He had traced this transformation before, of course-most notably in one of his finest poems, “Explico algunas cosas” (Let me Explain a Few Things) from Spain in My Heart (1937) and in the very first of the Elementary Odes, “El hombre invisible” (The Invisible Man). In the “Ode to Jean Arthur Rimbaud,” Neruda seems to be gazing back without the slightest nostalgia at his earlier anguished, self-obsessed self and relishing the fact that he is no longer enveloped in inward-looking melancholy. It is perhaps because of this that I have reached as far as I now have with my poetry and also with my banner. I was the most forlorn of poets and my poetry was provincial, oppressed, and rainy. I come from a dark region, from a land separated from all others by the steep contours of its geography. And in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Stockholm in 1971, Neruda specifically linked Rimbaud with his own origins: “I believe in this prophecy of Rimbaud, the Visionary. Neruda showed-in the prologue to his only novel, El habitante y su esperanza (The Inhabitant and his Hope), published in 1926-that he identified as a young man with the romantic outsider, as Rimbaud did. Like many of his generation, Neruda relied on Enrique Díez Canedo’s and Fernando Fortún’s 1913 anthology, La poesía simbolista francesa, which contained translations not only from Rimbaud but also Verlaine, Baudelaire, Nerval, and others. However, partly in order to escape his father’s clutches, he changed it to Pablo Neruda and published his first collection of poems, Crepusculario, in 1923.Īrthur Rimbaud was one of Neruda’s favorite poets as a young man. His name at the time was still Ricardo Eliecer Neftali Reyes Basoalto. Neruda initially arrived in the capital, Santiago, from Temuco in 1921, to study French pedagogy. He later wrote that he considered these three works, plus the 1959 collection, Navegaciones y regresos (Voyages and Homecomings) to be part of a single book. Buoyed by the critical and public acclaim, Neruda brought out two more books of odes for the same publisher, Losada, in Buenos Aires: Nuevas odas elementales (New Elementary Odes) in 1956 and Tercer libro de las odas (Third Book of Odes) in 1957. The Elementary Odes proved a huge success with both readers and critics. Yet, in his superb study of the Odes, the late Robert Pring-Mill rightly rejected any attempt to divide up Neruda’s work into mutually exclusive stages and pointed out that the Odes were as politically committed, lyrically, as his 1950 book, Canto general, was epically. We enjoy the world anew through his eyes: yes, a simple artichoke can be seen as a soldier, wrapped in armor and ready for battle an onion is “more beautiful than a bird / with blinding feathers.” Other odes are overtly political, condemning North American military aggression in Korea or US appropriation of much of the Chilean copper industry. Many seem genuinely full of his awe at the beauty around him. I cannot agree with René de Costa’s view that Neruda designed the ode “as a didactic artifice.” Neruda’s odes are neither didactic nor artificial. He praises simple objects like onions and tomatoes. Nevertheless, his aim was to speak to the ordinary people in the street about ordinary things using the language of the street. When Pablo Neruda published his first of three collections of odes-the Odas elementales (Elementary Odes)-in 1954, he was probably unaware that his Russian hero, Pushkin, had written 130 years earlier that odes were the lowest form of poem because they lacked a “plan” and because mere “rapture” excluded the kind of “tranquility” which, Pushkin said, was “an indispensable condition” of the highest beauty.”įortunately, Neruda does achieve rapture, tranquility, and immense beauty in many of the Odes.
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