Neruda and Borgej

PER.'ONALHIJTORY NERUDAAND BORGEJ No tzuoLatin-Anerican writers couldbe more important. No tttso ztsriterscould bemore diferent. Hou did the authorbecorne the friend and translatorof both? BYALA.'TAIR REID f f TuoN I first went to Spain, in country, to Andalusia, to Gibraltar and l/l/ 1953.I knew little about l'4orocco, to Pornrgal-looking and lis- Y Y thelivingcountryandbarely tening a lot, and I wrote the fust of a se- a word of the language.But my senses ries of chronicleson Spain for The New were in good working order, and I was Yorker.Soon after it appeared,I had my instanth' drarvn in by Spain'srhythms Spanishpress credentials withdrawn, but and its landscapes-the burned, sun_.- that made little difference,for Spain ex- stainedearth, the silver-blueclarig,of istedthen on rumor and speculation.Liv- Nlediteranean light, the warm s,rle.nnity ing there felt like belonging to an exten- ofthe peopie,the sparenessofvillage life. sive whispered conspiracy against the Existencewas honed down to its essen- Franco regime. Spain was at something tials,making the dayslonger, time more of a standstill,still in shockfrom the Civil abundant.So I returnedto Spain,and re- War and the long isolation that followed turned, and eventu'allywent to live there it, threadbarecompared to the rest of Eu- in 1956, setting out to learn thg country, rope. Censorship,both moral and politi- and slowly absorb the Spanish senseof cal, hung heavy over the press,over the time. Spaniardshave a gift fbr exiranding universities,and overwriters and publish- the present,around a meal or a conver- ers, and the police had sharp antennae sation; and they are mastersof the cos- out for any sign of dissidence.The writ- mic shrug that shedsall preoccupations ers I knew complainedthat yearsofcen- exceptthose immediatelyat hand. But sorship had instilled in Spaniardsthe living in Spain meant, aboveall, entering habit of censoringthemselves. Newspa- the Spanishlanguage, for in those early perswere gray and evasive,written opin- daysI felt separatedfrom the spokenlife ion was sparseand guarded, and literature around me, a baffiementhard to bear. was thin and soare. Spanish,at first encounter,is welcoming: Among my friends in Barcelonawas you enter it by way of the market and the a young poet and pubJishernamed Car- kitchen, but you soon find yourself los Barral, lean, birdlike, throaty-voiced, stranded on that plateau of daily needs. and given to infectiousenthusiasms. Car- The languagelies still beyond. Living in los's imprint, Seix Barral, published the anotherlanguage means growing another work of new Spanishwriters and of Eu- self, and it takes time for that other self ropeanwriters in translation, and conse- to becomea familiar. \\4rile I went about quently was always battling the censor. learning the machinery and the music, I Carlos's enthusiasm at that time, how- reaJizrdat the sametime that the Soan- ever,was for the writing that was b.gtn- ish I wasacquiring was as devoid of con- ning to appear from the countries of text asthat of a young child, for I had no SpanishAmerica. In 1962,he published past in the language.I was lucly, how- Mario Vargas Llosa's novel "La Ciudad ever,in having wise friends, and, follow- y los Perros," later translated as "The ing their counsel,I entereda continuum Time of the Hero." The book was re- of readingand listening. ceivedin Spain with an excitement hardly There is nothing like immersionin an ever generatedby the Spanish novels of unknown-new places,new landscapes, the day, and it led Carlos to proclaim, new preoccupations,new loves, a new with remarkable prescience,that it was language-to sharpenthe edgeof atten- from the countries of Spanish America tion. From Majorca, where I first landed, that we should expect not just the next I moved to Madrid and then to Barce- literary flowering but the renewing of the lona. I travelled all over-to the Basoue Spanishlanguage. 57 In those days, the attitude of Span- When Mario Vargas Llosa came to eruption, however,very few writers from iards toward Spanish America most Barcelona,Carlos introduced me. Mario Soanish America had earned interna- resembledthe way the English used to had left Peru behind and lived in Paris, tional attention. Foremost among them regard the United States,with an insuffer- working for the French radio network: were the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and able condescension.Europe was much he broadcastto Latin America at night the Argentine masterJorge Luis Borges. more immediateto them than the South and wrote by day. He had a kind of flash- They were, eachin a quite separateway, American continent, and their knowledge ing intensity to him, and a single,burn- the forerunnersof the writers ofthe Boom. of itwas vague.So was mine. I had in my ing ambition: to live by his writing. It was I had been introduced to Borges's heada mixture of schoolgeography, Hol- nearlyimpossible, he said,to make a liv- writing