JORGE EDWARDS
379
He was referring to a line that divides the end of the world, that separates a
catastrophic ending fyom a new beginning.
Ecuatorial
is a poem of caravans,
dethroned kings, magicians, multitudes who emigrate among ruins.
As
Enrico
Santi has noted, Neruda's "poetics of prophecy" alludes to successive forms of
Apocalypse: epic and political Apocalypse, the Apocalypse of Revolution and
the founding ofa new society, and the idea, which Neruda arrived at in his
last years, of an Apocalypse of the mind.
Looking more closely at the last period of Neruda's poetry, it seems as
ifhe began to mistrust the logic, the strict rationality, of his earlier notion of
an apocalyptic revolution that would lay the foundations of the future. He
saw the danger of an open clash between two conflicting rationalities, that of
a social revolution and that of counterrevolution, the former seeking to
accelerate historical time and the latter madly intent on freezing time and re–
covering the past. Neruda wrote, in the poem "La Verdad," ("The Truth"),
which appears in his book of verse memoirs,
Memorial de Isla Negra (Black
Island Memorial):
No puedo mas con
La
rawn al hombro .
(So much for notional man and his burdens ... )
(tr. Ben Belitt)
The poem clearly refers to the burden of political reason, which he
could no longer bear.
In
the same poem, Neruda alludes to the destructive
quality of purely bilateral, black and white, Manichaean vision. He also
observed in that poem:
anw lo
que
no tiene sin somos.
Tengo unJardin de flores
que
no existen
Soy decididamente triangular .
..
(1 love that which has only dreams
1 have a garden of flowers that doesn 't exist
I am decidedly triangular ...)
Raul Zurita noted that, paradoxically,
La
Moneda, the Chilean house of
government, under Salvador Allende's triumph in 1970, absorbed something
of the rhetoric of Neruda's "Canto General," while at the same time Chilean
poets were already writing a completely different kind of poetry that re–
jected the solemnity of the epic tone, the notion of an epical Apocalypse. The
new poetry employed colloquialism and irony and was influenced by the an–
tipoetry of Nicano Parra. Yet it should be noted that Neruda himself at that
time had already begun to critique his own former poetry. He died only two
weeks after the military coup, whereas Parra continued
to
write his an-
