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Some weeks ago I discovered that a selection of Pablo Neruda’s previously unpublished poems were about to be published. The poems, which had been discovered by his widow, Matilde Urrutia, among Neruda’s boxes, in varying stages of completion — some handwritten, some typewritten, one ending with a comma — were scrawled on the backs of menus and musical programs, preserved between sheets of conference papers and in school notebooks. I remember reading Neruda’s Elementary Odes in university and experiencing a kind of wonder that he could elevate the ordinary into something so extravagant. He made it seem so easy — those whirlpools of language and emotion, which is precisely what makes him such a dangerous poet to fall in love with; because it makes you think you can be a poet too.
In their introduction to the book, Then Come Back : The Lost Neruda (published by Copper Canyon, translated by Forrest Gander), the directors of the Neruda Foundation write, “It was as if the poems had hidden themselves in the jungle of the poet’s manuscripts, camouflaged among thousands of sheets of paper and hundreds of thousands of words, in order to remain fugitive, unconquered.”
This idea of the poems having intuitions of their own pleased me because I believe somewhere in the universe spins a tower made of all the lost and stolen things that once belonged to me. My own spiral jetty of baubles and books, sunglasses, pens, socks, computer cables, my childhood house. Where do lost things go after all? To imagine that they just slip through the cracks and disappear is inconceivable to me.
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Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (a.k.a. Pablo Neruda) led a life charged with poetic and political activity. A career diplomat, Basoalto was at one point a close advisor to former Chilean President Salvador Allende. An alchemical poet, Neruda won the Literature Nobel in 1971 and stands today as among the most quotable poets. Among the themes he explored were desire, loss and hope.
So, when 21 undiscovered poems were found, the anthology had to be titled The Lost Neruda .
When I finally got hold of the new Neruda book it was a few weeks after I’d been robbed in Amsterdam. I’d been performing with my dance company at a place called the Frascati Theatre, and while we were on stage, a thief or thieves entered the green rooms and stole all our cash. We lost the equivalent of $4,000 between us, but the thing that stung the most was not the loss of the cash (although that was pretty brutal) but that it had happened while we were giving our all on stage.
At the police station a man in a pink tutu wafted in and out while a group of florid Russian men in red T-shirts were trying to register some kind of complaint. The police-officer on duty was a patient but firm man. “Forget about your money,” he told us. “You’ll never see it again.”
I was disconsolate for days although I did make an attempt at defiance by announcing that I would splurge what little money I had left on a grand meal at the Waldorf Astoria. I didn’t. Instead, I’d occasionally reach for the flaccid sides of my yellow money pouch which, until recently, had been full to the brim and give it a sad squeeze. The only thing that remained inside it was my London Oyster card, which the thief had thoughtfully left behind for me. I tried to take some comfort in my teacher Chandralekha’s advice. She had told her dancers, “Why are you worried about money, all you need to do is this [a graceful sweep of hand in the air], and money will come.”
Since Amsterdam I have travelled thousands of miles, visited three countries, read poems to audiences large and small, encountered a rattlesnake in the Californian desert, seen stray deer hoover up cherry blossom petals on the streets of Port Townsend, discovered that the most popular food in Port of Spain is a version of the channa bhatura , called “doubles” served with a spicy sauce — slight, medium or plenty.
And while I have not exactly been gently sweeping the air with my palms open in expectation, it’s true, I have received and received. I still think about my lost money. I won’t lie. I still think about all the things I could have done to avoid what happened. But the thing about losing is that once a thing is gone, it usually stays gone. The only thing you can do is to alter the alchemy of loss. So I have accepted the generosity of friends and strangers who invited me into their homes and introduced me to their grandmothers and fed me fine rum and lent me the warmth of their dogs. And I have gone again and again to Neruda, who speaks from across the divide:
“No matter, my ancient ways will keep teaching and singing to you
of what’s bitter and electric in this impure, this radiant time with its
hyena fangs, atomic shirts, and wings of lightning,
for you with eyes yet to be born
I’ll open pages of iron and dew to a blasted and blessed century…”
Forrest Gander, the translator of these poems into English, writes of his experience of translating Neruda, of how his own poems often had to go on hold, “but when, eventually, I come back to it [his own work], I bring to it something new — a feral vocabulary I’ve adopted from the translation, a fresh set of syntactical and rhythmical strategies, the image repertoire of someone else’s imagination.” He writes also of how, during the writing of these translations, his mother was suffering from Alzheimer’s, how he and his sister had to clear their mother’s house that contained all the material of her life — “birding journals, decoys carved by Cigar Daisey, boxes of fossils…. the very kinds of things that Neruda celebrated in his odes.”
Change is a necessary accompaniment to loss, for what is change if not one thing being replaced by another, one state altered with another? It is heartening to read how Neruda grapples with his own changes — giving in to the “degradations of the telephone,” for instance. He writes...
“I who conducted myself with such singular tact
backing away from sterile offices,
from offensive industrial palaces
only to see some
black apparatus
that even with its silence insults me… I came to be a telefiend, a telephony,
a sacred telephant.”
Or his poem addressing the first astronauts...
“the astronauts
didn't go by themselves,
they brought our earth,
the odors of moss and forest,
love, the crisscrossed limbs of men and women,
terrestrial rains over the prairies...”
It will be another month before I am home again. Until then, with each day of my onward travels there is only joyous displacement. I am frequently lost and objects inevitably get left behind to lighten my bags. I have lost money, I have lost days of my life, I have lost so many beginnings of poems and deadlines. I have even lost the sense of who I am and where I am. I tell myself it’s alright, it’s desirable, that loss intuits a kind of return. Maybe one day I will come across my spiral jetty of lost objects, and haloed around it will be my stolen money, but until then I will heed Neruda, and...
“toughen up
take a walk
over the sharp stones
then come back.”
Published - May 17, 2016 02:47 pm IST
