The death of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) in the midst of the tragic events that shook Santiago and all of Chile last year has deprived Latin America of one of its two modern-day Nobel laureates in literature. Guatemalan novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias received the Nobel Prize in 1967. Four years later, after final balloting to determine which Latin American writer would receive the award, Neruda won out by one vote over the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges.
The award stimulated interest in Neruda’s work, and new editions of his poetry in translation began appearing at a quickened pace. One of the most recent of these is Ben Belitt’s bilingual edition entitled New Poems, 1968-1970. This volume carries an introduction by the translator in which he knowledgeably situates this most recent segment of the poet’s prolific work, which includes three separate volumes: The Hands of the Day (1968), World’s End (1969), and Stones of the Sky (1970).
While translator Belitt cannot be faulted for temerity (or even humility) in approaching the task of rendering Neruda’s verse into English, in his aggressive and sincerely creative charge at the poems he sometimes takes what one cannot help but consider as unusual liberties with the originals. Liberties, yes; but only rarely does one come upon obvious errors. The latter are infrequent and in a larger battlefield are, in perspective, but minor casualties. Belitt’s unquestioned talent, and the firm criteria he has developed for interpreting Neruda’s work, can be observed on every page.
Morris F. Carson’s study of Neruda’s work, Pablo Neruda: regresó el caminante, is a sympathetic and coherent interpretation of the intimate relationships between the events of the poet’s life and his poetry. It is a respectful, calm examination of Neruda’s residence on this earth, wherein Carson reveals no startling discoveries or new perspectives. Rather, he earns the reader’s admiration for his valuable correlation of the disparate views put forth by other critics, opinions which he then tempers with his own sound judgments. His study carries to the year 1967 and, thus, does not encompass the new poems of Belitt’s edition. (The latter poems, it should be noted, do not appreciably alter the image of the poet that has been gradually revealed to us over the space of a full half-century.)
Rita Guibert’s Seven Voices is an immensely interesting document. Over the period 1968-1971 she tracked down (in some cases this term is quite appropriate) and interviewed seven Latin American writers. Her pursuit covered three continents, giving some credence to Luis Harss’s statement at the XVI Congress of the International Institute of Latin American Literature (Michigan State University, August 1973) that magical realism—the single most distinguishing characteristic of “la nueva narrativa hispanoamericana”—is a tendency created during a specific historical moment by a group of Latin American writers in exile, voluntary or otherwise.
Miss Guibert’s subjects are two poets (Chile’s Pablo Neruda and Mexico’s Octavio Paz), four novelists (Guatemalan Asturias, Argentine Julio Cortázar, Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, and Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante), and Argentine poet-essayist-short story-writer, Jorge Luis Borges. In the interviews these literary figures are invited to talk not only about their work, but also about other things that are important to them. Paz discourses at length on love, Cortázar on his political engagement, Cabrera Infante on the early years of Castro’s Cuba, García Márquez on the anguish and self-doubt that notoriety has inflicted on him.
The Borges interview, touching on many themes, is the best he has given in recent years. (And he has given many.) Neruda talks openly of his politics and his poetry in a long, frank statement that is at once insightful and poignant for the reader, offering as it does a self-portrait in words that Neruda could not know would occupy some of the last pages of his earthly legacy.
