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:
http://culture-club.skynetblogs.be/archive/2010/05/12/la-complainte-de-pablo-neruda-jean-ferrat.html
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