Ilan Stavans

Audio

Transcript

Ramona Koval: Ilan, welcome to the program again.

Ilan Stavans: My pleasure.

Ramona Koval: It's good to have you. First of all, were you surprised that Neruda was voted the greatest poet?

Ilan Stavans: I was surprised that there was such a list. I don't know if we could really talk about the best poet. There are poets for different occasions. And the fact that he came ahead of Shakespeare strikes me as remarkable and even miraculous. I think Shakespeare is a poet who almost invented us all, whereas Neruda is a poet that reflects the passions and the complications, the complexities that live in our heart. Very different writers. I was delighted to have Neruda be presented in such a list, even if the list looks a little out of the fantastic.

Ramona Koval: You weren't a big fan of his work initially, were you. Talk firstly about your relationship with Neruda's poetry.

Ilan Stavans: Well, I grew up in Mexico, and when I was a young man in the '70s and '80s, friends of mine would recite Neruda's poetry to the girl that they were hoping to get. They would memorise some of the Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair or some of the sonnets. It was a kind of sport for many of us Spanish speakers, and it still is today, to make Neruda's poetry our own and to use it to confess the passion, the love that we have. I found all this corny, unappealing, melodramatic, more akin to a Mexican soap opera than to real love.

Ramona Koval: And it works though?

Ilan Stavans: It worked with many of my friends. And I can tell you, I probably should have tried it. It wasn't until many years later when a student of mine about to get married asked me to recite a poem during the ceremony...but he said that he wanted to choose the poem and it was going to be by Neruda, not my favourite poet at the time. And he gave me to read a beautiful, beautiful poem called 'Your Laughter' that Neruda wrote for his third wife, Matilde Urrutia. And I read it to myself first, I read it to the audience, and I was just flabbergasted. I thought it was just so beautiful that it prompted me to get back to Neruda and at that point I was hooked. Since then I dig and dig and find just pleasure after pleasure, jewel after jewel.

Ramona Koval: Well, you'd better read it to us too now, so if there are any people who are wavering about Neruda who are listening, this might make you turn. So let's hear 'Your Laughter'.

Ilan Stavans: Sure. This is a poem that comes from the book The Captain's Verses. Neruda wrote it while he was living with his third wife Matilde Urrutia in Capri Italy. In Spanish it's called, 'Tu Risa', 'Your Laughter'.

Take bread away from me, if you wish,
take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter.

Do not take away the rose,
the lance flower that you pluck,
the water that suddenly
bursts forth in joy,
the sudden wave
of silver born in you.

My struggle is harsh and I come back
with eyes tired
at times from having seen
the unchanging earth,
but when your laughter enters
it rises to the sky seeking me
and it opens for me all
the doors of life.

My love, in the darkest
hour your laughter
opens, and if suddenly
you see my blood staining
the stones of the street,
laugh, because your laughter
will be for my hands
like a fresh sword.

Next to the sea in the autumn,
your laughter must raise
its foamy cascade,
and in the spring, love,
I want your laughter like
the flower I was waiting for,
the blue flower, the rose
of my echoing country.

Laugh at the night,
at the day, at the moon,
laugh at the twisted
streets of the island,
laugh at this clumsy
boy who loves you,
but when I open
my eyes and close them,
when my steps go,
when my steps return,
deny me bread, air,
light, spring,
but never your laughter
for I would die.

Ramona Koval: So that turned you towards the man who you obviously spent a lot of time with afterwards because you've collected this major volume now. That of course is one of his famous love poems. Many of them are very erotic. But when English professor Dean Rader was launching this survey of the ten greatest poets, it was in context of the connections between literature and revolutions. He says great moments need a great language. So how did Neruda express the emotions of the times?

Ilan Stavans: For one thing, Ramona, he was deeply in love with the Spanish language. He spent his time honouring it, discovering it, tracing his own path through it. He was born in a small town in Chile, and in his youth he moved to the capital Santiago where he discovered poetry, and he also discovered that the resistance that his own father, a tyrannical man who refused to encourage him in his desire to write, that this man was best kept away. It is at that moment that Neruda started writing some of the early erotic poems, one of his most famous books, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.

