#245.  WHAT I CAME TO MAKE HAPPEN IN THIS WORLD.   In 1917, a thirteen year old, Ricardo Eliecer Neftali Reyes Basoalto, published an essay, “Entusiasmo y perseverancia” in a Chilean newspaper; it was a strangely proleptic title.  The young man had not yet swapped out to his later, less cumbersome name, which would become known to the world: Pablo Neruda.  By the age of twenty he had published a book, Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada (in English, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair), to date the best-selling book ever of Spanish-language poetry.  For all his poet’s poverty, he moved in heady circles: he was a student of Gabriela Mistral and palled around with Rafael Alberti, Federico Garcia Lorca and Cesar Vallejo.  As with Octavio Paz, diplomatic work brought him to Asia; the maze of twentieth-century South American politics and Neruda’s lifelong commitment to the Communist Party brought him to reputation, public success, vituperation and exile in head-spinning succession.  He was a controversial figure, for his support for Stalin early on, and for his multiple and messy relationships with women (he fathered and abandoned a daughter who died in the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands; a chapter in his autobiography details his rape of a Sri Lankan maid).  He published voluminously all his life, and his works, quoted and set to music as well as read, made him a public figure.  His poetry moves through all the conceivable modern modes: political, erotic, surreal, epic, and intimate, and his protean career seems most obviously comparable to that great Spanish trickster, Picasso.  Enthusiasm and perseverance indeed.

      Neruda for all that has never been one of my great enthusiasms.  No real, no moral, political or aesthetic objections; as with Shelley, I just don’t hear the music.  And of course I read him at the distance of translation, though with Ben Belitt, Donald Walsh, Nathaniel Tarn, Alastair Reid and the long years of work by William O’Daly, Neruda has attracted gifted interpreters, and I don’t see that the work should present any special difficulties.  Maybe it’s that definiteness—that sense that whatever he says or does, he does out loud and standing up—that can be a little overbearing in Picasso as well.  When, in World’s End, he writes, “Among the wise / I have been the only fool, / and among those who knew less, / I always knew a little less,” I don’t buy it for an instant.  Neruda always knows.

     So it was a rather nice surprise to have been put on to a lovely little book Neruda published only some months before his death: The Book of Questions, seventy-four poems of three to six couplets apiece, all in the interrogatory:

Is 4 the same 4 for everybody?

Are all sevens equal?

When the convict ponders the light

is it the same light that shines on you?

For the diseased, what color

do you think April is?

Which occidental monarchy

will fly flags of poppies?

      These little koans range from the whimsical and political (he leaves “sad Nixon” in hell, “with his buttocks over the brazier”) to personal echoes, literary sallies (“Wasn’t Rimbaud scarlet, / Gongora a shade of violet?”) and the piercing:

Do all memories of the poor

huddle together in the villages?

And do the rich keep their dreams

in a box carved from minerals?

The poems are, cheerfully, all over the place, and gave me the pleasant sense of Neruda letting himself off the hook a bit; one selection of them in English has been published as a children’s book.  It’s a rather fine valedictory: when he asks, “Whom can I ask what I came / to make happen in this world?” this book, after a long, long career of making verse, is a pretty good answer.