1971 Nobel Prize in Literature Presentation Speech

by Karl Ragnar Gierow, of the Swedish Academy (Translation)

Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen,

No great writer gains lustre from a Nobel Prize. It is the Nobel Prize that gains lustre from the recipient—provided the right one has been chosen. But who is the right one? According to Nobel’s will, as we have just heard, the prize is to reward work in “an ideal direction.” This is not pure Swedish. One may work under conditions that are not ideal. One can, according to the presumption made by Oscar Wilde, be an ideal husband. The word ideal simply indicates something that corresponds to reasonable expectations. But that is not enough for a Nobel prize. In Nobel’s time the word still had philosophical connotations as well. By ideal was meant something which only exists in one’s imagination, never in the world of the senses. This is perhaps true of the ideal husband, but not of the ideal Nobel prize winner.

The spirit of Nobel’s will tells us what he had in mind. The contribution must be one which will benefit mankind. But any work of art worthy of the name does this, so does any literary work with a serious purpose, and so for that matter does that which aims at nothing more serious than raising a healthy laugh. The clause in the will has so much to say that it leaves us without a clear message. One of the few cases, however, where it does take on a definite meaning is this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature: Pablo Neruda. His work benefits mankind precisely because of its direction. It is my impossible task here to indicate this in a few words. To sum up, Neruda is like catching a condor with a butterfly net. Neruda, in a nutshell, is an unreasonable proposition: the kernel bursts the shell.

Nevertheless, one can do something to describe this kernel. What Neruda has achieved in his writing is community with existence. This sounds simple, and is perhaps our most difficult problem. He himself, in one of his New Elemental Odes,has defined it in the formula: harmony with Man and the Earth. The direction in his work, the direction which can so justly be called ideal, is indicated by the path which has brought him to this harmony. His starting point was isolation and dissonance.

So it was in the love poems of his youth. What these Twenty Poems of Love and One Ode of Desperationdepict is the meeting between two people’s desolation in the shadow of destruction, and in the next major work, Residence on Earth,he is still “alone among shifting matter.”

The turning point was reached in Spain. It was as if a release from the shadow of death and a way towards fellowship were opened when he saw friends and fellow writers taken away in fetters and executed. He found the fellowship of the oppressed and persecuted. He found it when he returned from the Spain of the Civil War to his own country, the battleground for conquistadors over the centuries. But out of the fellowship with this territory of terror there grew, too, awareness of its riches, pride over its past, and hope for its future, for that which he saw shimmering like a mirage far to the East. With this, Neruda’s work was transformed into the poetry of political and social preparedness under the banner of redress and visions of the future—not least so in Canto general,partly written while in exile in his own country for no other offence than an opinion. The opinion was that his country belonged to him and his compatriots and that no man’s dignity should be insulted.

This huge collection is no more than a drop in Neruda’s brimming output. In his work a continent awakens to consciousness. To require moderation in such an inspiration is as if to demand system and order from a jungle and restraint from a volcano.

The fact that Neruda’s œuvreis so difficult to view as a whole may also make it difficult to recognize what distances he has put behind him. One of his later collections of poems is called Estravagario. The word seems to be a new one and comprises both extravagance and vagabondage, whim and errantry. For the way from Canto generalwas still long and full of experiences, enriching or bitter. The territory of terror was found to lie in more than one part of the globe and Neruda saw this with the indignation of one who feels himself duped. The erstwhile idol who was set up everywhere in “the stucco statutes of a moustachioed god in boots” now appeared in an ever more merciless light, as did the similarity in methods and trappings between the two leader figures whom he called just Moustache and Little Moustache. But at the same time Neruda was also led to a new relationship to Love and to Woman, to the origin and continuance of life, perhaps most beautifully expressed in yet another masterpiece from recent years, La barcarola. Whither Neruda’s path will take him now, it is not for anyone to say. But the direction is the one already set, harmony with Man and the Earth, and we shall follow with high expectations this remarkable poetry, which with the overflowing vitality of an awakening continent resembles one of its rivers, growing all the mightier and more majestic the closer it approaches the estuary and the sea.

Cher Maitre,

Votre Estravagariovous a mené loin à travers des pays et des époques. Une fois il vous a mené vers une cité minière où les mineurs avaient peint un hommage sur cette terre qui est vraiment la vôtre. Il disait: Bienvenue à Neruda. C’étaient les mots de la dignité humaine opprimée à celui qui était son porte-parole. Votre tour du monde vous a aujourd’hui mené ici: dans la ville aux clochers vert-de-grisés que vous chantâtes une fois. Et je répète le même hommage: Bienvenido Neruda. Avec lui je transmets aussi les félicitations de l’Académie suédoise et vous prie maintenant de recevoir des mains de Sa Majesté le Roi le Prix Nobel de littérature de cette année.

