Poetry and Communism

Alain Badiou

translated by Bruno Bosteels, Lana Turner

[from the forthcoming book by Alain Badiou, The Age of the Poets and Other Writings on Twentieth-Century Poetry and Prose, edited and translated by Bruno Bosteels with an introduction by Emily Apter and Bruno Bosteels (London-New York: Verso, 2014).]

In the last century, some truly great poets, in almost all languages on earth, have been communists. In an explicit or formal way, for example, the following poets were committed to communism: in Turkey, Nâzim Hikmet; in Chile, Pablo Neruda; in Spain, Rafael Alberti; in Italy, Eduardo Sanguinetti; in Greece, Yannis Ritsos; in China, Ai Qing; in Palestine, Mahmoud Darwish; in Peru, César Vallejo; and in Germany, the shining example is above all Bertolt Brecht. But we could cite a very large number of other names in other languages, throughout the world.

Blood in the Streets of Santiago: Forty Years Since the Coup in Chile

Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971 for “a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent's destiny and dreams". In his acceptance speech in Stockholm he cited Arthur Rimbaud, the wild teenage poetic genius of the Paris Commune of 1871: "In the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid Cities." Neruda declared that “my duties as a poet involve friendship not only with the rose and with symmetry, with exalted love and endless longing”, but also a “taking sides” with the “organized masses of the people” in struggle against the “the condemnation of centuries” and for “justice and dignity”.

Neruda, Pinochet, and the Iron Lady

Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker

It’s curious, historically speaking, that Margaret Thatcher died on the same day that forensic specialists, in Chile, exhumed the remains of the late, great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. The author of the epic “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair” and the winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature, Neruda died at the age of sixty-nine, supposedly of prostate cancer, just twelve days after the violent September 11, 1973, military coup launched by army chief Augusto Pinochet against the country’s elected Socialist President, Salvador Allende. Warplanes had strafed the Presidential palace, and Allende had bravely held out, but committed suicide with a rifle given to him by Cuba’s President Fidel Castro as Pinochet’s goons stormed into the Presidential palace. Neruda was a close friend and supporter of Allende’s; he was ill, but in the midst of planning to leave the country for Mexico, where he had been invited to go into exile. When he was on his deathbed in a clinic, his home had been broken into by soldiers and trashed.

Right, comrade, it’s the hour of the garden

by Pablo Neruda

Right, comrade, it’s the hour of the garden

Right, comrade, it’s the hour of the garden
and the hour up in arms, each day
follows from flower or blood:
our time surrenders us to an obligation
to water the jasmines
or bleed to death in a dark street:
virtue or pain blows off
into frozen realms, into hissing embers,
and there never was a choice:
heaven’s roads,
once the by-ways of saints,
are jammed now with experts.

The Essential Pablo Neruda

“Poetry is like bread. It should be shared by all, by scholars and peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity."  

- Pablo neruda

"The call for a more accessible collection of Neruda's important poems is answered with City Lights' The Essential Neruda, a 200-page edition that offers 50 of Neruda's key poems. The editors and translators know how to extract gold from a lifetime of prolific writing. If you want a handy Neruda companion and don't know where to begin, this is it."
– The Bloomsbury Review

"What better way to celebrate the hundred years of Neruda's glorious residence on our earth than this selection of crucial works - in both languages! - by one of the greatest poets of all time. A splendid way to begin a love affair with our Pablo or, having already succumbed to his infinite charms, revisit him passionately again and again and yet again."
– Ariel Dorfman, Pulitzer-prize winner author of "Death and the Maiden"

Too Many Names

by Pablo Neruda

Mondays are meshed with Tuesdays
and the week with the whole year.
Time cannot be cut
with your weary scissors,
and all the names of the day
are washed out by the waters of night.

No one can claim the name of Pedro,
nobody is Rosa or Maria,
all of us are dust or sand,
all of us are rain under rain.

They have spoken to me of Venezuelas,
of Chiles and of Paraguays;
I have no idea what they are saying.
I know only the skin of the earth
and I know it is without a name.