And then he was able to get a diplomatic job in the far east in Ceylon, and it was the discovery of the rest of the world and particularly the arrival on his way back to Paris first, to other parts of Europe, but especially to Spain, just as it was entering its own civil war in 1936 and lasted until 1938, that Neruda realised that poetry should not only be about one's own inner domestic, private thoughts and desires but it should be kind of a weapon or an extremity or a tool to change the world and to express the suffering that is going on around.

He realised that a true poet is a poet that finds some sort of symmetry between the world that inhabits him and the world he lives in, and that it is words that serve as a bridge between those two, and if he uses the words properly and if he makes those words have echoes around, they might be more powerful than a hand grenade or a tank. And it was in Spain that he realised that poetry needed to be about politics and that politics had much in it that is also poetic, but sometimes it's hard to find it that way.

Ramona Koval: He had these diplomatic posts. He wasn't diplomatic though, was he, in his political poetry?

Ilan Stavans: He wasn't certainly diplomatic. He was a senator for a while, he ran for president, he served as a diplomat in different parts of Europe, he served his own country. But when the time came to speak truth to power, he is certainly the poet that it didn't shy away from that task, and he is known for that type of courage, a courage that came with a smile.

Neruda would denounce the transnational corporations, the United Fruit Company, for instance, that had arrived and decimated Latin America, but not with a gesture of anger. He would research the history of those particular moments or destructions, and then chant them in a way that would let people understand what had happened. And yet at the same time he was never shy from expressing his own thoughts of how this should not take place again and that people should take arms or be courageous enough to stand in front of authorities that pushed them down or oppressed them.

Ramona Koval: We said his early poetry is very much love poetry often, and then the Spanish civil war changed him. And we have poems such as his famous 'I Explain a Few Things'. And we've got it just a little bit of Pablo Neruda actually reading from this poem.

Pablo Neruda: [reads in Spanish]

Ramona Koval: Pablo Neruda there, a reading in Spanish of course, 'I Explain a Few Things'. The poem which was about the Spanish Civil War found an echo in more recent times, English playwright Harold Pinter quoted from it when he received his Nobel Prize in 2005. It was an outburst against the coalition invading Iraq. He says, 'Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda's poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful, visceral description of the bombing of civilians.' So, Ilan, can you read some of it in English?

Ilan Stavans: It will be my pleasure. Let me just first say that this in my estimation might well be Neruda's most beautiful poem, certainly most powerful. This is a poem about a house and this is a poem about change, about blood, and about his own experience as a Chilean in Spain during the civil war.

Ramona Koval: I think you should read the whole thing because, as you say, if it's such an important poem we should hear it.

Ilan Stavans: Sure. The translation is by Galway Kinnell, an American poet.

'I Explain a Few Things'

You will ask: But where are the lilacs?
And the metaphysics covered with poppies?
And the rain that often struck
his words, filling them
with holes and birds?

Let me tell you what's happening to me.

I lived in a barrio
of Madrid, with bells,
with clocks, with trees.

From there you could see
the parched face of Castile
like an ocean of leather.
My house was called
the house of flowers, because from everywhere
geraniums burst: it was
a beautiful house,
with dogs and children.
Raul, do you remember?
Do you remember, Rafael?
Federico, do you remember
under the ground,
do you remember my house with balconies
where the June light drowned the flowers in your mouth?
Brother, brother!
Everything
was loud voices, salt of goods,
crowds of pulsating bread,
marketplaces in my barrio of Arguelles with its statue
like a pale inkwell set down among the hake:
oil flowed into spoons,
a deep throbbing
of feet and hands filled the streets,
meters, liters, the hard
edges of life,
heaps of fish,
geometry of roofs under a cold sun in which
the weathervane grew tired,
delirious fine ivory of potatoes,
tomatoes, more tomatoes, all the way to the sea.

And one morning all was burning
and one morning bonfires
sprang out of the earth
devouring humans,
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.

Bandidos with planes and Moors,
bandidos with rings and duchesses,
bandidos with black friars signing the cross
coming down from the sky to kill children,
and in the streets the blood of the children
ran simply, like children's blood.

Jackals the jackal would despise,
stones the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers the vipers would abominate.

