Directions for question: Read the following passages carefully and answer the questions that follow it. Albie Sachs, the noted South African writer, lawyer and activist (now a judge in South Africas Constitutional Court) once told me that his bodys shape (he lost an arm while opening a parcel bomb sent to him by the South African police to his home in Mozambique, where he lived in the 1980s) was really due to Pablo Nerudas influence. By that he meant that reading Nerudas poetry as a teenager changed his outlook not only on literature but on life, and sent him irredeemably on the course towards that fateful day in Maputo. He may have exaggerated; Albies father was a well-known trade unionist, so that much of his Weltanschauung may have been imbibed at home. But the very fact that my good friend Albie could tell such a story reflects the degree to which Nerudas work marked so many of our generation. The man whom Gabriel Garcia Marquez called the greatest poet of the twentieth century in any language, and whose centennial we celebrate this year, changed the way we relate to Spanish, and language more generally; recast Latin America and the Americas through his metaphors; and took on the cause of the dispossessed of this world. The son of a railway worker and a primary school teacher, born in one obscure provincial town in Southern Chile and raised in another, he rose to such literary heights through sheer talent and intelligence. His poetry is wide-ranging and versatile. His Twenty poems of Love and a Song of Despair (in which he paraphrases one of Tagores poems), published when he was all of twenty years old, has captured the imagination of many, but speaks especially to young lovers. His Canto General, but particularly his Heights of Macchu Picchu, confronts our American and pre-Columbian roots with a starkness no other poet has, in an effort, as he put it, to fill with words the vast empty spaces of South America. As the Nobel citation put it, he received that award for a poetry that impelled by a vital force, gives life to the destiny and dreams of a continent. It has been said that nothing ordinary was alien to Neruda. He has written odes to red wine and tomato, to onion and artichoke, to bees and bicycle, among other subjects. He loved life and lifes simplest things; that is why he sang to them with such directness, brio and gusto. When writing about the Americas, he wrote about its minerals and volcanoes; when about politics, he would use names and last names, of countries and leaders. He did not mince words and did not use euphemisms. No abstract theorising for him, no vague metaphysical reflections. He liked what he could touch and feel, and as Federico Garcia Lorca put it, was closer to blood than to ink. And I would venture to speculate that is why his books have sold in the millions and some consider him to be the most widely read poet in history. Neruda was very much a man and a poet of his time - the first three-fourths of the twentieth century - a time very different from our own. But that does not make him any less universal. His voice remains with us and will do so for a long time.
Posted on: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 08:47:49 +0000
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