I'm not certain whether Latin-American writers have a special ability to put together words in exciting and unexpectedly vivid combinations, or whether this is simply a function of reading in a non-native language. Neruda--along with Paz and Borges, among others--delights and startles on every page with the way he sees and describes the world. It feels at times that he is just introducing words to each other, and standing back to see how they interact. Let's conduct a little experiment, shall we? Here is a table of the combinations on a "random" diptych, to the extent that anything is random.
It is amusing that I can't even cite the specific pages from which these were taken, spanning two poems, the book having closed as I type. One can clearly see the interchangability of Neruda's descriptions, and that "desnuda tierra de un incendio" or "dulces racimos de mi patria" would be just as serviceable--and just as Neruda--as any other combination, in spite of never having occurred. What we are left with then, is not a specific moment or vivid image that defines Neruda, but rather a corpus of words that combined reveal the soul of his epic. He does not seem to be carefully selecting his juxtapositions--though of course he did. He seems to be pouring everything sharp, putrid, herbaceous, and mineral together into a boiling cauldron, and letting it boil over.
This is something of a mercy to the reader, proportionally to how closely the reader intends to look. A scholar could, and no doubt has, devote at least an essay to, for example, Neruda's descriptions of love in "El Hondero":
"Sólo un golpe de madreselvas en la boca,
sólo unas trenzas cuyo movimiento subÍa
hacia mi soledad como una hoguera negra" (606)
any one of which could be plugged into the above table and replaced with others. Neruda states over and over, however, that he did not write to enable such analysis. Rather, as he says in "Artigas", he writes because "Sumergí mi cabeza en tu arena y en la plata do los pejerreyes, en la clara amistad de tus hijos, en tus destartalados mercados" (251), and again in "Compañeros de Viaje":
". . . buscando
Cada tarde en mi pobre poesía las ramas,
Las gotas y la luna que se habían perdido.
Acudí al fondo de ella, sumergiéndome
Cada tarde en sus aguas . . . " (609).
He has submerged himself in the reality of nature and humanity, and presents it to us swirling and beautiful and cruel. Furthermore, he wants nothing back from us, as readers, scholars, or as members of the nature and the humanity he describes. As he reveals in "Que Despierte el Leñador",
"Yo no vengo a resolver nada.
Yo vengo aquí para cantar
y para que cantes conmigo" (473).
As in many works of greatness, the answer was there all along in the title. This cauldron bubbles over in a song that Neruda cannot help but sing. It is fitting that he invokes Mayakovsky at the end of this epic in "Testamento" (636). Like that poet, all he wants is to shine, and everything else can go hang.
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