Facing you I have seen the blood
of Spain rise up
to drown you in a single wave
of pride and knives.

Treacherous,
generals:
look at my dead house,
look at Spain broken:
from every house burning metal comes out
instead of flowers,
but from every crater of Spain
comes Spain
from every dead child comes a rifle with eyes,
from every crime bullets are born
that will one day will find out in you
the site of the heart.

You will ask: why doesn't his poetry
Speak to us of dreams, of leaves
of the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets,
come and see
the blood in the streets,
come and see the blood
in the streets!

Ramona Koval: That is Pablo Neruda's poem 'I Explain a Few Things'. There are many collections of Neruda's poetry. You've done some yourself. What was your aim in this more recent large collection?

Ilan Stavans: My aim was to show the variety, the different registers that Neruda is capable of. He is a poet that really is...through his pen can bring us to the most mundane items in life and to make us realise that those items define us at all times. And also he's a poet that can go out and describe major historical moments. He is a poet of sublime inspiration, but I have to confess, and I don't think this will surprise any listener, he is also a poet of bad poetry. Having written 3,000-plus poems, some of them are doomed to be quite bad and mediocre. He had a terrible period during the Vietnam War in which he wrote really very bad poetry. One book of his was called Incitement to Nixonicide, calling readers to go against Richard Nixon and bring him down. But he also has really superb poems, and those poems, as far as I'm concerned, those 20 or 30 poems that Neruda wrote that are sublime, are as essential as any part of the universe, the colour yellow, a Greek island, the smell of poppies. They are part of who we are and will always be.

Ramona Koval: Yes, because there is a Spanish poet, Juan Ramón Jiménez, who said that he was a great bad poet.

Ilan Stavans: People love to attack Neruda, for good reason. He did, as I said, have bad poetry. But also he was so successful that many of the poets of his own time, many of the intellectuals, were frankly jealous of the heights that he had been able to reach.

Ramona Koval: There are some poems in this book never before translated into English. You include some original Spanish and sometimes more than one translation of a poem. For example, the 'Ode to the Artichoke'...we should just mention the odes that he wrote. He wrote some odes to things like an artichoke, a dictionary, his trousers. These were for newspapers, weren't they.

Ilan Stavans: They were. He decided at one point when he was in his early 50s that he would try something new. He adored the form of the ode that had started with the Greeks and wanted to modernise it, and he decided to write an ode a day for a newspaper in Chile that would print it, and that newspaper eventually also allowed others to syndicate it. And so he chose an item, the ones that you listed and others, shoelaces, a pencil, salt, and paid attention to it. Some of these poems are three, four pages in length, others are shorter, but they almost always managed to bring us to realise that these items (say, the dictionary) are there serving a purpose and really changing who we are in a way that only a poet would be able to achieve.

Ramona Koval: Can you read the 'Ode to the Dictionary' for us?

Ilan Stavans: Yes, I have a portion here. I love this ode because I myself have a large collection of dictionaries, mostly in Spanish and English but also in different languages, and I love what a dictionary does, the idea that you can capture in between covers all the words that we use day in and day out, that somebody came up with this idea that our language can be contained in between covers. And Neruda pays tribute to the dictionary. He calls it in different parts of the ode a resource, a companion, a weapon, and at one point he...in this part that I'm going to read, he brings forth the idea that it is from the dictionary to his pen that all his literature comes forth. He says:

Dictionary, let one hand
of your thousand hands, one
of your thousand emeralds,
a
single
drop
of your virginal spring
one grain
from
your
magnanimous granaries
fall
at the perfect moment
upon my lips,
onto the tip of my pen,
into my inkwell.

I love in particular this phrase 'the perfect moment'. Very often you have the impression that a dictionary is just sitting there, and you open it in one page and that perfect moment happens when you and the word that is registered on that page all of a sudden are married, something new has happened. And Neruda is singing to the fact that the words that he is shaping, his own ode, are scrambled in the dictionary and that in his poem he unscrambles them, he gives them an order. And maybe that idea brings us forth to the concept that every single novel, every single short story or poem, present, past and future, is already contained in our dictionaries and that the writers don't do anything but unscramble the words that are in them and bring some inspiration to that order that is put forth.

