translated from Spanish: Neruda, 2019: an unpresentable “whitening”

The body “Arts and Letters” of El Mercurio published on Sunday, November 3, an article entitled “The Double Return of Neruda: An Apology and His Poems of the 50s”. As is clear, the text addresses two themes. First, a new biographical book (Editorial Lumen, 2019) called “The Sins of the Poet”, by the national author Hernán Loyola. The second, a reference to the third volume of “Full Poetry”, published by Editorial Seix Barral.
Both publications are entirely complementary: especially in poets, the association between “life” and “work” tends to be symbiotic. Going further, it is quite possible that, even if they do not propose it, it will slide into their verses or writings. By the way, there’s an even more direct case: when they delve into the unique mazes of the autobiography.

In these lines, we will focus on the first section of the article, specifically because of a phenomenon that we think is quite unique: a willingness on Loyola’s part to almost expunge from all “sin” – that is precisely why the name of the work refers – to Neruda’s life or, at least, to justify them with rather unusual reasoning. The same is not true of the work of the journalist Pedro Pablo Guerrero, a fair text in which there is always a reasonable doubt regarding the quasi “sanctity” that is usually attributed to the author of “Residence on Earth”. There is an essential suspicion in his lines, even going so far as to directly challenge his interviewee: “(…) the position of rapist is objective,” he confronts him.
The allusion is not free. It is framed in the eleven “sins” of the vate that Guerrero lists following the contents of the book. “Useless poet, sexist, phlambling, bad husband, bad father, plagiariary, insolent, forsaken, Stalinist and bourgeois.” The list includes another word: “violator”.
To be sure, the latter word has forever changed the public image of Neruda.
The “innocence” of the dead
The genesis of how the case spread is almost implausible. The starting point is a short but thorough description by the poet in which he openly and without great modesty acknowledges how he sexually abused a young Tamil woman while serving as consul in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). In full awareness that she was considered of the caste of the “outcasts”, that is, an “untouchable” and even more so knowing that her role was reduced to “cleaning the bathroom” of the bungalow where she lived, the poet exercised all his power by tainting it, even more so given his status as a functioning diplomat. The facts date back to 1929, with a Neruda… 24-year-old.
The unusual thing is that the facts were there, written, for decades in the volume of memoirs “I confess I have lived”. The book was published in 1974 in Spain… with a poet who was already lying underground (he passed away days after the coup d’état of ’73). What is directly inferred is very simple: he never had to give the face nor the slightest explanation for this or any other act contained in his writing. But it’s not the end of the matter here. While the text was generally available – even in not too distant times, it was recommended as a school reading – no one seemed to have repaired in the rape described. That, until a few years ago when it began to spread to nations throughout the orb this singular narrative, which includes the following paragraph:
“One morning, determined to do everything, I took her heavily from the wrist and looked at her face to face. There was no language I could speak to him in. She let herself drive by me without a smile and was soon naked on my bed. Her thin waist, full hips, overflowing cups of her breasts made her equal to the ancient sculptures of southern India. The meeting was that of a man with a statue. He remained all the time with his eyes open, impassive. He was right to despise me. The experience was not repeated,” he reads in the Nerudian memoirs. 
Why didn’t you publish them in life? The answer seems logical: the dead never answer for their actions…
“Apology of Neruda”
As Plato immortalizing Socrates, the author of “The Sins of Neruda” seems to see no greater gravity on the matter. No one doubts that his work on the poet can be exhaustive, but his opinions leave a very strange taste…
The quote is textual: “What is truly deplorable is that there are people who cannot understand that there is a confession on these pages that meets all the requirements of a confession made to a Catholic priest: there is an unrepentant recognition, a repentance, and a determination not to fall. (….) Do you know any public recognition like Neruda does? Me, none. I’m not saying Neruda is applauded for this, but at least he’s recognized.”
Truly unusual. Unpresentable.
First, because for anyone who reads the full fragment of Neruda (it is easy to find on the web) there is not the slightest “repentance”, nor that of the “will” not to relapse. The words of the then diplomat are clear: “The experience was not repeated.”
