3/15/2023 0 Comments Pablo neruda![]() ![]() “The Widower’s Tango” is the best-known poem from the first volume of Residence on Earth, a plainspoken expression of the anguish of loss intensified by necessity. He absconded by night to escape his implacable Fury, and wrote a valedictory poem to her on his voyage to Ceylon. Just as Josie Bliss’s jealousy was growing more threatening, Neruda received a cable from Santiago informing him of his immediate transfer to Ceylon. When you die, she used to say to me, my fears will end.” It was she, walking round and round my bed, for hours at a time, without quite making up her mind to kill me. It was Josie, flimsily dressed in white, brandishing her long, sharp knife. ![]() In his memoir, completed shortly before his death, in 1973, Neruda wrote that “ometimes, a light would wake me, a ghost moving on the other side of the mosquito net. Josie Bliss was at once obsessively devoted to him and possessed by an overwhelming jealousy. Neruda would later say that the ostracism “couldn’t have pleased me more.” Apart from his vehement dissent from their policies, these petty bureaucrats bored him. When the colonial authorities found out, they barred him from their clubs. She may have given him financial support to eke out his pitifully small salary at any rate, he moved in with her. She worked as a typist and wore English clothes to work. He took as his lover a Burmese woman who had adopted the English name Josie Bliss. Neruda was isolated and lonesome in Rangoon, perhaps, but he was not alone. When a British official hinted to Neruda that he should not be seen at a popular Persian café because it was frequented by “natives,” he kicked against such bigotry. This work, collected in the first two volumes of Residence on Earth, took a radical departure in tone from the earthy, mystical lyricism of the Twenty Love Poems. He was prolific in Asia, but his intellectual solitude weighed heavily on him, and the process of composition exacted a painful toll. And writing, of course Neruda never had a prolonged period of inactivity. With few official duties, the young consul devoted much of his time to reading: masses of Spanish and French poetry, in particular Quevedo and Rimbaud, and Proust’s novel entire, four times. ![]() When a British official hinted to Neruda that he should not be seen at a popular Persian café because it was frequented by “natives”-in other words, the people in whose country he was a guest-he kicked against such bigotry and chose isolation instead. Foreign diplomats were sternly warned against mixing with the local people. The main cause of Neruda’s alienation was the narrow-minded colonial establishment, which disgusted him. When the minister asked him where he wanted to go, he replied confidently, “Rangoon.” He had no idea where it was. He had never heard of any of them, and he caught only one name. He offered Neruda a post on the spot, and rattled off a list of foreign cities that awaited the services of a representative of Chile. An aristocratic classmate at the university introduced Neruda to the foreign minister, who had read his poetry. In Latin America, a literary reputation commanded respect from power. Yet, destitute as he was, Neruda was determined to avoid becoming another starveling poet in Montmartre, so he sought an overseas diplomatic post. The path usually pursued by poor young poets was to turn up in Paris and scrounge off older, established writers until they made their mark, or gave up and came home. He was a student at the Universidad de Santiago in Chile, and hunger was an issue he wore a billowing cape to conceal his emaciated physique and a wide-brimmed hat that hoped for an air of mystery. His second book, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, had been a sensational success and would eventually become one of the bestselling books of poetry in the 20th century (more than 20 million copies to date), but he was paid almost nothing for it. At 22, Pablo Neruda was an international literary celebrity-and desperately poor. ![]()
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