THE CHILEAN WRITER Pablo Neruda is "the greatest poet of the twentieth century--in any language." Or so said Gabriel García Márquez, in a line recently repeated by the Washington Post and several other American publications. Readers in the United States seem destined to have Neruda thrust upon them every few years, much as the cicadas return to whine and roar up and down the East Coast. The excuse this time is the centennial of Neruda's birth on July 12, 1904.
There is probably no more chance of halting this current binge of Neruda worship than there is of banishing the cicadas, but, still, the truth does need to be said: Pablo Neruda was a bad writer and a bad man. His main public is located not in the Spanish-speaking nations but in the Anglo-European countries, and his reputation derives almost entirely from the iconic place he once occupied in politics--which is to say, he's "the greatest poet of the twentieth century" because he was a Stalinist at exactly the right moment, and not because of his poetry, which is doggerel.
Yes, his work is still plagiarized by teenage boys in Latin America, who see his Twenty Love Poems and a Desperate Song and figure there is nothing wrong with borrowing from it--just as one poem in the book is itself stolen from Rabindranath Tagore--and presenting its overwrought lines to their girlfriends. But if those boys grow up to be serious writers, they leave Neruda behind.
Nonetheless, the American progressive literary caste adores,
adulates, and idolizes Neruda. He found the exact measure of his mediocrity in Robert Bly, beater of drums and perpetrator of vexingly atrocious verse, as translator. I admit to feeling a little sympathy for the dead Neruda once: When I discovered that his political poem Que despierte el leñador, in which Lincoln represents the Marxist element in the history of the United States, had been done into English by Bly. Awarded a Soviet "International Peace Prize" for 1950--and there's a phrase that should provoke considerable thought--the text was published in America by the Communist party with its title stirringly rendered as Let the Railsplitter Awake! Actually, Bly's title, I Wish the Woodcutter Would Wake Up, may be even more revealing.
In 1938, two singular men sat down to compose a statement about the situation of the global intellect as they then saw it. They wrote, among other things, "The totalitarian regime of the U.S.S.R., working through the so-called 'cultural' organizations it controls in other countries, has spread over the entire world a deep twilight hostile to every sort of spiritual value. A twilight of filth and blood in which, disguised as intellectuals and artists, those men steep themselves who have made servility a career, of lying for pay a custom, and of excuses for crime a source of pleasure." Nobody more embodied the phenomenon described in these lines than Pablo Neruda. The description was written by the surrealist André Breton and the exiled Leon Trotsky.
Whatever may be said of the Trotskyists, neither their leader nor they themselves ever promoted bad art. And the essayists, authors, and critics who cleaved to Trotsky, including James T. Farrell, Sidney Hook, Mary McCarthy, Saul Bellow, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and a considerable number of others, were inspired by the words of Breton and Trotsky when, in 1939, some among them helped found the Committee for Cultural Freedom. Trotsky and his followers rejected the childish argument that leftist politics makes good writers and that authors of the right are necessarily heartless and mercenary.
|
