Remarks at the Grave of Pablo Neruda
Isla Negra, Chile, 6th October 2012
Señoras y Señores, Queridos Amigos. Muchas gracias por estar hoy aquí. Quiero expresarles mi agradecimiento por su amable invitación. Tanto mi esposa como yo estamos encantados de visitarles.
[Ladies and Gentlemen, dear friends. Many thanks for your presence here today. I would like to express my appreciation for your kind invitation. My wife and I are delighted to be here today]
I wish to thank the Museum and, in particular, it’s Director,
Ms. Carolina Rivas Cruz, for facilitating our visit today. Sabina and I are delighted to be in this special place.
Es para mí es un gran privilegio tener esta oportunidad a decir unas palabras in honor de Pablo Neruda.
[It is for me a great privilege to have this opportunity to say a few words in honour of Pablo Neruda.]
I have come here today to pay my respects to one of the great poets of the 20th century but to one of the great public voices on democracy. I have come here not only to pay my respects to a radical democrat, one who truly, in every fibre of his being, believed that every life mattered, every man, woman and child, and that to them the resources of nature belonged in the sense that the human adventure is a common endeavour to which all contribute, none taking precedence over another in the pursuit of dignity, justice and hope, and love, and humour too as recalled in the film El Posado.
Pablo Neruda lives in our hearts as a radical democrat who made his poems, in all sincerity, for the people with whom he shared his life, his language, his destiny and his gifts.
The Lord knows of the power and the passion of his poetry, this poetry that is Chile [……………………….] for the wide world, the best of this large-hearted country, lodged in the universal consciousness.
Chileans of all generations will never forget how passionately and honourably Neruda served his country, as Consul, Ambassador and Senator — and who could not be moved by the account of his last days, when he must have thought all he had dreamed of lay in ruins, had gone down to the underworld with his colleague and friend, Salvador Allende. Nevertheless, I want to say, here on this sacred ground, perhaps in all humility to the shade of Neruda himself: nothing is ever lost that has been born of goodness in the human heart. The unquenched thirst for justice is not lost. The unquenched thirst for a true poetry is not lost. And Pablo Neruda, as long as we have your poems to read and speak, your example to live up to, hope is not lost.
In his magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the poet said this: ”I always had confidence in man. I never lost hope. That may be why I am here with my poetry and with my flag.”
He raised that poetry, that flag, into the eyes of the world, so that forever after it would be impossible to think of Neruda without thinking of Chile, to think of Chile without thinking of Neruda.
In his beautiful lyric ‘El Perezoso’, Neruda offers us this resonant closing line: “No quiero cambiar de planeta’”— “I have no wish to change my planet.”
The poem is a quiet, perhaps a deceptively quiet, hymn to his beloved country; it is also, on a much larger scale, a hymn to our beloved earth, this threatened and often achingly beautiful one world we share.
If by now Neruda can rightly be considered a universal poet, it is because of this generous double pulse in his heart: his unwavering love of his native country, and his unwavering solidarity with all struggling peoples of our common world.
That great champion of the Irish people, James Connolly, once wrote: “Ireland without her people means nothing to me”. He meant this as a corrective to a sentimental vision of an idealized Ireland, a Victorian vision without real or meaningful content.
I think we can marry these resonant phrases, Connolly’s and Neruda’s, in order to call ourselves towards a shared duty, a duty of care to our common world and to our common humanity. A duty of care that Neruda would have insisted cannot be fully exercised until and unless it engages responsibly and actively with politics.
We must not forget that it was the murder of Federico Garcia Lorca, and other atrocities of Fascism, that propelled Neruda into the politically active dimension of his life. Roberto González Echevarría tells us that España el Corazón (Spain in The Heart) was published on the frontlines at Barcelona in the terrible year of 1937, “printed on paper made by the soldiers from captured flags, rags, bloodied gauze and other trophies of war.”
Neruda understood the true meaning of that venerable phrase,
“an injury to one is an injury to all”, and having understood its meaning, he accepted the concomitant moral responsibility, that injustice is to be fought wherever and whenever it rears its head.
In 1938, in an essay published in Aurora, Santiago, Neruda addressed these words to the shade of César Vallejo:
“And what can we do in this world to be worthy of your silent, enduring work, of your private, essential growth?”
Let me, in closing, address these same questions to the shade of
Pablo Neruda, and let me answer: We will keep your words, we will nurture your hopes, we will guard your memory, we will not disappoint you.
Viva Neruda! Viva Chile! Viva nuestro planeta común! Viva la esperanza y la justicia! Viva la Poesía!