Neruda is from Mars, Mistral is from Venus



“I believe in prophetic speech… still.  I believe in Cassandra, I believe in Elektra and the charming Antigone… for me they’re more alive than the intellectual co-operation and its choice group of old men.”

 –Mistral.

Although as a rule I try my best to avoid gender issues, I think that the identity of women is a huge theme in both of the authors’ works, and it needs to be discussed.

Mistral was a successful woman living in a male-controlled literary and political culture, and because of this had trouble with her own identity as well as the role of women in society.  Raised in poverty in a rural setting, she somehow broke free from the traditional fate of marriage and housekeeping and rose to the public life of poet, ambassador, and Nobel Prize winner.   Mistral was a paradox- maternal yet bore no children, an unwavering spirituality but deranged though grief and suffering, she loved her homeland deeply and yet she always lived abroad-and her issues with self-identity are evident in her work.   She wrote about women in history considered outsiders and related to them.  The characters she created-Through Hebrew Scriptures and Greek tragedies- are self-portraits, or spiritual states through which she was passing, and contain hallucination, prophecy, raving, and altered physic states.  Through these traits of “locura”, Mistral questions the possibility that a woman is not crazy in the face of extreme conditions, but merely conflicted as she attempts to break the gender molds in which she in encased.

Neruda-also a poet, ambassador and Nobel Prize winner- didn’t seem to have an issue with being a man.  He is very up-front in his poetry about his needs and feelings, and expresses love and lust and the manly emotions that come with it.  Although he idolizes the women in his poems, he also refers to them as possessions, a doll without a voice, an object.   His description of women is mainly physical: body parts compared to mountains or fruit, with lots of nudity.   Love is repeatedly described as a violent thing with negative condemnations, and the women in the poems are constantly subject to his scorn, desire, and despair.  There is little intellect in 20 poemas (one will not hear of Orestes from Elektra, for example) however the feelings are so vivid that the reader feels physically there with Neruda as he embarks on his erotic and sensual adventures with beautiful Chilean women.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.







Hell hath no fury...

Yes, we all know that love is grand, and after reading his 20 love poems it is safe to say that Neruda is a lover.  Exhaustively so.  So after over-dosing on the beauty of woman and unbridled passion for the last two weeks I was ticked pink to read The Song of Despair, a poem rich with resentment about the end of a love affair.

The relationship is a classic one that we've seen throughout the ages:  Boy is an island until he meets girl.  Boy and girl engage in a passionate, short-lived affair.  Girl distances herself from boy, the relationship dies.  Boy is super jaded, and defames girl all over Facebook.  This is essentially the plot of the poem, although it is not in chronological order.

There was the black solitude of the islands,

and there, woman of love, your arms took me in. 

In the beginning of their union, the narrator is enamored with the woman, describing her as fruit that nourished him, a miracle, his own flesh, a possession.  He describes his feelings for her with words like hunger, thirst, and the turbulent drunkenness of love, that blazed like a lighthouse. 

Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,

oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.

But, alas, the passionate was short lived, and the narrator implies that the relationship was tempestuous, to say the least.

How terrible and brief my was my desire of you!

How difficult and drunken, how tense and avid.

 Here's where the bad feeling start.  While the narrator is trying to make it work,

I made the wall of shadow draw back,

beyond desire and act, I walked on.

it seems that his sweetheart is just not that into him anymore, which results  in an barrage of insults.  Now his miracle is an open and bitter well, a pit of debris, an empty jar that is shattered by infinite oblivion (burn!).  He is furious at her girdled sorrow, which I decipher as her ability to hide her emotions.

The beginning of the poem is actually well after the break-up time-wise, and the narrator uses delicious comparisons to a shipwreck (debris, deserted etc) as he looks back at the relationship.

You swallowed everything, like distance.

Like the sea, like time.  In you everything sank.

Ouch.  Hell hath no fury like Neruda scorned.

