Dressed as an Admiral

Michael Wood

• Memoirs by Pablo Neruda, translated by Hardie St Martin
  Souvenir, 370 pp, £12.99, June 2004, ISBN 0 02 856481 2
• Isla Negra: A Bilingual Edition by Pablo Neruda, translated by Alastair Reid
  Souvenir, 416 pp, £14.99, June 2004, ISBN 0 285 64913 2
• The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems edited by Mark Eisner
  City Lights, 199 pp, US $16.95, April 2004, ISBN 0 87286 428 6

Ilya Ehrenburg had a complaint about his friend Pablo Neruda’s work. ‘Too much root,’ he said. ‘Too many roots in your poems. Why so many?’ Neruda, reporting this remark in his memoirs, took it as a joke, which it probably was, and as a compliment, which it probably wasn’t. Isla Negra has a whole section, originally a separate volume, called ‘The Hunter after Roots’, and Neruda is not the sort of poet who hunts for things he can’t find, or indeed for things he hasn’t already found. ‘It’s true,’ Neruda wrote. ‘The frontier regions sank their roots into my poetry and these roots have never been able to wrench themselves out. My life is a long pilgrimage that is always turning on itself, always returning to the woods in the south, to the forest lost in me.’ This sounds like hocus pocus, and the weird, disavowing syntax is suspicious. The regions sink the roots, the roots can’t get out, and the forest gets lost. What is the poet doing all this time?