If there is a direct influence on these poems, it is Rimbaud. This work is often, inaccurately, described as surrealistic: Neruda had no contact with the incipient movement in Europe, and the parallels are a case of literary convergence. These laments of alienation, expressed in hallucinatory, sometimes bizarrely disjunctive metaphors, adumbrated the modernist modes that dominated the poetry of his era, but they arose directly from his isolation. When a British official hinted to Neruda that he should not be seen at a popular Persian café because it was frequented by “natives,” he kicked against such bigotry. This work, collected in the first two volumes of Residence on Earth, took a radical departure in tone from the earthy, mystical lyricism of the Twenty Love Poems. He was prolific in Asia, but his intellectual solitude weighed heavily on him, and the process of composition exacted a painful toll. And writing, of course Neruda never had a prolonged period of inactivity. With few official duties, the young consul devoted much of his time to reading: masses of Spanish and French poetry, in particular Quevedo and Rimbaud, and Proust’s novel entire, four times. When a British official hinted to Neruda that he should not be seen at a popular Persian café because it was frequented by “natives”-in other words, the people in whose country he was a guest-he kicked against such bigotry and chose isolation instead. Foreign diplomats were sternly warned against mixing with the local people. The main cause of Neruda’s alienation was the narrow-minded colonial establishment, which disgusted him. Occasionally, for long periods of time, I am so empty, with no power to express anything or verify anything within myself, and a violent poetic disposition that has not ceased to exist in me gives me an increasingly inaccessible path, with the result that a great part of my struggle is accomplished with suffering, because of the need to occupy a rather remote domain with a strength that is surely too weak. His first letter to Eandi was far from bold: An epistolary relationship with a sympathetic older colleague in Buenos Aires was a safe outlet for his emotional bafflement. The experience was more shocking than he cared to admit to his family and friends. It was a bold stroke for Neruda to undertake exile in a faraway land he was scarcely an adult. The most reliable source for Neruda’s state of mind in Asia is a series of letters he wrote to Héctor Eandi, an Argentinean critic who had praised the Twenty Love Poems. His Asian sojourn would last five years: two years in Rangoon were followed by consular posts in Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) and Java. Thus, in 1927, Neruda sailed for Burma, a remote place utterly alien to everything he knew. When the minister asked him where he wanted to go, he replied confidently, “Rangoon.” He had no idea where it was. He had never heard of any of them, and he caught only one name. He offered Neruda a post on the spot, and rattled off a list of foreign cities that awaited the services of a representative of Chile. An aristocratic classmate at the university introduced Neruda to the foreign minister, who had read his poetry. In Latin America, a literary reputation commanded respect from power. Yet, destitute as he was, Neruda was determined to avoid becoming another starveling poet in Montmartre, so he sought an overseas diplomatic post. The path usually pursued by poor young poets was to turn up in Paris and scrounge off older, established writers until they made their mark, or gave up and came home. He was a student at the Universidad de Santiago in Chile, and hunger was an issue he wore a billowing cape to conceal his emaciated physique and a wide-brimmed hat that hoped for an air of mystery. His second book, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, had been a sensational success and would eventually become one of the bestselling books of poetry in the 20th century (more than 20 million copies to date), but he was paid almost nothing for it. At 22, Pablo Neruda was an international literary celebrity-and desperately poor.
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