Ramona Koval: When I mentioned before the 'Ode to the Artichoke', one of these odes, and this is one of the poems that you've actually got several...at least a couple of translations as well as the original Spanish, and I'll just read the beginning. 'Ode to the Artichoke':

[reading from The tender hearted artichoke... to ...arranging it's flounces.]

And it goes on. And the other translation says:

[reading from The tender hearted artichoke got dressed... to ...with it's red whiskers.]

So, these two different versions, why have both of them? What does each version do for our understanding of the poem, and are any exactly like the Spanish that he wrote?

Ilan Stavans: That is one of the purposes of this anthology that I put together. Translation is a way of appropriating a poem, but it's also a way of dressing it, of reshaping it for an audience that doesn't understand the original. Neruda is arguably the modern poet that has been translated the most. There is an astonishing number of translations of Neruda into English and into most modern languages, and I don't believe...and that is why I included in the book often more than one translation, I don't believe any translation or only one of them is enough to understand the essence of a poem. The Spanish that is the original is sacred, it cannot be changed, the poet left it in a particular way, and each translation is an approximation, it's an interpretation, it's a way by a translator (and sometimes that translator is a poet) to recreate that poem through his or her bent or subjectivity. So if you ask me which of these two translations is better, I will tell you that it's impossible to talk about the best and worst, unless the translation really is disastrous. But when it is a good translation it is an opportunity to see something in that poem that you didn't see before, not in the original or in other translations.

Ramona Koval: What about reading us 'Ode to the Watermelon' that's also a famous one.

Ilan Stavans: Sure. 'Ode to the Watermelon' is one of the most famous by him, and this translation is a gorgeous one. In Spanish it's called 'Oda a la Sandia', 'Ode to the Watermelon'.

The tree of intense
summer,
hard,
is all blue sky,
yellow sun,
fatigue in drops,
a sword
above the highways,
a scorched shoe
in the cities:
the brightness and the world
weigh us down,
hit us
in the eyes
with clouds of dust,
with sudden golden blows,
they torture
our feet
with tiny thorns,
with hot stones,
and the mouth
suffers
more than all the toes:
the throat
becomes thirsty,
the teeth,
the lips, the tongue:
we want to drink
waterfalls,
the dark blue night,
the South Pole,
and then
the coolest of all
the planets crosses
the sky,
the round, magnificent,
star-filled watermelon.
It's a fruit from the thirst-tree.
It's the green whale of the summer.
The dry universe
all at once
given dark stars
by this firmament of coolness
lets the swelling
fruit
come down:
its hemispheres open
showing a flag
green, white, red,
that dissolves into
wild rivers, sugar,
delight!
Jewel box of water, phlegmatic
queen
of the fruitshops,
warehouse
of profundity, moon
on earth!
You are pure,
rubies fall apart
in your abundance,
and we
want
to bite into you,
to bury our
face
in you, and
our hair, and
the soul!
When we're thirsty
we glimpse you
like
a mine or a mountain
of fantastic food,
but
among our longings and our teeth
you change
simply
into cool light
that slips in turn into
spring water
that touched us once
singing.
And that is why
you don't weigh us down
in the siesta hour
that's like an oven,
you don't weigh us down,
you just
go by
and your heart, some cold ember,
turned itself into a single
drop of water.

Ramona Koval: So I think we're all really thirsty now and we all really want to have a piece of watermelon and that's the power of the poet. When he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971, he was described as someone who is not only debated but for many is also debatable. He was also contentious, wasn't he, particularly when you consider how communists and communist sympathisers were viewed. This was still in the 1970s at the height of the Cold War.

Ilan Stavans: Yes, he was quite contentious and he was often accused, and for good reason, of aligning himself with fascism, not fascism of Mussolini or of Hitler but with Stalin and the Soviet regime. He visited the Soviet Union, befriended a number of apparatchiks and was given the Stalin prize. He has an ode to Stalin. When Fidel Castro in 1958-'59 entered Havana triumphantly and began the period that we know as the Cuban revolution, Pablo Neruda also celebrated that triumph, and when Fidel Castro started to commit human atrocities, Neruda did not turn around.

