Prize for a Chilean Poet

SINCE 1901, when the Swedish Academy chose the first recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature and bypassed Leo Tolstoy, the awards have often been surrounded by controversy. There is still a furor over last year's pick, Soviet Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose works (Cancer Ward; The First Circle) expose the authoritarianism of Soviet life. Fearing that he would not be allowed back into the U.S.S.R., he has not dared travel to Stockholm to accept the award; and the Swedish embassy, fearing an adverse reaction from its Soviet hosts, refuses to stage a public ceremony for him in Moscow.

Last week, as the secretary of the Swedish Academy, Karl Ragnar Gierow, stood outside the academy's headquarters in Stockholm's old bourse to name the 67th Nobel laureate, he told the gathered newsmen: "On television the other night [a Swedish author] remarked it would be better to give all the prizes to ambassadors so there won't be any problem in handing over the prize. Today we are doing as he suggested. The 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to Ricardo Eliezer Neftali Reyes y Basoalto." After a theatrical pause, while most of his audience wondered what obscure writer the academy had chosen this time, Gierow added: "Also known as Pablo Neruda."

A Real Man. In naming the world-renowned Chilean poet, Communist and ambassador to France, the academy picked another controversial figure. He is only the third Latin American to be given the coveted prize--following his high school teacher, Chile's Gabriela Mistral (1945), and Guatemala's Miguel Angel Asturias (1967). Some feel that his immense output--by his own estimate, some 7,000 pages of poetry--is occasionally marred by obscurantisn and Marxist propaganda. But Spanish Poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who was killed during the Spanish Civil War, praised Neruda as "a real man who knows that the reed and the swallow are more immortal than the hard cheek of a statue."

In announcing the award, Gierow described Neruda as "the poet of violated human dignity," one who "brings alive a continent's destiny and dreams." He added: "Those who are searching for Neruda's weak points have not far to look. Those who are looking for his strong points need not search at all."

Sense Over Intellect. Born on July 12, 1904, in Parral, Chile, Neruda was already writing poems by the age of eight, although his father, a railroad worker, hated poets and would burn his son's notebooks. Fearing his father's wrath, he first used the pen name Pablo Neruda when he was 15, taking the surname from the Czechoslovak writer Jan Neruda (1834-91). In 1923 his first volume of verse, Crepusculario (Twilight), was published. A year later, he followed with Twenty Love Poems and One Song of Despair, a book that remains his most popular, with more than a million copies sold. It evokes an instinctive materialism based more on the senses than the intellect, and the flesh becomes identified with the sensuous geography of his native country: "I have been marking your body's white atlas/ with crosses of fire./ My mouth was a spider which crossed, hiding itself./ In you, behind you, fearful, thirsty."

In the Latin American tradition, the Chilean government rewarded him in 1927 with a series of consular posts that took him to Burma, Ceylon, Java, Singapore, Argentina and Spain. In Barcelona and Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, he found his sympathies with the Loyalists, became a Communist, and began writing socially "committed" poetry with a passionate lyricism strongly akin to Walt Whitman's.

Poetry of Impurity. He advocated a poetry of "impurity," steeped in the total apprehension of material things. This "world of objects," he wrote, is "steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of lilies and urine ... a poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing and love, idyls and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts, affirmations and taxes."

His new allegiance to Communism required a direct and lucid language. His anti-Yankee "The United Fruit Co." is a bitter diatribe against economic imperialism: "Jehovah divided his universe:/ Anaconda, Ford Motors,/ Coca-Cola Inc., and similar entities:/ the most succulent item of all,/ The United Fruit Company Incorporated."

Turning overtly to politics, he joined the Communist Party and was elected to the Chilean Senate in 1945. After accusing Chile's President Gabriel Gonzalez Videla of having sold out to the U.S., Neruda was forced to flee in 1948, and until 1953 lived in exile. Meanwhile he finished the major work of his career, the Whitmanesque Canto general, which celebrates the struggles of the Latin American peoples against rapacious exploitation.

Rub of Verity. Despite Neruda's continuing Marxist stance, only a small percentage of his countless poems can be considered purely political. Though he won the Stalin Peace Prize (1953), he ultimately disapproved of the personality cult of Stalin. In 1954 he wrote: "Stalin is the high noon, the maturity of man and of peoples . . ." But in 1963 his assessment had completely changed: "This cruel man stopped life."

Buddha-like in appearance, Neruda is an intense lover of his native land and an obsessive searcher through memories and the senses for "the rub of mysterious verity." When not in Paris, he usually lives in Isla Negra on the Chilean coast. For 20 years he was a perennial Nobel nominee. By the time the Swedish Academy finally conferred on him the gold medal and the $87,000 in prize money, he had just about abandoned hope that he would ever be so honored for what he once described as "the equivocal cut of my song."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.