saying “no” to all “reasons of state” so frequently called in to justify everything from petty illegalities to crimes to real horrors. One can almost see him in the role of Antigone, responding to the many Creons in power almost using the same words that Anouilh gave his two protagonists:

Creon  : « … Il faut pourtant qu'il y en ait qui disent oui. Il faut pourtant qu'il y en ait qui mènent la barque… le mât craque, et le vent siffle, et les voiles vont se déchirer, … Crois-tu, alors, qu'on a le temps de faire le raffiné, de savoir s'il faut dire « oui » ou « non », de se demander s'il ne faudra pas payer trop cher un jour et si on pourra encore être un homme après ? … Il n'a plus de nom. Et toi non plus, tu n'as plus de nom, cramponné à la barre. Il n'y a plus que le bateau qui ait un nom et la tempête. Est-ce que tu le comprends, cela ? »

Antigone  : « Je ne veux pas comprendre. C'est bon pour vous. Moi je suis là pour autre chose que pour comprendre. Je suis là pour vous dire non et pour mourir. »

(Jean Anouilh, Antigone , La Table Ronde , Paris, 1947, pp. 87-89)

Neruda knew how to say « no », and it cost him in the immediate material sense. But it kept the flame of the dream that he ignited pure and its light shines to this day.

His enormous engagement on the side of justice and equity, his determination to “Lean hard against the facts until they hurt” (an expression used by Sheamus Heaney) has made him the poet of the human condition for all countries and for all times…His verse is as real as any human: cut it and it will bleed!

But his wisdom transcends the polemics of the revolutionaries… Anyone can claim injury, scream against injustice and justify his or her own policy of exclusions and even make an aesthetics of promoting revenge against the old order… Neruda was different. Ever the returning exile, he saw the human detail and yet he saw things whole. With deft strokes he painted poems that together created a mosaic, a giant mural big enough for our dreams and our ideals.

Thus he rewrote his Canto General de Chile , while serving as Consul General in Mexico , transforming it into an epic poem about the whole South American continent, its nature, its people and its historical destiny. This work, the Canto General , was published in Mexico 1950, and also underground in Chile at the time, it is and remains an extraordinary paean to a whole continent and its diverse peoples. Its 250 poems brought together into fifteen literary cycles constitute a truly magnificent work, that many see as the central part of Neruda's production. Nearly all these poems were created when Neruda was living abroad, and perhaps because of that, he was seeing more clearly and feeling more sharply the essentials of the human condition than those who stayed at home.

Through the Canto General and his many other works, Pablo Neruda gave us all the gift of the journey of his life, a traveler who grew in stature and in wisdom. A supreme artist whose work not only delights, but also offers an invitation join him in this journey of exploration of the self and the other… and with him, …

        "We shall not cease from exploring

        And at the end of all our exploring

        Will be to arrive where we started

        And know the place for the first time."

        ( --- T. S. Eliot )