On Pablo Neruda's Time in Rangoon, Sri Lanka, and Java

Jamie James writes about the young Pablo Neruda's time in the Chilean foreign service: "When the minister asked him where he wanted to go, he replied confidently, 'Rangoon.' He had no idea where it was." More, from "Pablo Neruda’s Life as a Struggling Poet in Sri Lanka," at Lit Hub:

The most reliable source for Neruda’s state of mind in Asia is a series of letters he wrote to Héctor Eandi, an Argentinean critic who had praised the Twenty Love Poems. It was a bold stroke for Neruda to undertake exile in a faraway land; he was scarcely an adult. The experience was more shocking than he cared to admit to his family and friends. An epistolary relationship with a sympathetic older colleague in Buenos Aires was a safe outlet for his emotional bafflement. His first letter to Eandi was far from bold:

Occasionally, for long periods of time, I am so empty, with no power to express anything or verify anything within myself, and a violent poetic disposition that has not ceased to exist in me gives me an increasingly inaccessible path, with the result that a great part of my struggle is accomplished with suffering, because of the need to occupy a rather remote domain with a strength that is surely too weak.

The main cause of Neruda’s alienation was the narrow-minded colonial establishment, which disgusted him. Foreign diplomats were sternly warned against mixing with the local people. When a British official hinted to Neruda that he should not be seen at a popular Persian café because it was frequented by “natives”—in other words, the people in whose country he was a guest—he kicked against such bigotry and chose isolation instead.

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