N.B.: (1)“chest register”--vox
pectoris (Latin), Voz de pecho (Spanish); (2) As one has seen
no one notice, the collection in which
“El perezoso” appears, Estravagario (1958), which marks
new departures of style for Neruda, has
many echos of the French Libertine poet, Marc-Antoine
Girard de Sant Amant (1594 – 1661),
the inventor of burlesque poetry in French. Indeed, the
title of the poem clearly refers to
Girard's “Le paresseux”, in which the poet, lazy and
melancholy, cannot rise from bed, a
theme which Neruda, reversing the tone, here changes to
the poet, completely content with the
bed that is his earth, especially in Chile, has not the
slightest inclination to rise into
space. The contemporary context is the so-called “Space Race”
between the United States and the
Soviet Union, which had already seen by 1958 three satellites
put into orbit, Sputnik, Sputnik II or
Muttnik by the Soviets and the anticlimactic Explorer
1 by the United States. In an excellent
essay, “The Spacecraft of Pablo Neruda and W. H.
Auden,” by L. A. Cheever and D.
Ketterer (Contributions to the study of science fiction
and fantasy, ed. D. Ketterer, vol. 107,
2004, pp.239-246), the authors point out that Neruda
was certainly not against space travel.
He did, however, as chronicled in his autobiography,
adopt the same sardonic attitude as in
this poem when in the 1960's on a visit to the USSR
he met the cosmonaut Titov. "Commander,
did you see Chile when you were flying through
space, looking down on our planet?",
Neruda asked. Titov answered: "The most important
thing was to have seen Chile from
above, do you understand? I saw yellow mountains in
South America. They seemed to be very
high. Maybe that was Chile?" Neruda replied,
"Of course, that was Chile."
The obvious connection of El perezoso to Le paresseux,
of which Cheever and Ketterer are not
aware, and thus the context of burlesque, helps
put Neruda's attitude in context, which
is, simply, space travel yes, but a sensual earth
and Chile from the ground first and
last; (3) The contrast between the United States
“drugstore” and the traditional
farmacia (“pharmacy”) and apothecary's (botica)
was a subject of mirth and wonder in
Spain and in most of the Spanish-speaking world
by the 1950's, and still is. By the
1920's, the U.S. “drugstore”, as also seen in U.S. films,
had become a general retail outlet with
a pharmacy attached, with an almost mandatory
soda jerk and his phosphates and other
drinks, and all sorts of goods ranging from tobacco
through newspapers, magazines,
cosmetics, clothes, toys, and so forth. The Spanish
farmacia or botica, on the hand,
dispenses mainly or exclusively prescription and
non-prescription drugs. In Latin
America droguería may also be used but it is important
to note that in Spain a droguería
dispenses cleaning products, paints, and so forth,
not pharmaceuticals. Eventually the US
hybrid got its own Spanish word, el drugstore.
The US Explorer I was launched on
January 31, 1958 and Neruda's unavoidably
burlesque play with farmacia clearly
alludes to the US participation in the Space Race,
since the Soviets were not known for
“drugstores.” It also confirms the connection with
Le paresseux, whose bedridden libertine
simply has no time or interest in the news of
the day, which in 1957-58 through most
of the world included the first steps into Outer
Space by the Soviets and later the US;
(4) “en las guitarras brilla el agua” (water
is
glistening
in guitars): This
is a supremely subtle visual metaphor, not recognized by
Cheever
and Ketterer above, nor anyone else in English or Spanish one knows of.
Hidden
under
the surface of a figure suggesting “the guitars are playing
fluidly like water”,
while
cherries in the trees dance in the breeze and dark girls sing, is an
image of
Chile--the
long string of space between sea and cordilleras—as the neck of a
guitar
pointing
south with the body being the Andes to the north. The "neck" of a guitar
in Spanish is, moreover, el mastil, "pole or mast", clinching the nautical
reference. Thus el agua
or the sea is marked as both the guitar's music and its string(s).
The image is obvious in any colored satellite
map, not available to
Neruda in 1958,
but brilliantly intuited from the geography. This is
also clearly what
Neruda was getting
at with Titov, who seems not to have got the play,
but whose
answer confirms
Neruda's Chile as the neck of a guitar. Titov indeed saw
Chile from above,
but failed to see the subtle visual metaphor in his poem, which,
importantly,
is
a dual image of Chile from space and on the ground. The combination
of
marvellous
prosody fit to the brilliantly executed double visual perspective,
all
in the context of revolutionary technological events in the news—and
still news--
makes
this particular poem one of the most striking and underestimated
poems in
Neruda's
corpus, which in a way Neruda himself devilishly footnotes in his
autobiography's
mention of the conversation with Titov. The old science fiction
saw
about the so-called Great Wall of China being visible from outer
space was never
accurate.
For one thing, as all scholars of China's history and geography
always
knew,
there is not, and never was, one “Great Wall”, nor were the
different sections
“great”
in size, so no parts are more visible than any other large earthly
fortifications.
Here, as an added bonus, Neruda replaces that fictional Great Wall
with
the great and actually visible shoestring of Chile, as much a
terrestrial feature
as
a space on a map. Considering the lame effort at poetic metaphor
that the US
astronaut
made in the first moon landing--”That's one small
step for (a) man, one
giant leap for mankind.”--one might
argue that Neruda's El perezoso is the first
great poem of actual, as opposed to
fictional, space exploration, and not without
its own warning irony.
