Poet of many trajectories

Youth doesn’t come alone. The flux of youth often brings grief, sorrow and dejection tinged with melancholic blues.

- SOUMALYA CHATTERJEE

In the gloomy spring of our early youth we discover Pablo Neruda’s poetry and sitting alone in front of a glass window we see with an incurable numbness “The night gallops on its shadowy mare / shedding blue tassels over the land.’’ It is Neruda who first makes us aware that “Love is so short, forgetting is so long.’’ In a sense, in an arid desert – where we went astray, Neruda’s poetry embraces us like a fountain of love and sprinkles its pious water all over our afflicted hearts.

Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto a.k.a Pablo Neruda lost his mother shortly after his birth in July 1904. While growing up under the watchful eyes of his disciplinarian father in ‘Temuco’ – a densely forested region in south Chile – Neruda developed his immense interest in poetry. From his early childhood Neruda was a voracious reader. He indiscriminately read Jules Verne, Victor Hugo and whatever came in his way. Neruda in his teens tried to translate the famous French symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire and also tried to tackle Miguel de Cervantes’ phenomenal novel “Don Quixote”. But Neruda’s father – who was a railway employee and was opposed to his son’s poetic aspirations – interrupted his literary practices.

At the age of sixteen, leaving Temuco behind, Neruda arrived in Santiago to study French literature. But the memories of his birthplace never left him. Years later in the anthology of “Memorial de Isla Negra” (“Isla Negra”) he would write in a poem: “This rose of granite reminds me / of something that dwelled in me or I in it.’’