Saturday, June 11, 2011

The Pablo Neruda's Death Case

   
The Neruda Case in Aragon's Verses

At he moment when I was reading an autographed copy of French poet Luis Aragon's book Le Nouveau Crève-Cœur, an inquest on Neruda's death was opened. The book contains the brief collection The Romancero de Pablo Neruda, and among them the multi-part poem La Complainte de Pablo Neruda, that provides various hints and an insight about the political scenario surrounding the Nobel Prize winner.

According to Associated Press (AP), Chile is to investigate whether Augusto Pinochet's regime murdered the Nobel prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda after it seized power in a bloody 1973 coup.
Judge Mario Carroza is set to examine claims that Pinochet's agents injected poison into Neruda's stomach at the tim he was being treated in Santiago's Santa Maria clinic for prostate cancer, which until now is said to be the cause the heart failure of the revered Nobel laureate.
Chilean plural left demanded an inquest after Neruda's former driver, Manuel Araya, stated that Pinochet henchmen injected the 69-year-old on 23 September 1973, the day when he died, just 12 days after the military coup, and shortly after the poet had written an article excoriating the military regime and defending his friend Salvador Allende, the socialist president who died during the coup.
On the other hand, the Neruda Foundation, administering Neruda's estate, has rejected the poisoning theory and stated that the author of Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair was gravely ill.

The Chilean Communist party said however that other Neruda staff had confirmed the driver's suspicion and that former Mexico's ambassador to Chile, Gonzalo Martínez Corbalá, apparently encountered Neruda in good form less than 24 hours before his death.  Similarly, six people, including Pinochet agents, allegedly poisoned a former president, Eduardo Frei, in the same clinic in 1981. They were charged last year in connection with his death. Neruda and Frei are among 725 possible murder cases from the "dirty war". Recently, Allende's remains were exhumed for a forensic examination to determine whether he really shot himself with an AK-47, the official version, as troops closed in on the palace.


Aragon's collection, and in particular his poem La Complainte de Pablo Neruda, offers a clear perspective on the political turmoil lived by the poet, who then had to seek political asylum several times.
As I read other Aragon's historic poems in this book recounting his visions from World War II, I also recalled some of the poems by Whitman (Leaves of Grass) on the American civil war. While the former are visual but focused on the poet's inner feelings, the latter are more graphical and centered in the feelings of those who suffered the war violence.
While Neruda was clearly potically aligned with Aragon, he wrote mostly love poetry. Only his book Confieso que he vivido probably had a clear autobiographic leit motif. Neruda is considered by the global literary critic as one of the greatest poets of all time in all languages.
Some interpretations of Aragon's poem by Jean Ferrat can be found at:

Sunday, June 5, 2011

..and who do they say I am?

...and who do you say I am?

When Jesus needed to be identified as the Messiah, the Son of God, the Bible suggests that he repeatedly ask his disciples and people Het met, including the Samaritan woman, who they thought he was. In John 14:6, he explicitly states: "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one goes to the Father except through me. He also states explicitly “he who believes in me will not die forever, but rather have eternal life.”

While neither the Bible nor any esoteric writing explicitly discusses anyone else impersonating Jesus at his time, it is clear that Jesus himself thought he was either misidentified or confused with someone else, in particular, with John the Baptist, as mentioned by some of his disciples.

The biblical passages mentioned here are quite relevant to today's identity theft crisis. While people can be impersonated by look-alikes or confounded with others on the look, the idea of impostoring or impersonating someone else in literature is widely presented in various master pieces. I will refer to this topic more in detail in one of my next writings. I actually won an important literary prize to several senior writers of the time with my short story “That Obscene Character called María”, in which María is actually impersonated by Gertrudis, the false María.

However, when it comes to Jesus, this is a unique character that provides ideal value to Christianity, Catholicism, and the entire nation accepting Jesus as the Messiah.  Besides, in spite of the many miracles that many witnessed from Jesus, his resurrection is crucial to everyone's expectations on salvation, as described by the Apostle Paul. Those who believe in and expect on Him, will not die, but live forever.