Translation of the French by Michael Lazare:

Dear Master,

Your Estravagariohas led you on a long journey through lands and through times. Once it brought you to a mining city where the miners had paid you homage on the land that is truly yours. It said: Welcome to Neruda. These were the words of oppressed but proud people, spoken to the one who speaks for them. Today your tour of the world has led you here: the city of copper-clad bell towers, of which you once sang. And I repeat the same homage: Bienvenido Neruda. With it I also offer you the congratulations of the Swedish Academy, and I now ask you to receive, from the hands of His Majesty the King, the Nobel Prize in literature for this year.

Gierow also made a speech that was broadcast on Radio Sweden on 21 October 1971, after Neruda’s prize was announced:

In Pablo Neruda, this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature has a recipient who is a controversial author. Besides being the subject of debate, he is, in some people’s eyes, debatable, not to say, questionable. The debate has been running for almost forty years, as good a sign as any that his contribution cannot possibly be bypassed, and the differences of opinion have included the artistic content of his work. There are two assessments of him which have become famous, the one contradicting the other, and both by fellow-writers in his own tongue. When Neruda, not yet thirty, came to Barcelona as the Chilean consul, he was welcomed in lyrical strain by García Lorca, with words that are already classic: “A poet nearer death than philosophy, nearer pain than intelligence, nearer blood than ink; a poet possessed by mystical voices which he fortunately cannot interpret, a real man who knows that the reed and the swallow are more immortal than the hard cheek of a statue.” Those who are not prepared to agree with Lorca’s balanced, yet inspired, greeting to this fellow poet, five years his junior, look for support instead in Jimériez’s concise judgment: “A great bad poet.”

The tenacity with which this invective comes to mind certainly has to do with the sheer mass of Neruda’s output. One wonders indeed whether he has any parallel in the history of poetry. At the age of thirteen he printed his first poems, at twenty he was already an established poet, at forty-five he had still–after continuing a lively production–written only a small fraction of the collected writings, which, by 1962, filled something like two thousand pages; two years later, for his 60th birthday, five new volumes of poetry appeared under the collective title of Memorial de Isla Negra,and since then there has been a rapid succession of new works, including such masterpieces as La barcarolaand Aún. Faced with such a flood of poetry, what can be said in brief review? There is something preposterous about picking individual poems or even collections of poems out of this boundlessness, like baling a 50.000 tonner with a teaspoon. One cannot reproduce the essence of Pablo Neruda. He has not been able to himself.

It is inconceivable that everything in these gigantic writings should rise to the same heights. Those who are searching for Neruda’s weak points have not far to look. Those who are looking for his strong points need not search at all. They are to be found in almost inexhaustible plenty throughout his works, from Residence on Earth,with which he made his name, to his most recent writing. Not the least remarkable thing about his inspiration is that it has clearly grown with the years. It resembles one of the rivers of Neruda’s own continent, a stream that flows with the banks out of sight, growing broader and more powerful on its way to the estuary.

The eruptive procreation has not prevented–perhaps it has rather been engendered by–a continuous evolution, a mutation of styles, renewal of motifs, changes of opinion, and emotional shifts. Compared with Neruda’s uninhibited, at times even pompous show of words and slap-dash welter of metaphors, much of Europe’s surrealistic poetry pales into lame exercises by students of textbooks and manifestoes; his imagination appears, in quite a different way, to be in immediate, mysterious rapport with the gestation of language and hence of verbal imagery. Obscurity often results, inaccessible and fascinating; this still applies in his enormous poetic work, Canto general. And yet this is a far cry from the early masterpieces, just as it is still further on to the simplicity which he attains in some of his recent poetry. But the transformation is still greater from the introspection and despair of his youth to the outraged, fighting poetry of manhood, with his eyes on a dazzling dream of the future, and from there, on to the bitter disappointment when the dazzle faded, and the milder wisdom that comes with perception.

In one of his recent poems Neruda says: “There after I ceased to be a child / for I realized that my people / had been denied life / and refused a grave.” In that moment Neruda took the first, decisive step out of his isolation toward fellow-feeling. It was then a matter of his native land, violated and oppressed since the days of the Conquistadors. But banished himself, and persecuted time and again, he did not stop there. The fellowship of the oppressed exists all over the world. That is what he sought, and it was the poet of violated human dignity that he became.

[© The Nobel Foundation, 1971.]