Second, it is only because a priest is made a confession, it does not exempt from guilt, in the least, unless it is clear that the religious stipulateans an acquittal. This argument is very unusual: it would imply that if Hitler (or in a closer case, Manuel Contreras) were to confess and say that they are genocidal psychopaths, to go on to describe their crimes and future plans, by the very enunciation of it they would already be “free” from all sin. Unjustifiable.
Finally, this “public recognition”: What is the value of a book published after the death of its author and even more so when it had the Nobel Prize in its hands since 1971? In practice, none.
Another of the poet’s “sins” is linked to his first marriage, the birth of his daughter and his subsequent departure from both. It was 1930 when she married the Dutch Maryka Antoinette Hagenaar Vogelzang (known as “Maruca”). In 1934 he came to the world Malva Marina Trinidad, with a serious illness in charge: hydrocephalus. Two years later, Neruda formally separated from Hagenaar, but her divorce application was rejected. In March 1943, Malva died in Gouda, the Netherlands. I was 9 years old.
For the biographer (and editor of the five loms of the poet’s “Complete Works”), such a situation has a rather particular “explanation”.
“What I have tried about the Neruda bad father or bad husband was to show that he found himself in a truly terrible dilemma: he did not abandon his daughter; separated from his wife which is something else,” he says. A date like this is likely to cause horror in many parents.
His claim that attacks on Neruda would be born of “bad faith attached to ignorance” is also highly striking. The poison is, especially in a field like Literature, where envy and quarrels are as old as bread; Ignorance is something else, more all the more universal about Chile’s author, on which there are millions of printed pages dedicated to his life and work, not to mention Babylonian Material of the Internet.
“He is convicted without giving much inquiry or voice to the accused. There is no will to understand the ‘criminal’; there is a previous position,” Loyola explains.
A “luxury” from Chile
In Guerrero’s chronicle/interview, the author argues that Neruda’s “mortal sin” was to have been openly Stalinist. Indeed, such a position would change over the years, particularly from the period of “thaw” in the Soviet Union, in which he highlighted the 1956 denunciation of the crimes recorded during the 30 years of Stalin’s term, as well as the “personality cult” that surrounded him. Interestingly, only three years earlier, in 1953 the author of “Twenty Poems of Love and a Desperate Song” received the then-called “Stalin Peace Among Peoples Award” awarded by the USSR; which was dubbed the Lenin Peace Prize among the peoples, after the “de-Stalinization” initiated by Khrushchev. What will you have done with the honorary medal awarded to you by the Soviets, after learning of this “unknown” facet of Stalin?
Neruda, by the way, was moved by such revelations, although he “did not change the game, but of poetry”. True to his communist militancy, he was the party’s pre-candidate for the 1969 face-to-face elections, eventually giving that nomination to Salvador Allende, who ended up leading the Popular Unity.
In any case, being a supporter of Moscow was not a bad “business” in those years and more than some benefit should have reported to the poet, at a time when the USSR and the US, were contesting world hegemony side by side, with no nation to counterbalance them. This, coupled with his international artistic fame, eventually turned him into an almost mythological character on the world left.
Thus, to argue that his devotion to the Soviet Union was a “mortal sin” seems in the light of the totally dubious years; what’s more, you might think it was precisely the opposite.
Finally, Loyola clarifies that “beyond being a communist, Neruda is a luxury of Chile. We can’t lose him! It’s a value that’s beyond your own political position.” The author (born 1930) was a friend of the poet. To good friends, as you know, you tend to forgive them everything, but when you write a biography…
While the largest mass protests in Chile to be memorialised are taking place, the INDH receives daily new allegations of human rights violations (more than 2,300 to date), including many illegal detensions against women, adolescents and girls.
In 1929, in Ceylon the young Tamil who “let herself drive by me without a smile and was soon naked on my bed” by Consul Pablo Neruda and who “stayed with her eyes open all the timeImpassive. (And) he did well to despise me” was not supported by any State or international human rights body.
It is good not to forget that when talking about “sins”… Neruda.

Francisco Ramirez. Journalist and writer. “Book Fund” Award 2018 in the category of Literature/Creation).

The content poured into this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.

Original source in Spanish

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