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Gaps, Translations, Loaded Words: Poetics and Current Neruda Criticism
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EL PENSAMIENTO POÉTICO DE PABLO NERUDA. By SICARDALAIN. Translated by PILARRUIZ VA. (Madrid: Gredos, 1981. Pp. 648.)
PABLO NERUDA: THE POETICS OF PROPHECY. By SANTÍENRICO-MARIO. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982. Pp. 256. $19.50.)
TRANSLATING NERUDA: THE WAY TO MACCHU PICCHU. By FELSTINERJOHN. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1980. Pp. 284. $18.50.)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2022
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- Copyright © 1984 by Latin American Research Review
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Notes
1. La rosa separada and El mar y las campanas were both published in 1973; Jardín de invierno, 2000, El corazón amarillo, Libro de las preguntas, Elegía, and Defectos escogidos were all published in 1974. According to Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Neruda planned to publish the first seven of these books to celebrate his seventieth birthday, which would have occurred in 1974. See Neruda: el viajero inmóvil (Caracas: Monte Ávila, 1977), pp. 237–38.
2. Confieso que he vivido: memorias (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1974); translated as Memoirs by Hardie St. Martin (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977).
3. Neruda, El río invisible: poesía y prosa de juventud (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1980). Matilde Neruda and Miguel Otero Silva have edited prose pieces from different stages of Neruda's career, many of which had not previously appeared in book form, in Para nacer he nacido (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1977).
4. Cartas de amor de Pablo Neruda, edited by Sergio Fernández Larraín (Madrid: Rodas, 1974). Pablo Neruda and Héctor Eandi, Correspondencia durante “Residencia en la tierra,” edited by Margarita Aguirre (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1980). Another volume of correspondence contains Neruda's letters to his sister: Cartas a Laura (Madrid: Cultura Hispánica, 1978).
5. Margarita Aguirre, Las vidas de Pablo Neruda (1967; 2nd rev. ed. Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1973). Rodríguez Monegal, Neruda: el viajero inmóvil (1st ed., 1967; 2nd ed. cited). Jaime Concha has contributed a sociologically oriented study of the early life and works in Neruda: 1904-36 (Santiago de Chile: Universitaria, 1972). A biographical curiosity in the tradition of anti-Neruda diatribes is Jurema Yary Finamour, Pablo e Dom Pablo (Rio de Janeiro: Nórdica, 1975).
6. Notable books and bibliographies published since Neruda's death (not cited elsewhere in this essay) include the following collective volumes: Aproximaciones a Pablo Neruda, edited by Ángel Flores (Barcelona: Ocnos, 1974); and Simposio Pablo Neruda: actas, edited by Isaac Jack Lévy and Juan Loveluck (New York: Las Américas, 1975). Individual volumes include: Eduardo Camacho Guizado, Pablo Neruda: naturaleza, historia y poética (Madrid: Sociedad General Española de Librería, 1978); Luis Rosales, La poesía de Neruda (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1978); Gastón Soublette, Pablo Neruda: profeta de América (Santiago de Chile: Nueva Universidad, 1980); and Juan Villegas, Estructuras míticas y arquetipos en el “Canto general” de Neruda (Barcelona: Planeta, 1976). Bibliographies are Horacio Jorge Becco, Pablo Neruda: Bibliografía (Buenos Aires: Casa Pardo, 1975); and Enrico-Mario Santí, “Fuentes para el conocimiento de Pablo Neruda, 1964–74,” in Simposio Pable Neruda, cited in note 4, pp. 355–82.
7. Jaime Alazraki, “El surrealismo de Tentativa del hombre infinito,” Hispanic Review 40 (1972): 31–39; Hernán Loyola, “Tentativa del hombre infinito: 50 años después,” Acta Litteraria Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 17 (1975): 111–23; René de Costa, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 41–57; Luis F. González-Cruz, Neruda: de “Tentativa” a la totalidad (New York: Abra, 1979).
8. A rare extended treatment of a single posthumous book is Eliana Rivero, “Análisis de perspectivas y significación de La rosa separada de Neruda,” Revista Iberoamericana 42 (1976): 459–72.
9. Sicard, El pensamiento poético, p. 413. Subsequent references to this and the other books under review will be found in the text. English translations from Sicard are mine. They are translations of the generally reliable Spanish translation from the French original by Pilar Ruiz Va. Sicard's thesis was presented to Université de Bordeaux III and published in Lille in 1977.
10. For a somewhat trendy, but reasoned, discussion of the need to integrate Marxist thought with current linguistic and philosophical theory, see Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977). A poststructuralist view of these issues is Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1982).
11. Three texts by these critics that Sicard cites may be consulted in the collective volume Pablo Neruda, edited by Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Enrico-Mario Santí (Madrid: Taurus, 1980): Alazraki, “Para una poética de la poesía póstuma de Pablo Neruda”; Rodríguez Monegal, “El sistema del poeta”; and Yurkiévich, “Mito e historia: dos generadores del Canto general.”
12. Alazraki, “Poética de la penumbra en la poesía más reciente de Pablo Neruda,” Revista Iberoamericana 82–83 (1973): 263–91.
13. See my own early short review of La espada encendida, Books Abroad 45 (1971): 669.
14. I have discussed the affinity between interpretation and translation in “Vallejo Interpreted, Vallejo Traduced,” Diacritics 8, no. 4 (1978): 16–27.
15. Smaller-scale accounts do exist: Ben Belitt, Adam's Dream: A Preface to Translation (New York: Grove, 1978); Clayton Eshleman's various writings on translating César Vallejo, especially his preface to his and José Rubia Barcia's edition of Vallejo, The Complete Posthumous Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Octavio Paz, “El Soneto en ix [of Mallarmé],” in Paz's El signo y el garabato (México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1973).
16. Alonso, Poesía y estilo de Pablo Neruda: interpretación de una poesía hermética (2nd ed. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1968).
17. Here and at other points, Felstiner and Santí complement each other. Santí builds on Felstiner when he observes a “poetics of translation” in the final cantos of Alturas (pp. 155–56). The prime difference in their accounts of Alturas is marked by Santí's more cautious view of the poem's ideological project.
18. Other English translations of Alturas cited by Felstiner include an early version by Ángel Flores in The World's Best, edited by Whit Burnett (New York: Dial, 1950); Ben Belitt's, which Felstiner characterizes as overingenious, in Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda (New York: Grove, 1961); and Nathaniel Tarn's The Heights of Macchu Picchu, of which Felstiner has much good to say, despite reservations about Tarn's reinforcement of Christian imagery and some of his other lexical and rhythmic solutions.
19. Other guides in English include Salvatore Bizzarro, Pablo Neruda: All Poets the Poet (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1979), useful for the transcriptions of the author's interviews with Delia del Carril and Matilde Urrutia de Neruda, women important in the poet's life; and René de Costa, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, a guide to major works through Estravagario (see note 7).
20. Literary critics do not always take much care in composing or editing their illustrative translations. René de Costa's otherwise thoughtful guide offers “plain prose translations,” which would be more serviceable with fewer errors (see especially the quotations to the useful chapter on Tentativa del hombre infinito).
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