A National Sonnet for Neruda

Famous for his love of the sea, Nobel-winning poet Pablo Neruda wrote in his landmark book “Canto General” that he wanted to rest for eternity next to his stone and wood cottages in this hamlet on the Pacific.

Comrades, bury me in Isla Negra

before the sea that I knew, to

each rough space

of rocks and waves that my

lost eyes

will never see again.

Instead, Neruda was hastily interred in Chile’s capital, Santiago, when he succumbed to cancer two weeks after his friend Salvador Allende was deposed as president in a bloody 1973 coup. Soldiers ransacked one of Neruda’s homes, then surrounded the mourners at his funeral procession. The speeches at his graveside were the last act of public protest allowed by Chile’s new dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Nearly two decades later, Chile’s new, democratically elected president asked his “special events” director, Javier Egana, to supervise Neruda’s government-sponsored exhumation and reburial in Isla Negra. Thousands lined the roads and tossed flowers on the poet’s flag-draped casket as it passed.

Now Egana is working around the clock on a new task: officially incorporating Neruda, whose communist beliefs didn’t endear him to the conservative establishment that has dominated the country since Pinochet’s coup, into the pantheon of Chile’s national heroes.

In the new Chile, the ideologically driven disputes of the past have been fading amid the spirit of reinvention that comes with being South America’s fastest-growing economy. With each passing year, the rancor of the conservative elite toward its old foes diminishes.

On July 12, Chile will commemorate the centennial of Neruda’s birth. Cities and towns up and down the length of Chile are caught up in Neruda fever, each rushing to hold commemorative acts. In Isla Negra, children will parade, passing ships will sound their horns, and poetry will fall from the sky. President Ricardo Lagos will ride a train south from Santiago to Neruda’s birthplace, the town of Parral, where a host of Latin America’s leading literary luminaries will mark the event.

“Chile is recognizing a poetic hero, a hero of letters, a hero of humanity,” Egana said.

As Chile’s secretary of social communication and culture, Egana specializes in official acts of repentance, having also reburied Allende, a Marxist, and one of his slain former ministers, Orlando Letelier, in solemn, public ceremonies. Like those events, the Neruda centennial will be what Egana calls an “act of reparation.”

Everyone in Chile knows of the tragic drama of the poet’s final days. From his sickbed in Isla Negra, Neruda watched soldiers digging through his garden in search of arms. “The only weapons you will find in this place are words,” he told them.

Legend has it that cancer didn’t kill Neruda -- it was the sadness that overwhelmed him after hearing of the coup’s atrocities, of the bodies turning up in the Mapocho River, and of the killing of friends such as singer Victor Jara and Allende, who died in the presidential palace.

Allende had come to power after winning the 1970 election, promising “a democratic road to socialism.” But he soon confronted strong internal and external opposition, with the Nixon administration working to secretly destabilize his government. One of Neruda’s last works was titled “Call for the Destruction of Nixon and Praise for the Chilean Revolution.”

After the coup, Pinochet imposed a brutal dictatorship that lasted until 1990. But his conservative economic polices have remained in place, adopted even by a center-left president such as Lagos, a socialist who recently signed a free trade agreement with Allende’s old nemesis, the United States.

In a sense, the official Neruda Centenary observances will mark another step forward in the creation of a new Chilean national identity: one in which the antagonisms of the recent past are transformed into a shared history of tragedies and triumphs.

“Fourteen years after that trauma,” Egana said, referring to the end of the dictatorship, “this is a country that has recovered its sense of joy.”

Neruda wrote in green ink -- “the color of hope,” he called it -- and published his first book at 19. Over the course of five decades he produced a body of work that cataloged all things Latin American, from the Straits of Magellan to Macchu Picchu. In the words of New Yorker critic Mark Strand, he was “easily the most prolific and popular of all 20th century poets.”

As a young man, Neruda first earned fame for his love poems. Translated into 36 languages, they have been the opening gambit of countless courtships and seductions. From the 46th sonnet of “One Hundred Love Sonnets:”

From wave upon wave

upon wave

green ocean, green cold, branch of green.

I never chose but a single wave

the indivisible wave of

your body.

Neruda was later a diplomat, a senator and was nominated as the Communist Party’s candidate for president in 1970, though he withdrew in support of Allende. Despite his worldwide fame, Neruda’s political activism made it difficult for his name to become part of the public history of Chile in the years after his death.

“There was a time when all the mayors had been appointed by the military authorities, and clearly no one would have dared to name a plaza or a street for Neruda then,” Egana said.

In preparation for the centennial, Egana a year ago wrote to all 341 municipalities in Chile, politely asking local officials to conduct a census of public spaces in their domains named for Neruda. “Many wrote back to say, ‘We were sure we had at least one place named for him, but we don’t, so now we’re going to fix that,’ ” Egana said.

In recent months, the Chilean government has dispatched its cultural attaches to book fairs from Geneva to Guadalajara to promote celebrations of Neruda’s oeuvre. And new anthologies of the poet’s works are being published here and elsewhere.

“His humanist message is as vital as ever, and I think that’s what [the official celebrations] are trying to recognize,” said Adam Feinstein, the British author of “Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life,” the first major biography of the poet in English, published this year by Bloomsbury. “It comes from that infectious joy of life that fed his poetry so beautifully.”