Neruda and Tagore

XVI

En mi cielo al crepúsculo/In My Sky at Twilight

This poem by Neruda is a paraphrase of the 30^th poem in The Gardener, a book of poetry by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941).  Tagore was a Bengali poet, novelist, musician, painter, and playwright, who (surprise surprise) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.  He also penned the national anthem for two countries:  Jan Gana Mana (India) and Amar Shonar Bengla (Bangladesh).  He was known for his lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and contemplative style. 

Poem 30:  The Gardener

You are the evening cloud floating in the sky of my dreams.
I paint you and fashion you ever with my love longings.
You are my own, my own, Dweller in my endless dreams!

Your feet are rosy-red with the glow of my heart's desire,
Gleaner of my sunset songs!
Your lips are bitter-sweet with the taste of my wine of pain.
You are my own, my own, Dweller in my lonesome dreams!

With the shadow of my passion have I darkened your eyes, Haunter
of the depth of my gaze!
I have caught you and wrapt you, my love, in the net of my music.
You are my own, my own, Dweller in my deathless dreams!

  

In My Sky at Twightlight

In my sky at twilight you are like a cloud
and your form and colour are the way I love them.
You are mine, mine, woman with sweet lips
and in your life my infinite dreams live.

The lamp of my soul dyes your feet,
the sour wine is sweeter on your lips,
oh reaper of my evening song,
how solitary dreams believe you to be mine!

You are mine, mine, I go shouting it to the afternoon's
wind, and the wind hauls on my widowed voice.
Huntress of the depth of my eyes, your plunder
stills your nocturnal regard as though it were water.

You are taken in the net of my music, my love,
and my nets of music are wide as the sky.
My soul is born on the shore of your eyes of mourning.
In your eyes of mourning the land of dreams begin.

How I see this poem is an older man who has found a second chance at love with a younger woman.  “My sky a twilight” suggests a man near the end of his life, so does the image of sour wine, evening song, and widowed voice.

There is much personification of nature in this poem as well:  The sky, clouds, wind, the shore.

As usual we have a woman in the poem that the man possesses, but is also possessed by.  She is like a cloud in form and colour (white and fluffy?), with sweet lips, and eyes of mourning  Although she is captured in his net, the reader understands that she has power over him, as he describes her as a reaper, a huntress, a plunderer, and nocturnal.  The woman controls his dreams and the possibilities in his future just by being alive.  Awww, sweet.

Tagore chillin' with Gandhi

Keeping it real with Einstein

1971: Pablo Neruda

Parral, Chile 1904-1973 Santiago, Chile.

“I, a poet who writes in Spanish, learned more from Walt Whitman than from Cervantes”

                                                                                                                       -Neruda, 1972.

When I was in high school, I read a lot of Walt Whitman; I even quoted “Song of Myself” in the yearbook.  I was fascinated with the way that he celebrated nature and the beauty of self in an epic literary style.   After reading Neruda’s poetry this weekend, I am not surprised to learn that the Chilean poet was one of Whitman’s biggest fans (he kept a framed portrait of the American on his table).

Neruda was 20 when he published Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, the book of poetry that would secure his literary fame.  Freshly out of high school (where he had come to know Gabriel Mistral, a teacher who encouraged his writing), Neruda was an avid reader, and evidently deeply inspired by Whitman.    Take a look at the following parts of four poems:

From Neruda’s Ah Vastness of Pines

Ah vastness of pines, murmur of waves breaking,

slow play of lights, solitary bell…

From Whitman’s Ah Poverties

AH poverties, wincings, and sulky retreats!
Ah you foes that in conflict have overcome me!

From Neruda’s Body of a Woman:

Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,
when you surrender, you stretch out like the world.
My body, savage and pleasant, undermines you
and makes a son leap in the bottom of the earth.
Body of skin, of moss, of firm and thirsty milk!
And the cups of your breasts! And your eyes full of absence!
And the roses of your mound! And your voice slow and sad!

From Whitman’s I Sing the Body Electric

Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all
diffused, mine too diffused,
Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling
and deliciously aching,
Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of
love, white-blow and delirious nice,
Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,
Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh'd day.