This is a poet who had a dream that the world would be better and was often blinded by that dream, and he did not see beyond the light of the Utopia that communism was offering, and he paid a heavy price. He was attacked viciously at different moments of his life for that type of naive communism, and for not being able to denounce as committedly those on the left as he had denounced those on the right. Time has gone by, the dust has settled down, and we can see Neruda for what he was, a wonderful poet, on many occasions a very limited and mediocre and blind poet. But as I was telling you before, I think that the good poetry by far overcomes the limitations of the bad ones.

Ramona Koval: He is one of the most translated poets in the world, isn't he.

Ilan Stavans: By far, sure. Yes, there are more translations of Neruda into English particularly than of any other Spanish-language poet, and that is only referring to people from that linguistic background.

Ramona Koval: Because you say he's been translated into Uzbek and Yiddish and even Latin. I'm not sure who's reading the Latin.

Ilan Stavans: I love the fact that he was translated into Yiddish, and it is in many ways because there was a communist contingency in the Yiddish landscape that adored Neruda as well.

Ramona Koval: What was he actually like as a man?

Ilan Stavans: Well, if you go to Chile, several of his houses have been turned into museums, and if you walk around the houses you see that this was a man who loved collecting, collecting different items, not only collecting poems and books but collecting stones, collecting bottles, collecting statues, collecting sand that he would bring from different parts of the world to his island. The most famous one is in Isla Negra, not too far from San Diego. He was surrounded by artefacts. These houses are really not liveable houses, they are more museum-like places where everywhere you go you might stumble with something else. It's as if he had never grown up, he was a child collecting his little stamps or his little cars and had continued with this passion.

He was a world traveller, a bon vivant, loved wine, loved women, loved friends and said often that having good friends was the biggest prize that he would ever get. He was a close friend of Federico Garcia Lorca, another very famous poet in this case from Spain. And whenever he loved someone he dedicated not one but more poems to that person, and those poems immortalised that relationship. There is a wonderful poem about Garcia Lorca, but there are wonderful poems about his wives, particularly Matilde who is the subject of his 100 love sonnets and also of the different poems that are part of that beautiful collection I was telling you about that he wrote in Italy called The Captain's Verses.

Ramona Koval: Of course Neruda wasn't his real name, and I understand he changed it early on because he didn't want his father to realise he was publishing under their name.

Ilan Stavans: Right, his real name was Neftali Ricardo Reyes Boloalto, and he once came across the name of a Czech writer, the last name of a Czech writer, Neruda, Jan Neruda, and literally stole it, or in an homage to him, and turned it into his own pen-name. In the end, just like Mark Twain, people today do not know that he was not born Pablo Neruda, like he was not born Mark Twain, and that in many ways also the creation of a pen-name (again, as in the case of Mark Twain) enabled Neruda to create an entire persona for himself that gave him the freedom to express himself in a way that probably with his own name he wouldn't have been able to because of the psychological conflicts that he had with his own father and because poetry is about inventing oneself through words.

Ramona Koval: Did his father ever reconcile himself to his son's success?

Ilan Stavans: The father died before Neruda became internationally known. There was a reconciliation, but Neruda talks in his own autobiography, called Memoirs, in Spanish Confieso que he vivido, not too much about his father. There are other elements in his life that are bizarre. He has beautiful poetry about childhood and about children, and yet he had only one daughter who suffered a brain illness and to whom he really didn't connect or have any attachment to, and in fact when the mother was in deep need and wrote to Neruda seeking help, he hardly responded. So the poet that can celebrate parenthood and childhood could also be a rough and disinterested father.

Ramona Koval: Ilan Stavans, thank you so much for sharing Pablo Neruda with us today. Thank you for being on The Book Show again, it was good to talk with you.

Ilan Stavans: Thank you very much, it was a pleasure.

Ramona Koval: Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture. And The Poetry of Pablo Neruda is published by Palgrave Macmillan. And I wonder whether you think Pablo Neruda is the greatest poet, and maybe you could tell us who your ten best are, we'd love to hear your views.

Publications

Title: The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

Author: Edited by Ilan Stavans

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan