![]() ![]() Her role is passive, obnoxiously domestic. One thing is clear: She isn't a Vera Nabokov. 23, 1973, at his home in Isla Negra, only days after the Pinochet coup. They met at a concert in Santiago in 1946, she was his lover in the '50s (he built a house for her, La Chascona), and she was at his side when he died on Sept. Urrutia's version is important in that it offers an insider's view of Neruda's last 25 years. Happily, she hasn't altogether re-dressed the mannequin: It appears to have the same clothing, only color-coordinated. In rendering it in English, Giardino has synchronized verb tenses, eliminated repetition and supplemented information harvested from historical sources. She wasn't a writer, which is evident in the style and structure. My Life With Pablo Neruda first appeared in 1986, the year after her death. Her strategy, she repeated, was simply to give order to chaos. But did she purge indiscreet and unwelcome passages? Is Neruda the one doing the remembering, or is her hand in control of the material? Until the end, she defended her editorial effort. Urrutia, visibly depressed by the overall bleakness that surrounded her, delved into its pages in search of therapy. The manuscript needed to be smuggled out of the country. That was during the time when Pinochet's regime sought to utterly eradicate Neruda from Chile's collective memory. To make it palatable, Urrutia spent months refurbishing it. It is well-known that at his death, Neruda left a lyrical manuscript: What it lacked in sense it compensated for in sensibility. Ironically, Alexandria Giardino has done to it what Urrutia and another of Neruda's friends, Miguel Otero Silva, did to the poet's memoir, known in Spanish as Confieso que he vivido ("I confess to have lived"): They cleansed it, condensing and editing it heavily. Still, it is a much-needed, methodical picture of a poet who was at once witness to and participant in some of the major events of the 20th century.Īlso to coincide with "la fiebre Neruda," as one Santiago newspaper has described the current fervor, the autobiography of Neruda's third wife, Matilde Urrutia - a Chilean musician and the inspiration of one of my favorite books by the poet, The Captain's Verses - is being offered to English-language readers in a "doctored" version. Feinstein doesn't distinguish between the good and the bad, and is so cautious in his approach, so impartial, that he describes ideological confrontations as if they were mere brawls outside a bar. Neruda's poetry as a whole (he left us thousands and thousands of poems) is reduced to a mere map of his life, which, unfortunately, diminishes its depth. Feinstein fails to deliver sustained analytical insight. The result doesn't amount to an antithesis of Teitelboim's adoration. Feinstein's is the type of biographical job the British have mastered: unadorned, straightforward, making sure the observer is kept at a distance. Also brought to light are details time has managed to eclipse, such as his fascinating relationship with his half-sister Laurita, his ambivalence toward his daughter Malva Marina Trinidad (whom Neruda infamously described as "a kind of semi-colon, a three-kilo vampire"), and his love of the early-17th-century Iberian poet Quevedo. He records the poet's bohemian years in the '20s, his immersion in poetry as an adolescent and the writing of his popular Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (which Neruda himself believed was mediocre), his diplomatic service in Burma and Sri Lanka, his witnessing of the Spanish Civil War as well as his misguided Stalinism and support of Fidel Castro. ![]() He has explored every aspect of Neruda's life with care and attention to detail, talking with countless friends, acquaintances and specialists (he is especially influenced by the Oxford don Robert Pring-Mill, one of Neruda's unheralded champions). (July 12, 2004, would have been the poet's 100th birthday.) I met Feinstein some years ago in London, where he was a correspondent for the Spanish daily El Mundo and a BBC broadcaster. Which sets the stage for Adam Feinstein's ambitious Pablo Neruda, a multifaceted portrait that arrives amid the worldwide centennial celebrations of Neruda. This isn't surprising: Teitelboim was one of Neruda's close friends and comrades. Published in English translation in 1992 as Neruda: An Intimate Biography, it is a second-rate, hagiographic job, utterly uncritical of its subject. ![]() Translated from the Spanish by Alexandria Giardinoįor many decades the only full-length biography of Pablo Neruda available was by Volodia Teitelboim. ![]() By Reviewed Ilan Stavans October 24, 2004 ![]()
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