In Feinstein’s book, Neruda emerges as a man who pursued his passions for love and politics around the globe. As a Chilean diplomat in Burma (Myanmar), he fell in love with a woman so jealous that he feared she might kill him. Working as a consul in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, he helped more than 1,000 refugees escape to Chile.

Neruda was elected to the Senate in 1945, but was later expelled for writing a letter critical of then-President Gabriel Gonzalez Videla, and wrote “Canto General” while in exile. He returned to Chile in 1952.

In 1964, when he was a favorite to win the Nobel Prize in literature, the CIA organized a smear campaign to pressure the Nobel committee to deny it to him, Feinstein said.

“The committee gave the prize to [Jean-Paul] Sartre instead, but he turned it down,” Feinstein said. One version of the Nobel contretemps has Sartre saying, “I’m not going to have it. Neruda should have got it.”

Neruda won the prize in 1971.

Once upon a time, Chileans avoided discussing such controversies.

“There used to be a tendency to decaffeinate Neruda, to take away his political edge and just leave the poet who wrote about nature and love,” said Jose Miguel Varas, a friend of Neruda who last year published “Neruda Clandestino,” an account of the years the poet lived as an underground dissident in the 1950s. “Now we have gotten beyond that. We have come to appreciate the entirety of his character. Like any human being, he had his contradictions.”

Varas met Neruda in the 1950s when he was editor of the Communist Party’s daily newspaper, a publication to which Neruda occasionally contributed. Later, when Varas was press director of Chile’s government television station, Neruda called him every morning for news updates.

Neruda telephoned as usual on the morning of Sept. 11, 1973, Varas said. “I told him, ‘There’s been a coup in Valparaiso.’ I was supposed to drive out to Isla Negra to visit him that morning. I told him, ‘I’m not going to be able to make it. Maybe later.’ ”

“Maybe never,” Neruda answered.

About 3,000 leftist activists were killed in the days that followed. “They’re executing them!” Neruda said shortly after being transferred to the Santiago hospital where he died Sept. 23. “They’re executing them all!”

Neruda’s widow, Matilde, spent her final years in Isla Negra, fighting off attempts by the Pinochet government to have the property expropriated because of Neruda’s membership in the outlawed Communist Party. She created the Pablo Neruda Foundation, which sealed off the home of interlinked cottages after her death in 1985.

Two years later, the curator hired to transform the home into a museum opened the door for the first time.

“I found something very sad,” said Maria Eugenia Zamudio, who still works there. “It was obvious that in her final years, Matilde was living in a smaller and smaller part of the house.” At the very end, she was apparently cooking her meals in her bedroom.

The home was filled with Neruda’s haphazard collection that included colored glass and the carved wooden statues from prows of old sailing ships. Much of it was in a poor state.

“When you are this close to the sea, the salt, humidity and fungi do a great deal of damage,” Zamudio said. After a yearlong preservation effort, the home was opened to visitors in 1989.

Today it is a shrine to Neruda’s life and a popular tourist destination; about 120,000 people visit each year. Its success has led others to seek a cut of the action. Every year or so, Zamudio gets a letter from a union official claiming the home in the name of the Chilean proletariat, because one of the poems in “Canto General” declares:

I leave to the unions

of copper, coal and nitrate

my home next to the sea

at Isla Negra.

“The unions say we don’t have any right to be here,” Zamudio said from her office next to the museum. But Neruda didn’t put the lines from his poem in his will. So the home -- along with other Neruda homes in Valparaiso and Santiago -- remains property of the foundation.

This month, Zamudio is helping with the final preparations for Isla Negra’s Neruda Centenary events, which will include a helicopter drop of thousands of pamphlets of Neruda poems.

In Villa Alegre, not far from the poet’s birthplace in Parral, city officials dedicated a new Neruda monument in April. It’s a large bottle of green ink with a 6-foot-tall steel quill sticking out. A marble plaque bears the opening lines of Neruda’s most famous poem, one still memorized by legions of Chilean schoolchildren:

Tonight I can write the

saddest lines

Write, for example, ‘The night

is starry

and the stars are blue and

shiver in the distance.’

“The monument in Parral is not going to be completed by July 12, so for the moment ours is the most important in this region,” said Villa Alegre spokesman Jaime Gonzalez Colville.

But Claudio Bravo Araya, Parral’s mayor, begged to differ. The Parral monument is finished and will be unveiled when President Lagos visits, he said. Neruda was born in Parral in 1904, but the town had never celebrated his birth. A few years back, it allowed the home where he was born to be demolished.

“For many years, people here did not feel close to Neruda,” the mayor said. But it didn’t have anything to do with politics. Parral felt slighted, he said. “Neruda only came to Parral once after he won the Nobel Prize. And his family never came here at all.”

This year, the old enmities will be forgotten. The town government will rename several streets for Neruda’s most famous works. And it is building Parral’s biggest monument, a collection of steel sculptures spread over half an acre.

“It’s an emotional lift to the city ... to have Parral known across the world as the legitimate cradle of the poet,” the mayor said.

Times staff writer Andres D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires contributed to this report.