They’re pretty similar, eh?  Whitman is famous for his parenthetical insertions (like ah!), and it looks as though Neruda is mimicking him here.   Another thing that links Neruda to Whitman is their enumerative styles (the cataloging of chaotic, random details).   They both use the sensory and the natural to express their curiosity about the experience of life.

Unlike Gabriela Mistral, Neruda’s work seems more improvised and impulsive.  There are no Greek Goddesses found in his poetry, he instead describes earthy Chilean woman, the beauty of nature, and the glory in the ordinary.  Walt would’ve been proud.

Greek Myth and The Cross-Eyed Mother

Gaia:  The Earth Mother

The second installation of Gabriela Mistral’s poetry (from Locas Mujeres), is complex and compelling.  Once again there are themes of self-exploration, motherhood, nature, love, and creation, to name a few.  Her ballad like lyricism has contrasting tones of whimsy, mourning, and reverence.  What keeps blowing me away about this author is what a good grasp she had on literature, particularly Greek mythology.  As a person with limited knowledge in this area, I find myself on Wiki a lot these days!

In “Madre Bisoja” (The Cross-Eyed Mother), Gabriela Mistral tackles the folklore surrounding the creation of Earth and all the things on it, night and day, life and death. 

Ésta que era nuestra Madre,

La tierra sombría y sacra

Y era tan vieja y tan niña

Que al verla se desvariaba.

Era la higuera de leche

Y era la Osa encrespada

Y era más, de ser la Loca

Que da su flanco por dádiva

A few things of note in these stanzas:

Firstly, the fig tree is a symbol of fertility, as it is known to bear much fruit.  The branches of the fig tree and its milky sap were offered to Juno, the fertility goddess, in ancient times.

The poem goes on to name Gea as the Mother:

Gea, or Gaia (of Greek Mythology) is the Earth Mother, the Great God of Nature, the Goddess of all creatures, and the eldest of all beings.  She is to whom all things are issued, and feeds all the creatures of the world.  She was manifest in enclosed spaces (the house, the courtyard, the womb, the CAVE), and because she is unable to completely separate herself from her element, she is often depicted half-risen from the Earth.

Gaia brought forth Uranus, the starry sky, her equal, to cover her and the sea, Virgin Mary Style.  That is, no baby daddy, but out of her owns self.  With Uranus she bore 12 children, which came to be known as the Titans.  The youngest child castrated Uranus one day, thus separating the sky from the earth.

People who worship Gaia today are unconcerned with material things and are more in tune with nature…  Hmmm.  Sound like anyone we know?

1945: Gabriela Mistral.

Gabriela Mistral

Vicuna, Chile 1889-1957, New York, USA.

“What the soul is to the body, so is the artist to his people”

                  -epitaph of Gabriela Mistral.

Jeez, did Gabriela Mistral have a depressing life or what?  Abandoned by her father at age 3, she had to support her mother financially at age 16, and later lost both the love of her life and her beloved nephew to suicide?  Harsh.  I read somewhere that she was dear friends with writer Stephan Zweig and his wife (who both, ironically, also committed suicide in Brazil after they fled Nazi Austria, claiming that the world was just too hopeless to live in.  Good, positive company to keep). 

All of this happened to her and she persevered, kept writing, and won the Nobel Prize.

Now that’s what I call adversity.

One can see so much of Mistral’s life in her work: 

In Tenura (Cuento-Mundo), the reader sees her delight in the beauty of nature down to its simplest elements:  air, rock, water, fire; in other words, the world of matter.  She shows her maternal, womanly side (perhaps through her grief due to the loss of her mother and the boy that she considered her own son), as she explores the delicacy of nature, rebirth after death, and her Christian faith.

In Tala (America):  one sees a duality in Mistral, that she is a fusion of Basque (in her rebellious, religious side) and Indian (in her knowledge of flora and fauna, and the stories of the ancients in South America).  Her vast knowledge of the geography of Latin America-that she learned through her years of self-imposed exile from Chile-is continually utilized, as is her teacher's education, with rich literary references throughout her poems.

There were so many names and places unknown to me in Tala, that I spent eons researching them.  I’ve consequently made a little dictionary and have posted it below.

