Pablo Retamal. Third
The telegram from the Chilean embassy in Sweden arrived urgently in Santiago. It was October 20, 1971: “Confidential information indicates that Nobel Prize would be granted tomorrow to Neruda. I beg US. maximum reservation view information is not confirmed ”.
The document, extracted from the Historical Archive of the Chilean Foreign Ministry and which appears in the book Pablo Neruda and Salvador Allende, a friendship, a story (RIL Editores, 2014) by Abraham Quezada (one of the main scholars of the work of the vate) , exposes not only a crucial news, but also realizes that from the very machinery of foreign relations they were quite on horseback with the efforts for Pablo Neruda to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Why was she chasing him so hard? “He was aware of his poetic talent without being conceited,” says Quezada. For him, in Latin America there was only one poet whom he considered a true pair: the Peruvian César Vallejo ”.
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Another important step that brought Neruda closer to the award was his political militancy. It is known that until his death he was part of the ranks of the Communist Party, for which he was even a senator (between 1945 and 1948), when he was outraged and had to go into exile. “One thing that allowed him to win the Nobel is because he was part of a network of left-wing intellectuals and politicians. Its communist militancy was key, because it was a planetary party, at least the Chilean CP is internationalist. Without that network it is not understood ”, explains Quezada.
Besides, Neruda had learned to be tactful. In 1966, from Cuba a letter was made public against the poet accusing him of “lack of political commitment”, which was circulated in the main intellectual circles. It was quite an operation, “they even sent her to the Swedish Academy,” says Quezada.
Neruda’s communist militancy was key to his winning the Nobel. Photo: broadcast
The year that could be
While Neruda published books as if his life were going to go away, he visited countries, did public relations and appeared in the press, underground an enemy came up against him. None other than the CIA.
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In her book The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, the British historian Frances Stonor Saunders gives an account of the efforts that the organization carried out to prevent the Swedish Academy from awarding the Chilean award. If there was a year in which this worsened, it was in 1963, because the information reached John Hunt, in charge of the CIA office in Paris: Neruda was a strong candidate for the 1964 Nobel Prize.
By that year, the Cold War was at its highest point of tension. The Berlin Wall, the Missile Crisis, the war in Vietnam was already unleashed and the Soviets had put the first human being in space in 1961: Yuri Gagarin.
Meanwhile, Neruda’s candidacy for that year was raised by Swedes Ragnar Josephson and Bengt Holmqvist. In fact, the former had also nominated the author of Twilight the year before. If you check the list, there were formidable rivals: Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Rómulo Gallegos …
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Neruda had published his New Love Song to Stalingrad in 1943. For Abraham Quezada, it was already at this time that the CIA began to pay attention to him. “The monitoring of Neruda began when he was in Mexico, as consul general. They were attentive to what he was doing, he said, and where he was traveling ”.
Finally, the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Frenchman Jean Paul Sartre, who, surprisingly, rejected it. In a public letter to the newspaper Le Monde, where he explained his decision, the philosopher mentioned something key: “I know that the Nobel Prize in itself is not a literary prize from the Western bloc, but it is what it is made of, and events can also occur. that are outside the grounds of the members of the Swedish academy. This is the reason why, in the present situation, the Nobel Prize is objectively held as a distinction reserved for writers from the West or rebels from the East. It has not been awarded, for example, to Neruda, who is one of the greatest Latin American poets ”.
Despite the bad drink of 1964, Neruda continued his efforts. By then, he had already sought the most committed official support from the respective governments of the time.
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But by far the most relevant movements were made by Salvador Allende as soon as he became president. They were not many, but they were important. The first, he sent Neruda as ambassador to France.
Finally, On October 21, 1971, the Academy announced that Pablo Neruda, then 67, was the new Nobel Prize in Literature “For a poetry that with the action of an elemental force gives life to the destiny and dreams of a continent.”
The ceremony took place on December 10 and the award was presented by King Gustavo Adolfo VI.
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The hidden story behind the Nobel Prize for Pablo Neruda