Residencia en la tierra 1, 1933

Between the publication of his Veinte poemas in 1924 and Residencia en la tierra in 1933, Neruda lived what I will call his years of loneliness in the desert, or his season in hell. A brief chronology begins in Chile in 1925, then finds him in Rangoon in October 1927, then Calcutta in November–December 1928, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1928, Batavia (Jakarta) in 1930 and back in Chile in 1931 (with further trips to Japan and China). But place names do not figure in the poems, such is the intensity of introspection. There is something uncanny in his awareness that to become a great poet, to be different and find his own voice, he must suffer isolation and travel as he explores his relationship with himself and with the outer world. The consequence of this alchemical laboratory is Residencia en la tierra 1, his single most radical book, according to Saúl Yurkievich ‘that insuperable pinnacle in Pablo Neruda's work’. This view is gaining currency. Jorge Edwards, although a Chilean himself, goes further so that Residencia en la tierra 1 becomes ‘one of the greatest books of poetry of the twentieth century, perhaps the peak of poetry in the Spanish language’. However, it baffled and divided critics, and Neruda himself would later dismiss it as too pessimistic for Soviet youth when he refused permission for it to be translated into Russian, because a young man had committed suicide with that book in his hand. Neruda told Alfredo Cardona Peña that these poems were soaked in pessimism: ‘they do not help you to live, they help you to die’. Yet despite this increasing prestige, it is significant that the first edition ran to just 100 copies.

Neruda was driven, as already noted, to travel by the siren voices of Baudelaire's ‘Le Voyage’ and Mallarmé's sequel ‘Brise marine’. He travelled south in Chile for a year and then accepted a poorly paid, honorary consul's post in Rangoon, Burma, which meant travelling to Buenos Aires, then Paris and finally out to Burma, a far-flung outpost of the British Empire. He was accompanied some of the time by an eccentric Chilean amateur writer and follower of Eastern religions called Alvaro Hinojosa.