Santiago, Chile.- A new Chinese translation of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair celebrates Pablo Neruda’s closeness to the Asian giant, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the publication of this collection of poems and the 120th anniversary of the birth of the Chilean poet.
The book by the 1971 Nobel Prize winner for Literature is considered the most widely read Chilean title in history and this year celebrates the centenary of its first version, published in June 1924.
Neruda (1904-1973) visited China three times during his life, a nation whose artistic milestones he learned about and where he became friends with the poets Ai Qing and Xiao San (Emi Siao).
Neruda’s Que despierte el maderador was the first Latin American book to be translated into Chinese, in 1950, according to Sun Xintang, a professor at Beijing Language and Culture University.
120 years after the poet’s birth, his legacy still remains strong in the Asian nation, where an illustrated version of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair was republished.
“It’s been 100 years since Veinte poemas…, Neruda’s second book. It appeared when he was 19 and has remained relevant to this day. Billions of copies have been published. It has thousands of readers,” said Fernando Sáez, executive director of the Pablo Neruda Foundation.
The collection of poems, Sáez said, reflects “adolescent, youthful love, a love with all the passion, innocence and also the drama of loss. All of these themes are in the book, and eroticism is evident. The first love, the most innocent love in certain terms, naive or of complete surrender that occurs at 15, 14 (years).”
“The ingredients of those first loves, whether with what the loss of that love means or with the look of that dream, are not repeated later in life, it is very rare. It means that human beings still continue to feel the same thing that is beautiful,” he added.
The director highlighted the Chinese version produced by Thinkingdom publishing house, which joins the other versions available in the language.
Impressed by China
For his part, the writer and expert on Neruda’s work, Darío Oses, indicated that Neruda’s attention to China began before his first visit to the country, in 1927.
“The Chinese war of liberation is something that must have impressed this poet, who was very pro-socialist. In addition, he was from the generation of those who celebrated the crushing of Nazism, which also had a Japanese imperialist version,” said the director of the Neruda Foundation Library.
Oses explained that Neruda’s first visit to China was portrayed in his 1954 collection of poems Las uvas y el viento, in which he wrote: “From sea to sea, from land to snow / all men contemplate you, China / what a powerful young sister has been born to us!”
“He talks about this trip he made to the Chinese people. He is impressed by how China is progressing with collectivism, the incorporation of the people into the revolutionary enterprise,” he added.
For Oses, the poems about China in Las uvas y el viento, which evoke the “Chinese epic,” are a more universal version of Canto general, the great American poem by the Chilean poet.
“Neruda, and I believe to the very end, was a universalist. When he spoke of peoples, he did not separate the Chilean people who suffered in the coal mines from other peoples subjugated by Western imperialism,” he commented.
Oses recalled that on another visit to the Asian country, Neruda traveled along the Yangtze River with the Brazilian writer and politician, Jorge Amado; his wife, the photographer Zeila Gatta; and Ai Qing, with whom he communicated in French.
“He had a very keen capacity for observation. In some way, despite the language gap, he lived with the Chinese people, in addition to these friends he made,” he said.
Today, the Neruda Foundation also preserves other books in Chinese, including works by Chilean artist José Venturelli, who is also instrumental in Chile’s ties with the Asian country.
Both Venturelli and Neruda were the architects of the Chilean-Chinese Institute of Culture, founded in 1952, the first entity in Latin America that sought to build a relationship with the distant country.
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