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Chapter 1 - Transmigrant

Neruda’s Rebirth as the Soul of World Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2022

Roanne Kantor
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
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Summary

This chapter illustrates the major claims of the countershelf through its most frequent occupant, Pablo Neruda. Yet his appearance is different than later Latin American authors, who act primarily as stylistic models. Instead, it is Neruda himself who lives on, reincarnated as a “transmigrant,” who acts as a site of internal contestation between projects that are stylistically, even generically, quite distinct. After Neruda’s Nobel Prize and untimely death in the early 1970s, the painter Vivan Sundaram, poets including Agha Shahid Ali, Marie Cruz Gabriel, and Sirsir Kumar Das, and prose writers like Mohsin Hamid and Ravish Kumar all reincarnate Neruda’s persona as a way of thinking about the contest between aesthetic and political commitment through which their own creative endeavors might become global. Their perception of Neruda’s conflictual commitments emerges out of the real arc of his poetic career. These prompt a reconsideration of one of the most discordant – and yet essential – moments of Neruda’s oeuvre: his reincarnation-themed poetry of the first volume of Residencia en la tierra – written while Neruda worked as a consular functionary in British India from 1927 to 1929.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Transmigrant
  • Roanne Kantor, Stanford University, California
  • Book: South Asian Writers, Latin American Literature, and the Rise of Global English
  • Online publication: 17 February 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009039727.002
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  • Transmigrant
  • Roanne Kantor, Stanford University, California
  • Book: South Asian Writers, Latin American Literature, and the Rise of Global English
  • Online publication: 17 February 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009039727.002
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Transmigrant
  • Roanne Kantor, Stanford University, California
  • Book: South Asian Writers, Latin American Literature, and the Rise of Global English
  • Online publication: 17 February 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009039727.002
Available formats
×