Farewell to "The People's Poet"

There would be no state funeral, announced the ruling military junta, which confined itself to a restrained statement of condolence. Nonetheless, Pablo Neruda, the protean Chilean poet and Nobel laureate who died at the age of 69 last week, was given an emotional and stirring farewell.

Hundreds of mourners appeared at the Communist poet's home in Santiago for the funeral procession to the capital's General Cemetery. In bold defiance of the junta's anti-Marxist campaign and in obvious disregard for their own liberty, they chanted leftist slogans as the cortege marched slowly to the mausoleum. Softly at first, then louder and louder, they sang the Internationale.

Some shouted "Neruda y Allende, un solo combatiente [Neruda and Allende, one fighter]!" As the coffin was carried into the crypt, one old woman sobbed: "We are burying Salvador Allende now."

The son of a railroad worker, Neruda (real name: Ricardo Eliezer Neftali Reyes y Basoalto) was born in Parral, a small agricultural town in southern Chile. He started writing poetry at the age of eight, and persisted even though his book-hating father once destroyed his notebooks.

Neruda's early work was rhapsodic and lushly romantic, at once Whitmanesque and surrealistic. During the 1930s, the style and tone of his verse abruptly changed. The catalyst was the Spanish Civil War, which Neruda witnessed as a Chilean consul in Spain.

Shocked by the brutality of the war, and traumatized by the death of his friend and fellow poet Federico Garcia Lorca, Neruda pruned from his own writing much of its detached symbolism. Instead, he began to turn out blunt, vertiginous, often satirical verse--poetry that Neruda once described as "written with blood."

Convinced Marxist. The Spanish war also turned Neruda into a convinced Communist, though political engagement did not always inspire him to great writing: during the 1940s and 1950s, for instance, he produced a series of slavish, gushing poems in praise of Stalin.

The Nobel committee eventually forgot them; after being nominated numerous times, Neruda was awarded the Prize in Literature in 1971.

Even Latin Americans who challenged his political views found it hard to quarrel with the honor. In such works as the surrealistic poem cycle Residence on Earth, and the massive Canto General, an epic on the origin of the Amer icas, he proved himself to be the continent's most creative and authentic literary voice. In one of its best-known sections, The United Fruit Co., he mockingly writes of "Jehovah" parceling out the universe to "Coca-Cola, Inc., Anaconda, Ford Motors, and other entities," while the United Fruit Co. "reserved for itself: the heartland/ And coasts of my country."

An eminent politician who was a Communist Party candidate for President of Chile in 1970, Neruda served as Chile's Ambassador to France from March 1971 until last February. With royalties from the millions of copies of his books sold round the world, he was able to buy homes in Santiago, Valparaiso and the beach resort area of Isla Negra. Yet for all his bourgeois tastes, Neruda remained a convinced if not always convincing Marxist. He was a friend of Allende's and perhaps his leading propagandist.*

In the wake of the coup that ousted Allende's government, there were rumors in Chile that Neruda had been arrested, and even executed. In fact, he had been moved shortly after the coup to a private clinic in Santiago for treatment of cancer, and he later died of heart failure. Shortly before his death, Neruda's rambling house in Santiago was ransacked, his books and papers were burned. The new military government denied responsibility and vowed to arrest the "vandals" who had done the ransacking. At week's end, none had been caught.

* A much reprinted poem called The Satraps, said to have been written by Neruda shortly before the coup, was released by a Cuban news agency staffer in Buenos Aires. The verse, which describes President Nixon and Junta Leader Augusto Pinochet as "hyenas ravening/ Our history," is a hoax. Apparently Buenos Aires leftists "updated" a Neruda poem from the 1950s, changing the names of Latin American Dictators Trujillo, Somoza and Carias to Nixon, Frei (Allende's predecessor as president) and Pinochet.

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