TLS Reassesses Pablo Neruda in the #MeToo Era

In a recent TLS article, Ben Bollig muses: "Is Neruda still worth reading today?" Two new collections of Pablo Neruda's writing, published in English for the first time, would be cause for celebration—were it not for the sheer volume of Neruda's writings already available to inquisitive readers and Neruda's unsavory conduct. "What if the problem is not just proliferation, but also Neruda himself? The man matters: throughout his work, autobiography and self-fashioning are inescapable. It is not always very palatable," Bollig writes. Let's pick up there: 

In his memoirs, Neruda recounts an incident in 1929 in Wellawatte, Sri Lanka, where he had been posted as a dip­lomat. He developed an obsession with the Tamil girl who emptied his slop bucket: “One morning, I decided to go all the way”, he recalls. “I got a strong grip on her wrist and stared into her eyes . . . . Unsmiling, she let herself be led away and was soon naked in my bed . . . . It was the coming together of a man and a statue. She kept her eyes wide open, all the while, completely unresponsive. She was right to despise me. The experience was never repeated”.

Neruda the man is certainly a problem, but critics have argued that unacceptable attitudes to women and sex course through his poetry too. The link between the silencing of women and sexual violence is underlined by Mario Vargas Llosa in his novel La Fiesta del Chivo (The Feast of the Goat), when the dictator Rafael Trujillo abuses a teenager, having recited poem fifteen of the Veinte poemas to her. Then there is the politics. A youthful anarchist, Neruda became and remained a communist, at times a Stalinist, for much of his mature career. And so we read dithyrambs to Stalin; rhapsodies about various authoritarian states, including their tractor production; and a poem unironically called “The Angel of the Central Committee”.

Megalomania is hard to avoid in Neruda’s poetry. The huge scale of his Latin American epic, Canto general (1950), has its corollary in gargantuan appetites for food and drink, as well as sex. The excess loses its charm after a while. The appetite stretched to other people’s verses. Persistent accusations of plagiarism, or unacknowledged borrowings, accompanied Neruda over the years: the Uruguayan Carlos Sabat Ercasty in the early works; Rabindranath Tagore in the Veinte poemas; or later an obscure Argentine poet, Jorge Enrique Ramponi, as a source for “Alturas de Macchu Picchu”. Across the vast stretch of the oeuvre, there are wide variations in quality. C. M. Bowra calculated – somewhat harshly – that about “half” of Neruda’s poetry was “very poor stuff indeed”. So is Neruda still worth reading today? Might these two new translations give a sense of his continued relevance, or remind us of the thrill of a first encounter with España en el corazón (1937; Spain in Our Hearts) or “Heights of Macchu Picchu”?

Read on at TLS.