a few years earlier, by Pipina lywood epics,Carmen Miranda with fruit ing asa writer in Latin America: editions Prieto, a vivacious Argentine who had on her head, peons asleepunder huge were small, readerswere sparse,and few known him in Buenos Aires and who Neruda in Isla Negra, 1969.Hisfriend v.tassought out and shot,and everynthereabout htm Mruda saut Spain broken. The zoar brougbt about in him a deeppolitical conaersion. sombreros,the bossanova, and the cha- writers were read beyond their own bor- spokeof him with such fervor that when cha. It may have had something to do ders, since tariff barriers in many coun- shepressed his "Ficciones"on me I would with the stasisof Spain at the time, but, tries madebooks hard to comeby. While not havedared not read it. The effect on through the books and manuscriptsthat the separatecountries of Latin America an unsuspectingreader of encounteringa Carlos passedon to mrbooks like Juan all had their writers, it made little sense, work of Borges'can be alarming enough Rulfo's "Pedro Pdramo" and Alejo Car- Mario said,to speakof a "Latin American" almost to justi$' a publisher'swarning on pentier's "The Lost Steps"-I began to literature.As yet,there was no bodyofwrit- the book jacket. His storiesinduce a kind take an impassionedinterest in South ing that had found its way through of vertigo in his readers,an eerieafter- America, and to readits turbulent history translation into other literatures and so effect that can invest small happenings, with some amazement.More than that, achievedinternational recognition. \Atthin like breaking a glass or missing a train, I found in the literature a loosening of a decade,that was to changeutterly, with with ominous significance.Pipina was a Spanish from its Castilian restraints,an the surgeof memorablenovels, popularly bewitching talker, and could practically intenseverbal energy.I noticed the same referredto asthe Boom, that appearedin perform Borges'sstories. We talked them thing in the few Spanish Americans I the aftermathof the Cuban Revolutionof over,endlessly, and beforelong I kept the came acrossin Barcelona:they had more 1,959and receivedgreat acclaimin many halFdozen slenderbooks that contained exuberancethan we were usedto in Spain languages:novels by Vargas Liosa, Julio most of his writing then-poems and es- p and, given the occasion,they turned con- CortLzar, Gabriel Garcia Mdrquez, Jos6 saysas well as stories-always at hand. Qversationonitsear,makingaplayground Donoso, Alejo Carpentier, and Guil- I had been coming acrossthe poetry 3 of the language. lermo Cabrera Infante. Prior to that of Neruda piecemeal, mostly in the 5B THENEV YORKER,JUNE 24 T"JULY 1,1996 houses of friends, for Neruda's books sensualist,a poet of physicallove, a man family moved to Europe, where they lived were then proscribed in Spain as Com- of appetites,Borges is an ascetic;where for the next sevenyears-first in Geneva, munist literature. There is an extra- Neruda is rooted in what he has exoeri- where Borges studied and read French ordinary lift that comes from reading enced,Borges seems to havelived almost and German, and then in Spain, where Neruda's ooetrv for the first time: both entirelyin literature,in the mind-travel of he began to write in earnest.When he from its ih..i b."nty on the ear and his reading. Borges acceptedbeing Ar- returned to Argentina, in 1,921,fired from its great tumble of images. But gentineas his destiny,Buenos Aires ashis by a new enthusiasmfor his country, he I found not one but many Nerudas. locality,but his preoccupationswere began a literary career-as a poet, an I read his fierce elegieson the Spanish wholly metaphysical.Where Neruda in essayist,and a reviewer,in the world of Civil War, and his tender, whimsi- his poems addressedthe realities of the salons,tertu/ias, and small magazines- cal "Ode to My Socks," his sensual Latin-American presentand lived on in- that continued all his life. lft . "'?:.},]'t n * ;,..i.il,',i _st **{ .,;" fto 0'. i:ir:-:r' '..t : E-J$.; Borgesin BuenosAires, 1971. The ffict on an unsuspectingreader of encounteringa tuork of Borges' can be alarming enoughalmost tajustfy a publisher'sraarning on thejacket. love poems, and the high incanta- timate terms with the physicalworld, Neruda had his beginningsin 1904, in tory pitch of his "Heights of Machu Borges'swritings often castdoubt on the Paral, in the rainy south of Chile, where Picchu," and I wondered at their accom- very existenceof that world, except as a his father worked on the railroad, on the plished varieqt but had no sense,yet, mental projection, a fiction. frontier of the sreat forests. He has re- of who the poet was among so many createdhis solitary,awestruck childhood, incarnations. flonces wasborn in 1899,in theBue- his discoveryof the secretlife of words, That these two writers should be ac- l-l nos Aires suburbof Palermo,into in a number of enchantedooems.

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