Diego Rivera, The Flower Carrier,
"We live singing among the beasts".
In reading the "Letter to Miguel Oterao Silva, Caracas, 1948" Song of General , I found that perfectly illustrated the idea developed in my previous article on Nazim Hikmet: the song is a weapon of resistance. In this long text which stretches over five pages, Neruda establishes a privileged communication with Miguel Otero which he received a letter through Nicolas Guillen. Neruda was exiled in a situation that is very unfavorable. They are still the strength and joy that dominate the poem. In this crucial text, the question of poetic writing is central as Pablo Neruda explains how and why he abandoned the love poetry, metaphysical poetry for a less pure materialist.
The force that emanates from this poem is probably due to the combination of a celebration of the elements and a testimony to the reality of his country. But it is also born of this epistolary relationship between the two comrades. Neruda y multiplies addresses: "Miguel, as it is blue life!", "Miguel, they can not defeat us." The word is gradually gaining in size in repetitions and exclamations: "What you're gay, Miguel! As we're gays!".
If the condition of the poet on the run is precarious, Neruda was pleased "to work among the things that [he] loves." So he sings the place that welcomes them, "pelican boats like the wind" and "world, our well." The world, free from any property becomes at the end of the letter that every man can possess precisely because it belongs to nobody in particular. And the poet sings the beauty of American land:
"in some places, emeralds have
the thickness of apples".
But it is also a witness and actor in history. Therefore, smuggler, he mentions what others told him. The mouth of the poet sings the stories of the worker, the student: "and he told me how the prisoners work on the roads.
Neruda passes alternately from past to present and from present to past, citing the advent of the poet Neruda:
"then life, I grabbed ,
I camped in front of her, I hug to subdue
then I went into the mine galleries
lived to see how other men. "
The poet appears "hands stained with dirt and pain," sure, but he became a man of reality. It is more absorbed by his "metaphysical one", however, it does not say goodbye but the lyricism renew into a weapon of struggle. Thus, a girl, during a strike, began to recite a poem by Miguel "a courageous voice where the crystal and steel united. " This alliance of the delicacy of the crystal and the unalterable steel could be used for art Neruda poetry: the poem must be both singing and attack. And he tells Miguel "one of your ancient poems, one traveling between wrinkled eyes of all the workers and peasants of my country, America." The poem becomes the spark that gives hope to the poet reached by melancholy. The people picked it up, it is appropriate to survive and fight.
Neruda also opposes the metaphysical sadness to joy, distinguishing between materialistic love poems where he "died of sadness" of the following: "I conquered the joy," says t he said. Through it, the poet is trying to save what can be:
"I defend the embers of life."
At the eucharist he substitutes poetic even a supper where words become symbols of strength and immortality poetic
"words that are bread, wine,
words they can not yet dishonor. "
Song, inseparable from the shotgun, none the less sacred. Singing does not torture, or exploitation, but at least creates a space of freedom, a space where humanity, love between human beings still has its place:
"And in a world of ulcers there is no longer plastered
that we, with our endless joy "
Reference Edition: Vocal General Pablo Neruda, Gallimard, 1977 for the French translation. "Letter to Miguel Otero Silva, in Caracas (1948), pp. 389-394.
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