New edition serves to remind us of poet’s strong pull in China
Print Edition
A new Chinese edition of Pablo Neruda’s lyrical poetry is just out. The 100,000 print-run in an elegant volume by Think Kingdom shows the poet’s ongoing popularity in China.
The book, in a fine translation by Chen Li, includes such mainstays as “Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair,” “Verses of the Captain” and “One Hundred Sonnets of Love.”
Neruda, considered by some as the most widely read poet ever, has a universal appeal. His epic, lyrical and daily life poetry convey his extraordinary command of the Spanish language. His poems’ directness and straightforwardness make them strikingly accessible, and may be one reason they translate so well.
This new Chinese edition, and his appeal in this country, reflect the Chilean poet’s long-standing association with Asia and with China, a country he visited and wrote about repeatedly.
While still in his 20s, Neruda spent five years (1927-32) in Asia — in Rangoon, Colombo, Batavia and Singapore — as consul ad honorarium of Chile. It was there that he wrote the bulk of “Residence on Earth,” one of his major works.
In his 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech, Neruda looked back on Asia as an almost necessary learning experience where he learned “through other people” that “there is no insurmountable solitude.” Through his “solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence,” he was then able to “reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance … in this dance … there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common humanity.”
Neruda traveled through Hong Kong and Shanghai in 1928, and referred in his memoirs to an “iron-clad colonized China of gamblers, opium dens, bordellos, thieves, false Russian duchesses, and pirates of land and sea.”
In his poem “China,” he spoke of the traditional Western view of this country as “an old wrinkled woman, infinitely poor, with an empty plate of rice at the door of a temple.”
As he put it,
They wanted us to believe
That you slept
That you would sleep an eternal sleep,
That you were “mysterious,”
Untranslatable, strange
A mother beggar in rags of silk, while in each of your ports
Ships would leave full of treasures
And the adventurers fought among themselves
For your wealth: minerals and ivory, planning
After bleeding you, how they would take away
A good ship loaded with your bones.
Yet, when he visited in 1951 and then again in 1956, he found a new China,
…
A strong and sweet captain of the people
Still with your victorious weapons in one hand
And a growing bunch of wheat ears in the bosom
And on your head the star of all the peoples.
From sea to sea, from land to snow, all the men watch you, China
What a powerful young sister has been born!
And he went on :
The man in the Americas, bent over his furrow,
The poor man of the tropics, the brave miner of Bolivia, the broad worker of deep Brazil, the herdsman of infinite Patagonia,
They look at you, People’s China, they salute you and with me they send you this kiss on your forehead.
Neruda’s first visit in 1951 was to confer the Lenin Peace Prize to Madam Soong Ching-ling, the widow of Sun Yat-sen, for whom he a composed a poem, “Conferring a Medal to Madam Soong Ching-ling:”
…
And so we saw you, dear friend, upon arriving at the airport:
You seemed younger than we had thought, and more simple,
As your people that have suffered and fought so much ....
Yet despite his admiration for the honoree, things did not go all that well.
At a Soviet Embassy dinner, Soong, seated next to Neruda, showed him an exquisite golden cigarette holder, embossed with rubies and diamonds, one of her favorite personal belongings. After holding it, Neruda returned it. But when getting up from the table, she asked him for the holder. Although convinced he had returned it, he did his best to search for it. At the last moment she found the holder in her handbag.
“She recovered her smile, but I didn’t smile again for several years,” Neruda said.
During his second visit in 1956, he took a cruise on the Yangtze River with Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado.
“China’s central highway. Very broad and quiet, the Yangtze sometimes narrows, and the ship can hardly make it through its Titanic gorges. On each side, the high stone walls seem to touch in the heights, where sometimes one can grasp a small cloud in the sky, drawn with the skill of an Oriental brush, or a small human dwelling among the scars of stone. Few landscapes on Earth of such overwhelming beauty” … “A deep poetry emerges from this grandiose nature; a short and naked poetry like the flight of a bird,” Neruda wrote.
In his judgment, “this combination of vast land, extraordinary human work and gradual elimination of all injustices, will make the beautiful, extended and deep Chinese humanity flourish.”
It is difficult to say what Neruda would make of today’s China, but there is little doubt that, at a time when China has come into its own, and Latin America partners with it to forge a better future, Neruda’s insights into China’s awakening and our America’s destiny resonate.
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