Aztec/Nahautl references

Anáhuac: "land between the waters" (see geographical)

Mexitlis: child of the moon”, great leader, war god

Quetzalcóatl:  Aztec diety, “feathered serphant”, god of wind, venus, dawn, merchants, arts, crafts, and knowledge

Tláloc:  god of rain, fertility, water, gave life but sent hails/floods etc.

Tlálocs: four corners of the universe=4 Tlálocs

Xochiquetzal:  goddess of love and beauty, earth, flowers, plants

Xochitl: “flower”, a given female name in Latin Amerca.  Also a day sign in the Aztec Calander:  provider of life energy, day for creating beauty and truth, message:  life is beautiful and quickly fades.

Inca references:

Chasquis: communication system of the Inca Empire, a courier-relay of young boys on narrow paths

Inca Huayna:  successor to Tupac, the Inca Empire was the largest under his rule

Mama Ocllo: mother, fertility goddess, taught art of spinning to women.  The sister and husband of Cápac, together they discovered Cuzco

Manco Cápac: fire/sun god with a golden staff.  Brother and husband of Ocllo, together they discovered Cuzco

Pachacámac:  an archaeological site in Peru, temples and pyramids that were conquered by the Incas (but not built by them), and used as an important administrative centre

Christian references:

Gabriel:  messenger from God

María (Mary):  mother of Jesus and Queen of Angels, works with Raphael

Migel (Michael): commander of the army of God (against Satan), a symbol of humility before God

Rafael:  “God who heals” an archangel of Christianity, with a green healing flame (God’s fifth ring), serves with Mary, truth, concentration, healing

Santa (de Puerto Rico):  John the Baptist, baptized Jesus, and a bunch of other people in the Jordan River

Viático (Viaticum): communion of someone who is dying (part of last rites) “provisions for the journey”

Greek/Roman References:

Atalanta: daughter of Hades, raised by a bear, fierce hunter, and always happy because she was raised in the woods

Dioscuros:  two famous heroes, twin brothers of Helen of Troy=GEMINI

Walkiria (Valkyrie):  Actually Norse mythology:  supernatural women who decide who dies in battle

Los Zodíacos (the Zodiac): a ring of 12 constellations that the sun’s path crosses over a course of a year

Latin American Geographical References:

Aconcagua: highest mountain in the Americas (the Andes, Argentina)

Anáhuac: In Nahautl “land between the waters”, plateau in central Mexico that is now D.F., the center of many pre-Columbian peoples (Aztec, Toltec, Teotihuacán), surrounded by mountains, volcanoes, and lakes, the Spaniards drained the lakes and built on top of them, now D.F. is sinking and has bad air/water quality

Andes:  world’s largest mountain range

Cordillera:  chain of mountains

Cuzco:  city in S/E Peru, the capital of Inca Empire

Palenque: Mayan city in Southern Mexico

Pico del Toro:  a mountain in the Andes in Venezuela

Tacámbaro:  A village in western Mexico, where a battle took place with 300 members of the Belgium army against 3000 Mexican Republicans (the Mexicans won in 5 hours)

Tihuanaco: the oldest known ruins in the world.  Belonging to Incas or an older people?

Valle de Elqui:  in northern Chile, 360 sunny days a year, magnetic vibrations/cosmic energy produces calming affect in people, exact other side of the earth as the Himalayas

Latin America Flora/Fauna:

Araucarias: evergreen, coniferous tree (found in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil)

Braceadora: stepping horse with the smoothest gait, good speed in difficult terrain

Maguey: (in Nahuatl: Mexcalmetl) “Century Plant” from Mexico, plant that Mezcal is made of

Quetzal: strikingly coloured bird of western Mexico/Neo-tropical regions, bright green with red belly, a solitary bird

Sargassos: brown algae with round bladders, found in tropical Atlantic waters

Yuca: South American woody shrub, the root is source of protein/carbohydrates

Latin America tradition:

El cántaro del peruano:  traditional silver pitchers of Peru

La jícara de Uruápan: traditional wooden pre-Columbian cups of Uruápan (the avocado capital of the world!!!!!)